Debate contribution: Budget Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Ms Sinéad McLaughlin on 18 February 2025.

MLA: Ms Sinéad McLaughlin
Party at the time: Social Democratic and Labour Party
Date: 18 February 2025
Type: Debate contribution
Business: Executive Committee Business
Heading: Budget Bill: Second Stage
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 4806470

Text

At the outset, I welcome John O'Dowd to his new ministerial position, and I thank Caoimhe Archibald for her service to the Department of Finance. We all know that we are not short on challenges in Northern Ireland. Years of stop-start government and mismanagement from Westminster mean that we face a difficult settlement here and have profound issues to address. I take the opportunity to recognise that the Executive operate within difficult financial constraints, and, of course, we know that there is not enough money to do everything that Ministers or the public would like to see done. I accept that that work is not easy, but we all put ourselves forward for public office on the basis that we will fix challenges for the people whom we serve, and now is the time to get on with that job. Unfortunately, the Budget Bill does not meet the challenges and marks more of the same from the Executive, continuing with a status quo that ran out of road a long time ago.
People here rightly deserve a long-term strategic plan to address our challenges now that the Government are back up and running. The Budget Bill and the Programme for Government (PFG) should always be aligned, but that has never happened. All too often, government lacks the creativity and ambition to get to grips with the issues that we face. Take financial transactions capital (FTC) as an example in the Budget Bill: millions remain unspent while crucial capital projects sit waiting to be delivered. Take the Barnett consequentials: we should have ring-fenced that funding in recent years to deal with the huge childcare costs that families face. We have not yet met that challenge, and parents still pay the price. I will make three points to the Chamber and the Minister, not about the money that we have but about the way in which we do things. First, we need to see multi-year budgeting, which is a cause that, I know, the Finance Minister agrees with, so that future Budgets can be more effective. We are yet to see any progress on that. Secondly, we need to see the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council (NIFC) put on a statutory footing. For some time, the SDLP has been calling for that to happen without delay. We are pleased to see it included in the 2024 legislative programme, but it now needs to be delivered. Thirdly, there is regional balance. Members of the Executive and the Finance Minister in particular rightly and frequently go on the airwaves and into meetings with the British Government to make the case for needs-based funding for Northern Ireland, and that is as it should be. We look forward to reading the results of the independent review of the fiscal framework to determine the scale of the need that we experience here. It is so important that we get it right, but it seems that we never apply the same logic when we eventually spend that money here at home, as we will see as a consequence of the Budget Bill. If we are so enthusiastic about and persuaded of the case for needs-based funding for Northern Ireland, why are we not as enthusiastic about adopting a needs-based approach to our spending here? Why do we not have a formula that directs health funding to the places with the worst health outcomes? Why do we have confusion over education funding, which seems to make little sense to the public? Why do we not see positive discrimination of the kind that the Northern and Western Regional Assembly (NWRA) has called for, whereby we overinvest in the places that have been left behind? Investing more in the places that need it is our argument in front of the Chancellor on our trips to London. I simply argue that that should be our argument in front of the public as well, and we should follow through with action by modelling what we ask for. We can meet the challenges only if we have effective long-term government budgeting linked to the outcomes that we want to achieve with detail and strategic priorities. That is the task ahead, and we look forward to ensuring that the voices of the people whom we represent are heard and acted on as those consequential decisions are taken by the Government.

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

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