Debate contribution: Policing Resources

Debate contribution by Mr Eóin Tennyson on 9 September 2024.

MLA

Mr Eóin Tennyson

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

9 September 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Policing Resources

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4511711

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I want to make a number of observations about the debate that has taken place this afternoon, because this is an important issue. Policing and justice funding is something about which this party has been raising the alarm for many years, if not beyond a decade. The first observation is the number of Members who have either misunderstood or, more likely, seem to wilfully misrepresent policies around managing public money and the role of an accounting officer, which is one of the few roles that a permanent secretary has that sits outside political direction and control. In any organisation, a healthy tension between accounting officers is necessary to ensure good governance. It will, therefore, be custom and practice in every Department to have debates with their arm's-length bodies around the management of public money and protocols and rules of engagement. Indeed, if a Minister acts in a way that is counter to the policies set out in 'Managing Public Money', it is the permanent secretary who will rebuke the Minister. The idea that this is a political issue fundamentally misrepresents the issue at hand and, more than that, is dangerous. The protocols are in place and the roles of accounting officers exist in order to ensure good governance. When we start to politicise those in a disingenuous way, it erodes trust in not only the institutions but our ability to deliver that good governance. That attitude explains the cavalier approach to cost controls and the management of public money that we have seen from parties in the Chamber in the past. It is also important that we reflect on how we got here, because the funding challenges did not emerge over the summer or fall from the sky. Some of us have been warning about them for years. Westminster austerity has been mentioned, and that is correct. Public services have been underfunded by Westminster, but I will take no lectures on that from those who not only propped up the Conservative Government but championed some of their most destructive policies. It is true that our public services have been starved due to Northern Ireland's being funded below relative need. It was this party in December that made the argument that the Fiscal Council's assessment did not adequately take account of policing and justice spend. When we reflect on why policing and justice has been squeezed since ring-fencing ended — for the Member's information, justice spend was ring-fenced after devolution for five years — we see that, since then, it was not the Alliance Party but successive Executives led by the DUP and Sinn Féin who squeezed the justice budget, despite our warnings, because we were a small party in the Executive at that time. You cannot now come crying to the Chamber about the inevitable consequences of your actions. To give credit where it is due, the current Finance Minister recognised and sought to rectify in the most recent Budget the scarring impact that underinvestment in justice has had. The Ulster Unionist Party, however, railed against it and said that all the additional money that had become available should have gone to health, in which case policing and justice would have been in an even worse position. Let us get real about this: politics is about choices and priorities. It is about actions, not words. It is all well and good to come to the Chamber and decry a letter that has been sensationalised in order to cover your own blushes when we are in a situation that is entirely of your making. I commend the Justice Minister for the work that she has been doing behind the scenes and wish her and the Chief Constable well in securing the additional resource needed for our Police Service. I look forward to unanimous support from every party in the Chamber when those bids come forward in monitoring rounds and in the next Budget.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 10:58 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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