Debate contribution: Supply Resolution for the Northern Ireland Spring Supplementary Estimates 2024-25

Debate contribution by Mr Matthew O'Toole on 17 February 2025.

MLA

Mr Matthew O'Toole

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

17 February 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Supply Resolution for the Northern Ireland Spring Supplementary Estimates 2024-25

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4802538

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Madam Principal Deputy Speaker. I have 10 minutes, although I may not use them all. Thank you for taking my point of order on the anomaly that relates to my two roles. It is important that it be resolved. Today and tomorrow, we will have a significant opportunity to debate the Budget process in the Assembly. As always, it is important to point out that the Budget Bill and the Estimates process are not quite the same thing as the Budget statement, which sets specific allocations. They are, however, inextricably linked, because this is the legal process by which spending becomes legal, either on a forward-looking basis through the Vote on the Account that we will do for the beginning of the financial year or by looking back and regularising spending that has already happened. For many of the public, a lot of this is fairly incomprehensible. To be honest, I am fairly convinced that, for many MLAs, a lot of what we will debate today will be relatively incomprehensible. That, I am afraid, is an indictment of the standard of debate in the Chamber, but it is slowly but surely getting better. I will draw attention to a few things. Today's is a timed debate, but we will have a little more time tomorrow to go through the issues. I will briefly comment on the spring Supplementary Estimates. During the 2024-25 budgetary year, an unprecedented amount of additional resource came into the Executive's coffers. It is important to say that, yes, it came after a decade and a half of austerity from successive UK Governments, but it is also true to say that political dysfunction and repeated collapse here have made things worse. It is important to put that on the record, because, if we were to listen to certain Ministers — indeed, probably most Ministers — we would not think that unprecedented funding had gone to the Northern Ireland Executive. Is it enough? Certainly not. The official Opposition and I will always support more resources going into local Ministries to support public services here, but it is important to say that the 2024-25 financial year that we are about to leave saw an unprecedentedly large financial settlement at the start of the year, as well as in-year from Barnett consequentials from the UK Government. By the way, those are not my words. It was not me who said that but the most senior Budget official in the Minister of Finance's Department. The corollary to that should have been a strategic plan to deal with the crisis in our public services and a multi-year Budget matched to clear outcomes and targets in a Programme for Government (PFG). We have not got that. If anybody from the Executive parties or anybody else in the Chamber wants to intervene and explain to me where either of those things is or where I should look for them, I will give way. We should have seen them by now.

I am happy to give way to the Finance Minister.

I am grateful and glad that the Minister has offered an intervention, and I look forward to debating with him on that stuff in the Chamber in the days, weeks and months ahead. He is right to say that he, as Finance Minister, cannot place before the Assembly a legally binding multi-year Budget for Departments in the absence of one from the Treasury. However, there is nothing stopping him or his predecessor producing a multi-year indicative Budget, which is not legally binding in the same way, matched alongside the Programme for Government headings. I am glad that, in answer to my question for written answer, he has already indicated that his Department and other Departments are looking at five-year plans. I encourage him on that. His written answers may be somewhat ahead of his oral contributions in the debate. I am glad that the Department is looking at that because it is exactly where we need to go. I want to say a couple of things about the specifics of what we are debating today. We have had a record level of in-year additional Barnett and reallocations. We should have done much better in matching those to strategic priorities, whether that is on a four- or five-year indicative basis or even in the short term. Bluntly, I do not think that the public are at all clear on what the priorities are for the Executive. With regard to the expenditure resting on the sole authority of the Budget Act, which the Minister talked about, the figure is £24·5 million at table 6 in the spring Supplementary Estimates. As the Minister said, that relates to spending that has no legislative basis. It has to happen not quite on the q.t. but through this process. It needs to be regularised by a financial provisions Bill. The Minister said that it would be dealt with legislatively largely through a financial provisions Act that is due in 2025. It was due in 2024, because it was in the legislative programme. We were supposed to have passed into law a financial provisions Bill by now. A financial provisions Bill is not hugely complex or politically difficult, I presume, for the Executive parties. It is technical stuff. Officials could have been writing it all through the collapse of the institutions. It should have been written and prepared for. We should have debated it and had it on the statute book already, but we still have £24·5 million of black-box spending that was not dealt with through the specific provision. Half a million pounds is spent every year on the Fiscal Council. The Fiscal Council is a critical and welcome improvement in how we do fiscal monitoring and Budget-making here, but it still has no legislative basis. Going on for five years, we have had the Fiscal Council with no statutory underpinnings. The Fiscal Council Bill, like the financial provisions Bill, should have been relatively technical legislation that gave us clarity and oversight. The Fiscal Council already gives clarity and oversight, but it would have had a legal basis for its budget and its status. It is, frankly, ridiculous that we have not had that spending thus far. Those are the specific bits about the spring Supplementary Estimates that I wanted to raise. There is significant movement in-year, and a significant part of what is moving in-year is the fact that a record level of additional spending has come to the Executive — a record level. The least that the public could have expected was, if not a record level of strategic direction and purpose, something better than we have had over most of the past decade. They have not got it yet. They have not got that clarity. We are still muddling through monitoring round by monitoring round. I would like to raise a couple of other points. The Minister mentioned that there was a further monitoring round on Thursday a week ago, which came after the January monitoring round. He allocated £17 million, which was largely to deal with Storm Éowyn. While a lot of that spending will be welcome, I would like to know a couple of bits of information. Were specific bids put in? I know that bids were put in for Storm Éowyn and there were some specific areas. Will the Minister provide a little more detail on how that bidding process was run? It clearly was not via a conventional monitoring round process. Did his Department go out and ask for bids? How did that happen? What specifically gave rise to that Barnett consequential coming from London? Part of it, he said, came from the Westminster Estimates process, but it would be helpful to know. There is another outstanding question on which his predecessor did not give us clarity and, in fact, created more confusion: the position that we are in with the unwelcome additional costs for employer National Insurance, which are creating burdens for businesses but also different parts of the public sector, including councils. All councils across the North, I think, have now struck their district rate. In some cases, they are punishing ratepayers with above-inflation rises in the district rate. It would be helpful to know whether the Minister has plans to offer those councils any support. It would also be helpful to know when exactly the Executive agreed the regional rate rise for 2025-26, because it is clear — it was indicated in the draft Budget before Christmas — that an indicative rate rise would be about 5-odd % for householders and about 3% in the non-domestic rate for businesses. That is a significantly above-inflation rate rise for ordinary families and workers in Northern Ireland. The Executive have not been straight about that thus far. I found out about it only because it was given to me in a response to a question for written answer last week. No clear oral or written statement was given to the Assembly that the Executive parties had agreed that rate rise. The public out there face extra costs. The least that they could have expected was some clarity from the Finance Minister and the Executive more broadly about the rate rise that was being foisted on them. Furthermore, I go back to my initial point that the general trade-off for the public when it comes to Budget-making is what they get out of it: how their money is spent to improve public services, to deal with the crisis in the NHS, to invest in waste water infrastructure and to deal with all the other priorities that, we know, exist, even if they are not particularly well articulated in the Programme for Government. The public, if they are even aware that their regional rate is going up, do not know yet how those rate receipts will be spent to deal with those crises, because the Executive have not fronted up and told them or produced a coherent plan with which to go to the public. When we have a coherent plan, we will be better able to judge the Budget-making process. I am afraid that what we have had thus far is improvisation and spending that limps from monitoring round to monitoring round. I will look forward to debating those matters further tomorrow and in the weeks ahead. Thank you, Madam Principal Deputy Speaker.

1,731 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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