Debate contribution: Budget 2025-26

Debate contribution by Mr Justin McNulty on 19 May 2025.

MLA

Mr Justin McNulty

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

19 May 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Budget 2025-26

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4968788

Read the official Assembly record

Text

We are being asked today to support a Budget that is supposed to shape the future of the North but, instead, reads as a list of missed opportunities and broken promises. In 2022, people in communities across the North were promised that things would change. Sinn Féin and the DUP told them that their health service would be rebuilt, that their children's schools would be properly funded and that the housing crisis would be confronted head-on. Three years on, this Budget tells a very different story. Let us start with an issue that touches every family in this place: healthcare. At the previous election, Sinn Féin and the DUP promised an extra £1 billion for health. Today, what do we have? The Executive have found an additional £331 million from the last fiscal year, but trusts will have to find £400 million in savings. Talk about giving with one hand and taking away with the other, although it is not surprising from this Sinn Féin/DUP-led Executive. That is a threat to front-line services. There are theatre closures, cancelled operations and vacant posts going unfilled while patients languish in hospital corridors and on waiting lists. The Confederation for Health and Social Care said that the Budget is:

"unworkable, counter strategic, and undermines the value of additional funding."

It estimates that the cuts will be equivalent to the loss of 10,000 staff. Waiting lists have not been reduced; they have grown. The people who were promised action are waiting months, sometimes years, for care. Behind every statistic is a mother waiting on cancer treatment, a child waiting for speech therapy or a carer waiting for support that never comes. That is not transformation; they are broken promises. Going back to the previous election, Sinn Féin promised 100,000 homes over 15 years.

The DUP pledged to support construction jobs and invest in housing infrastructure, but here is the reality: just £100 million is earmarked for social housing. That might sound like a big number, but it is not even a drop in the ocean compared with what is needed to deal with a housing list of over 45,000 people. Every week, I speak to young couples who have given up on owning a home, parents who are raising children in temporary accommodation, pensioners in damp, unsuitable housing and families who are buckling under the weight of extortionate rents, dreaming of a home of their own but with no light at the end of the tunnel. How can the Executive claim to be building a better future when they are not even fit to build enough homes?

Sinn Féin and the DUP said that they would improve access to special educational needs provision and would ensure fair funding and build more schools, yet, today, schools are being told to cut classroom assistants, scrap breakfast clubs and delay repairs to buildings that are falling apart. Children with additional needs are being failed year after year, time and again, due to a lack of assessments and resourcing and a complete lack of urgency from the Executive. The Executive talk about giving our people the best start in life, but their Budget and their inertia all but ensure that some will not even get off the starting blocks. Both parties spoke in 2022 about boosting our infrastructure: roads, digital connectivity, water. Travelling around some of our rural roads, especially in south Armagh, is akin to travelling along the surface of the moon, given the scale of the craters and the potholes. This year, we were told that £105 million will go to NI Water. That might sound impressive, but the fact is that NI Water needs five times that amount just to stand still. As a result, development has been stalled, because the infrastructure cannot cope. Those are not abstract technical issues; they are barriers to new homes, businesses and investment. The Executive cannot be taken seriously when they claim to support growth while underfunding the very infrastructure that growth depends on. The Budget reflects not just what is in the Executive's bank account but what they view as a priority, what informs their values and what, they believe, our people deserve. Irrespective of how the Executive parties spin it, there is no escaping the reality that the people whom we represent deserve better than this Budget. They deserve better than broken promises and mediocre leadership. They deserve better than warm words, posters and platitudes while schools, roads and hospitals crumble around them. Through the Budget, the Executive are sending a message to patients, parents, pupils and pensioners of, "Wait your turn. Accept less. Be grateful for crumbs". That is not a message that the SDLP will stand behind. Those are not our values, and we cannot support this Executive Budget. This Budget fails the ambition test. This Budget fails the integrity test. This Budget fails the delivery test. This Budget fails the hope test. What else would you expect from a Sinn Fein/DUP-led Executive?

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

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 12:38 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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