Debate contribution: Budget Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Alan Chambers on 18 February 2025.

MLA: Mr Alan Chambers
Party at the time: Ulster Unionist Party
Date: 18 February 2025
Type: Debate contribution
Business: Executive Committee Business
Heading: Budget Bill: Second Stage
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 4806244

Text

I welcome the chance to make some brief remarks on the Budget Bill at its Second Stage. I will focus my comments on our health and social care system. I listened with interest to yesterday's debate on the spring Supplementary Estimates. Although many sensible points were made across the Chamber, what struck me most was a small number of comments from an even smaller number of MLAs, who seemed to be casting doubt on the existence of financial woes in the Department of Health. Any Members who try to claim that our health service was not handed a poor financial deal at the start of 2024-25 are simply not living in the real world. They certainly have not talked to senior clinicians and service leaders, who have spent almost the past year constantly firefighting and having to deliver unprecedented levels of savings as a direct result. For almost the entirety of 2024-25, the Department of Health has existed in a significant deficit position. Although some MLAs are now almost using the fact that the Department and the Minister were able to balance the books as some sort of irrational justification for additional funds being unwarranted, those same MLAs are ignoring the undoubted damage that has been inflicted.
Sorry, but I want to make some progress. Week after week, MLAs from across the Chamber urge the Minister and the Department to do more to reduce waiting times, to introduce new schemes and to invest more money in existing services, yet the Executive, propped up by the Assembly, consciously took the decision last May not to spend money — not a single penny — on waiting list reduction initiatives. MLAs, particularly those from the other Executive parties, therefore need to take —
— some ownership of that.
Madam Principal Deputy Speaker, I am responding to comments that were made yesterday, and —
— I feel that I have the right to —.
OK, I will —.
Sorry.
I am almost finished, Madam Principal Deputy Speaker. We could spend many hours in the Chamber discussing the rights and wrongs of how the 2024-25 allocations have panned out, but, to sum it up, our health service, patients and health workers were not given the priority that some in the Chamber would like to pretend that they were. That is deeply disappointing.

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

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