Debate contribution: Budgetary Pressures
Debate contribution by Mr Timothy Gaston on .
- MLA
- Mr Timothy Gaston
- Party at the time
- Traditional Unionist Voice
- Date
- 10 September 2024
- Type
- Debate contribution
- Business
- Private Members' Business
- Heading
- Budgetary Pressures
- Assembly identifier
- Official Report component 4517491
Read the official Assembly record
Text
Thank you very much. While it is safe to assume that Alliance did not have this as a consideration when tabling the motion, it does come at an opportune time for the TUV, as my party will today be submitting proposals on the matter to the Treasury, where these decisions are actually made. Between the mid-1970s and the later parts of the 2010s, Northern Ireland was funded relatively generously by Westminster. During 2020, however, the block grant funding to Northern Ireland fell to the UK Government definition of need. Then, in April 2022, Northern Ireland became the first part of the UK to be funded below the UK Government's own definition of need since its adoption in 2012. In order to have a sensible discussion about those developments, we need to review them in the context of appreciation of the development of UK policy around need. The first part of the UK to really struggle with the Barnett squeeze was Wales during the noughties. In 2007, the Welsh Government appointed Professor Gerry Holtham to review the impact of the squeeze and to develop a metric for measuring what Wales needed in order to justify intervention to make sure that the squeeze did not take Wales below that level. Holtham explained that the only way that he could develop a meaningful metric was on a UK-wide basis, assessing how funds should be allocated across the whole of the UK, mindful of local need, with the objective that, regardless of where people lived, we should all have access to broadly comparable public services. The Holtham formula demonstrated that, in order for people in Wales to enjoy the same level of public services as people in England, the Government, because of the higher need in Wales, needed to spend £115 per head for every £100 spent in England. The equivalent figure for Scotland was £105 per head, and in Northern Ireland it was £121 per head. Holtham's calculations took place before the devolution of justice in Northern Ireland, and the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council has since made appropriate adjustments to apply the Holtham formula.
In that updated context, the definition of need for Northern Ireland has increased to £124. Go on ahead.
Thank you very much for the intervention. Indeed, Westminster rule is certainly my preference, but we have to work with what we have. The UK Government embraced the Holtham formula in 2012 when they committed to intervene to ensure that the block grant funding to Wales would not fall below the Holtham definition of need at £115, and that is something that they started doing every financial year from 2017-18 and have continued to do ever since. The funding of Northern Ireland was £3 below the UK definition of need in 2022-23 and 2023-24, even as the UK Government intervened to make sure that block grant funding to Wales did not fall below need. That constituted an arrangement that was obviously unjust and indefensible. The UK Government cannot have a UK definition of need and then deploy it to protect some UK Welsh citizens while refusing to protect UK Northern Ireland citizens. Northern Ireland was badly let down by the fiscal framework negotiated by the Government at the end of last year. While we do not argue that Northern Ireland should be funded at £19 above the need like in Scotland, we are equally clear that the trauma of being funded below that need is so serious that we insist on nothing less than that, and the same protections afforded to other parts of the UK threatened by funding below need must now be afforded to us. The fiscal framework denies that on two counts. First, the framework does not hold the UK Government to the Wales precedent in that it does not clearly fund Northern Ireland to the £124 baseline from 2022, so we are denied the clarity afforded to Wales.
Thank you very much.
655 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.
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