Debate contribution: Budget 2024-25

Debate contribution by Mr Mike Nesbitt on 28 May 2024.

MLA

Mr Mike Nesbitt

Party at the time

Ulster Unionist Party

Date

28 May 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Budget 2024-25

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4492754

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I feel moved to begin by thanking the Chair of the Economy Committee for his very generous words when he opened his remarks, and I want to reciprocate. I have been on a few Committees during my 13 years in the House, and I think that the Economy Committee is particularly collegial and coherent. I wish it every success for the remainder of the mandate. I also note that Ms Ní Chuilín thought that I was staring at her during her remarks. I will do my best to be less attentive in future. My starting point is to ask this: what is the purpose of a debate such as this? It seems to me that a lot of people think that it is to win the argument and then win the vote. I put it to you that there is an alternative: progress. Maybe the outcome of a debate such as this is to make progress, particularly in this consociational system of government that we have, or power-sharing, as it is known colloquially. With five parties — in this case, four — in government, it is difficult to rub along together, but, surely, that is ultimately the objective.

As I said, I have been here for 13 years, and I have never been more optimistic about what we might achieve. The mood is different since we restored, and I am optimistic. Every one of the 90 MLAs knows that, if it collapses this time, it is gone, and fewer than a handful of MLAs would like to see that result. Perhaps that was in our political psyche and we had to take it right to the brink of destruction before we realised that there is no alternative to power-sharing and to learning to work together. I am optimistic despite the fact that we have a legacy of disaggregated working, with a single-year Budget divorced from the Programme for Government and divorced from the legislative programme. However, that is where we are, and that is what we have to work through. I am a little disappointed at the number of contributors who are calling us "reckless" and saying that we do not have an alternative. We had an alternative. The alternative was to wait a few weeks. We know from the Department of Finance that June monitoring will yield £200 million or maybe even as much as £300 million. That would have done no damage to the working of the Departments because we have already passed a Vote on Account, so they would be solvent in that time. We had an alternative, which was to wait, see what the £200-plus million could do for the Budget and go from there. I give way to the Member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

The Member maybe misunderstands what "Vote on Account" means. It means that Ministers are free to make decisions in the meantime. My party, during all the talks that preceded restoration, was clear in its understanding that all the other parties that were going to form the Executive wanted to prioritise health. I refer to a response that I got from the Executive Office earlier this month to a question for written answer about the Programme for Government. The answer stated:

"The Executive is agreed on priorities, including: childcare; reducing hospital waiting lists; tackling violence against women and girls; Special Educational Needs; housing; developing a globally competitive economy; and Reform and Transformation of public services."

That is not an alphabetical list of those seven priorities, so it is either random, which would be a rather sloppy way to respond to a Member's request, or it is in rank order, in which case "reducing waiting lists" came second. However, the only money set aside for waiting lists is the £34 million that has come from the UK Government. Whether we say that it is a 6% increase on last year's starting position or a 2·8% decrease from the finishing position — I note that the esteemed BBC commentator John Campbell says that it is both — in my opinion, neither represents the prioritisation of health. I heard a Member say that it was disingenuous to talk about the starting position compared with the finishing position, but I note, as a former member of the Economy Committee, that, in an exchange between the permanent secretary of the Department for the Economy and the Chairperson of the Committee, the permanent secretary indicated that the Department's budget for 2024-25 is largely positive and that it is hoped that the opening positions for arm's-length bodies would largely match the closing position from 2023-24 — ie include all the 2023-24 in-year allocations. That is not disingenuous; that is a valid assessment of the position. I will conclude by referring to Mark Friedman, the man behind outcomes-based accountability (OBA) programmes for government. As a collective, we agreed that we would take that OBA approach sometime in the middle of the last decade. His book, which details how to do it, is entitled 'Trying Hard Is Not Good Enough'. In other words, it is not about the effort; it is about the outcomes. Outcomes are best delivered through cooperation. We are learning that, and we increasingly understand that few issues are dealt with in a departmental silo. We need to cooperate to tackle things like educational underachievement or to deliver childcare. I regret that the Budget is all about departmental budgets, because, ultimately, we need to share and cooperate in order to succeed.

914 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 10:35 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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