Debate contribution: Administrative and Financial Provisions Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Matthew O'Toole on 1 July 2025.

MLA

Mr Matthew O'Toole

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

1 July 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Administrative and Financial Provisions Bill: Second Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5061857

Read the official Assembly record

Text

It was the case, but the amount has come down. This will help to tidy that up. From that perspective, it is useful. This is a big Bill. There are lots of important things in it, and it will be important to each Committee, where their bodies are being granted powers. The Finance Committee is looking at three specific areas: one relates to the Audit Office; another relates to the Northern Ireland Investment Fund; and the third relates to the Consolidated Fund advances. The Committee will want to understand the exact context for those powers, working out examples of how they might be used and all of that. It is important that the Committee does that work. I will make an important process point. The DUP Members Mr Buchanan reprimanded the Opposition earlier, saying, "You wanted legislation, and now you are complaining that you are getting it all in one day". That is not how it is supposed to work. We are supposed to be given time to debate such things. The fact that we asked for there to be more debates on legislation does not mean that it is acceptable to have six full-blown debates on stages of primary legislation in two days. That does not represent a serious legislature in operation. We are debating two important Bills today: the Fiscal Council Bill and the Administrative and Financial Provisions Bill. We should have had those Bills a good while ago and been devoting a bit more time to them. I will leave it at that. I do not want to labour the point, but I strongly reject the idea that we should debate six important, substantive pieces of legislation —.

I am happy to return to the Bill, but it was important that I put those remarks on the record, because the Administrative and Financial Provisions Bill is a substantive piece of legislation. Before I draw my remarks to a close, in welcoming the fact that we finally have an Administrative and Financial Provisions Bill, I draw attention to the strange situation with the Northern Ireland Investment Fund, which is one of the entities for which funding is being clarified via the Bill. The Northern Ireland Investment Fund was set up a number of years ago as a way to use financial transactions capital. I have been talking about using FTC in novel ways for a long time, as have other members of the Committee. There was not much of an audience for that, a few years ago. Now, it looks as though FTC will be used to build Casement Park, if it is ever built — maybe the Minister will give us a view on that while he is at the Dispatch Box. That will be the case, if we ever get it built, and I really hope that we do. That would be a novel and important use of FTC. The NI Investment Fund has existed for a while. It has funded some important things, but it has also been used to finance things that were supposed to be innovative, cutting-edge and new economic development projects in areas of high deprivation and all of that.

It has often been used to fund hotels, which are not necessarily excluded from commercial lending. In one case, which was particularly interesting, it was used to fund a car park. That is, I think, worthy of interrogation. That is the NI Investment Fund. I hope that that will work better and that, in the course of interrogating the Bill, we will understand how the Department intends to manage the NI Investment Fund much more strategically.

In broad terms, the fact that we have the Administrative and Financial Provisions Bill is welcome. There is lots of detail that we have not had the chance to go through, as a Committee or as individual MLAs, so I say once again that, although, rightly, we will pass the Bill at Second Stage, members of the Finance Committee, who will be doing their job, and other Committees need to look through the detail of what we are passing and understand precisely the legal ramifications. The provisions are all sensible, and the Bill is largely a tidying-up exercise, but we should still be across the detail, because a fundamental point about the seriousness of this legislature is at stake. In broad terms, we support the Bill's passing at Second Stage.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 13:06 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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