Debate contribution: Community and Voluntary Sector Funding

Debate contribution by Mr Mike Nesbitt on 30 September 2024.

MLA

Mr Mike Nesbitt

Party at the time

Ulster Unionist Party

Date

30 September 2024

Type

Debate contribution (made as a minister)

Business

Opposition Business

Heading

Community and Voluntary Sector Funding

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4564052

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker. For Members who put a premium on accuracy, let it go into the record that the decision to cut the core grant by 50% was taken not by Robin Swann but by the permanent secretary at the Department of Health. The reason that it was not taken by Robin Swann or a Member of the House is that the Democratic Unionist Party refused to practise devolution. I ask the Member for South Down to reflect on that. In doing so, she may also care to reflect on the fact that the biggest financial blow to the voluntary and community sector in recent years has been the loss of the European social fund; lost because of Brexit, a policy supported by her party. Ms Forsythe claims that I do not understand or appreciate the community and voluntary sector. I did not hear a particularly robust evidence base for that claim, but I became closely involved with aspects of the community and voluntary sector as a commissioner at the Commission for Victims and Survivors, where the task was to be a champion for the most vulnerable: those who had suffered most during the 30 years in which we inflicted such terrible pain on one another. Dozens of community and voluntary sector groups are involved in supporting victims and survivors. By and large, they emerged because somebody saw a loved one, a neighbour or a friend get hurt and tried to help. Their doing so resulted in other people saying to them, "Well, you're helping your cousin", or, "You're helping your neighbour" and, "I have a cousin who was hurt", or, "I have a neighbour who was hurt. Can you help them too?". Suddenly, they were in charge of a voluntary and community group looking after victims and survivors. Suddenly, they became chief executives, human resource managers or financial directors, and, because they never started out to become such, they needed help. That, to a large extent, was the genesis of the core grant scheme. As the mover of the motion said, they are among the very best of our society. As a commissioner, I became very aware of the impact of cuts and changes to budgets; the impact of a single-year budget; and, in particular, the impact of constant delays in confirming state funding. If, for example, a group thought of a new service for its service users, it would advertise for an expert to deliver that service. That expert would get a one-year contract, and, after six or nine months, they would ask, "Is my contract being renewed?". The answer was, "Well, we're waiting to hear from government". In the meantime, that person would see a safe, permanent job in the statutory sector, and off they would go, leaving the service users in a worse position than the one in which they had begun. In the game of snakes and ladders, they had gone up a lovely ladder to a better place but had then hit a snake and gone back down again, so they knew that there was better to be had. I believe that I understand and appreciate the work of the community and voluntary sector. My Department has supported and relied on the sector for many years. In some cases, the sector provides services under contract to Health and Social Care (HSC) bodies, including the trusts. The Department of Health has also supported the sector through the core grant scheme. That system is intended to be an enabler by covering core organisational costs. It is not intended to cover the full cost of service delivery; rather, it makes it possible for organisations to function and, potentially, to bid for other funding. I have had it described to me as a lever or a way to demonstrate to other funders that the organisation is worth investing in because we, as a devolved Government, believe in it and back it financially. It is important to the organisations that receive it, to the Department of Health and to government in the round that we continue the core grant. While I recognise the valuable role that the sector has to play and the importance of investing in it, all Members will be aware of the funding position that the Department of Health found itself in last year and again this year. I am nearly deafened by the irony klaxon coming from my right in particular. The budget position has made it necessary to take incredibly difficult funding decisions and choose between the things that need to be funded to save life and limb and the things that we would like to fund. Having to choose between funding critical statutory services and supporting the voluntary and community sector because it is a good, productive and proper thing to do is a very unpleasant place in which to find yourself. The sector faces an incredibly challenging financial landscape at the minute, but, let us be honest, so do all Departments. We all know what has been going on. Permanent secretaries and senior leadership teams have been looking at everything that their Department does that costs money and putting those actions into one of two columns: statutory responsibility and non-statutory. If you are in the second column, you are struggling.

I thank the Member for her intervention. Many times a week, if not daily, I am given a presentation that says, "If you invest in preventative measures or put some money into transformation here, that relatively small amount of money will release a comparatively large amount of money down the line". Where is that transformational money to come from? It does not exist, and the Members who voted for the Budget must take their element of responsibility for that. I say this to the Member: yes, one thing that I want to do is move from care in hospitals to care in the community. That would be a cost-effective way of doing business. I also want to move from a health service that is primarily about curing the sick to one that keeps the healthy healthy. If we can find the funds for those transformative issues, we will release money at the other end or, as they say, on the right-hand side. Despite the financial challenges, I decided in July to maintain my Department's core grant scheme in 2024-25. Much as I would have liked to restore the full grant, that was simply not possible in the circumstances. I understand that Members will say, "But look at your budget of £7·9 billion. How can you not find another £1·8 million?". That is a measure of how constrained the budget is. Yes, I am looking for efficiencies. For example, I have sat down with the trust chairs, and we have had some uncomfortable conversations about the need to be more productive and efficient, but will that yield significant financial savings in the rest of the financial year? It is very unlikely. There could have been an outcome whereby, in order to ease the huge financial pressures that to this day weigh down my Department, nothing at all was invested in the core grant scheme, but, to me, that was unacceptable. I was clear that, despite the difficulties that it created elsewhere, I wanted to maintain at least the same level of funding as last year. I hope that that has made a positive contribution towards the financial sustainability of the 61 organisations in receipt of the grant. While I was able to reinstate it in part, I was able to protect the investment in the front-line services that the sector provides. It is important to note that the majority of organisations in receipt of core grant funding also hold service delivery contracts. Those are with my Department's arm's-length bodies. Core grant funding is not their only source of HSC income. Indeed, in the financial year 2023-24, 52 of the 61 recipients held service delivery contracts, and the total value of those contracts was £53 million. I am fully committed to supporting the sector financially going forward, but that commitment will take me only so far. I need a budget allocation that permits me to do so, and I welcome my party colleagues' amendment. The reality is that the budget for the past two years has fallen significantly short.

I thank the Member for her intervention. It speaks to a belief that I have formed rather quickly in my time as Minister of Health, which is that, as a generalisation, we have grossly overcomplicated healthcare delivery. That goes right across health and social care. Asking people to jump through hoops because we have a process and leaving a community and voluntary group believing that the process is more important than meeting its needs is something that we need to be aware of. Being aware of it, we need to address it. Even if it is a perception, it is potentially debilitating. In the time remaining, I want to address another aspect of the issue. In addition to inheriting a grant scheme that is extremely challenging in financial terms, I have inherited a scheme that I consider to be inherently unfair. The scheme has been mostly closed for the best part of two decades, with no route for an unfunded organisation to access financial support. Through no fault of their own, the same organisations — there are around 60 of them, as has been said — have been receiving core grant funding in all that time. Attempts were made to redesign the scheme between 2015 and 2017 and, again, as recently as 2022, but we kept coming back to the old closed scheme. The latest attempt, in 2022, failed because of design flaws, which my Department now accepts were its responsibility. Do not get me wrong: the organisations currently supported under the current scheme work with and alongside some of the most vulnerable children and adults in Northern Ireland. To offer a few examples: current recipients provide treatment and support services to people with drug and alcohol addictions, children who are in the care system, older people, victims of domestic and sexual abuse, adults and children with disabilities and those living with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions. The scheme needs to change. In 2010, the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA) and Chief Officers Third Sector (CO3) indicated that it was no longer fit for purpose. Furthermore, the Department of Health is operating in a much-different policy and strategy environment and the sector itself has evolved and continues to do so. To signal my commitment, I have asked NICVA to facilitate a co-design process through which my officials are working with representatives from the sector to redesign the core grant scheme, and, hopefully, that will be for implementation at the beginning of the next financial year. Again, I must add, that is budget permitting. I am running out of time, so I just want to say that I have had a brief on how discussions are going between the Department and NICVA and NICVA's member organisations. Without going into fine detail, I will say that some of the discussions and conclusions have been very surprising. Some of the groups are proposing a way forward that would not have been our first guess, if I may put it that way. That affirms the value of undertaking the review of the core grant scheme to try to do something better and, importantly to me, to make sure that it is opened up. Over the past 20 years, obviously, the landscape of community and voluntary sector groups has changed in some ways rather significantly, and it is not fair that some groups have access and others do not. I look forward to the fruits of that consultation and the advice that NICVA finally brings to me.

1,972 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:12 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

Disagree with this assessment?

Classifications can be challenged. A person reads every challenge, and any change is recorded publicly above with its reason.

Challenge this classification