Debate contribution: Budget 2025-26: Reports

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 8 April 2025.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

8 April 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Committee Business

Heading

Budget 2025-26: Reports

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4919976

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for using the grace time. It is important to hear everybody's voice, and I appreciate that you have done that. The obvious question for people here to consider is this: how many more reports do we need to read on the failure of our Budgets to meet people's needs? How many more reports need to be published in order to explain how our public services are at breaking point, which they certainly are? Despite a mounting pile of evidence, the Executive parties, which complain about Westminster austerity, insist on implementing Westminster's austerity Budgets. The links between the Budget and the Executive's stated priorities in the Programme for Government are weak at best. The earmarked allocations for childcare, for ending violence against women and for social housing are all a drop in the ocean compared with what is needed. I support the motion, but there is another report that the Finance Minister should take note of, which is the NI Affairs Committee's report on the North's public services. To no one's surprise, that Committee found that our public services are crippled by inadequate funding, a lack of reform and political instability. That is not news to my constituents and many others. The slow and dramatic collapse of health and social care and education is having a disastrous impact on people's quality of life. Ordinary people did not need a report to tell them that our public services are at breaking point, because they experience that every day. People who cannot afford to go private wait months or years for a first appointment with a consultant. Mental health needs are 40% greater here than they are in Britain, and the North recently held the world record for prescribing the most antidepressants per head of population. There is a backlog of at least a year for major court cases. School classrooms are crumbling or infested with black mould. Up to 80% of schools are operating at a deficit.

In the face of this crisis, one-off emergency rescue packages simply will not cut it, and neither will single-year Budgets. What is urgently needed is long-term, sustainable and predictable funding based on people's needs. The 124% uplift in funding from Westminster to the North is clearly not enough to avert a catastrophe for our public services. We need to transform the way in which our public services are delivered, so that they are sustainable, high-quality and dependable for current and future generations. We need to make progress on transformation while maintaining day-to-day services. I emphasise this question: transformation for whom? It should be for people, not to satisfy the austerity wolves in the Treasury or Number 10. The Budget will not allow us to do both: £95 million of transformation funding from the restoration package has already been diverted into day-to-day spending. For as long as we are handed paltry Budgets from Westminster, we will never be able to invest in transformation. Despite much of what the media and the political class tell us, the answers to our financial crisis are not water charges or rates increases. Ordinary people have already been punished enough. A 5% regional rate increase is being implemented as part of this Budget with absolutely no improvement in the delivery of services to justify it. At least 35,000 people in the North have been impacted on by the Labour Government's cuts to personal independence payment (PIP) and universal credit. Last week, the House passed a motion calling for tax increases for the superwealthy. There was clear consensus that, rather than punishing the poor, there are more progressive ways of raising revenue for our public services. One of the options is to complete the devolution of corporation tax. Instead of arguing to cut it, the Executive should fight to raise corporation tax on corporate giants that are raking in record profits. Giving due regard to the findings of the reports cannot just mean business as usual, nor can it mean the Executive forcing ordinary working-class people to foot the bill for water charges. The Executive need to break from Westminster's economic rule, stand up to Keir Starmer's attempts to impose a new era of austerity and refuse to implement cuts that will devastate working-class communities across the North. Otherwise, there will be another decade of misery, poverty and crises in public services.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

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

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