Debate contribution: Multi-year Budget

Debate contribution by Mr Alan Chambers on 25 November 2025.

MLA: Mr Alan Chambers
Party at the time: Ulster Unionist Party
Date: 25 November 2025
Type: Debate contribution
Business: Opposition Business
Heading: Multi-year Budget
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 5258753

Text

The importance and undeniable benefits of moving to a multi-year funding position have often been discussed in the Chamber, and have always been supported by my party. No public service would benefit more from some degree of financial clarity and certainty than our health service. Over the past decade, this reality has become painfully clear: our health service cannot continue to function, never mind transform, under a cycle of short-term Budgets and political instability. If we genuinely want to provide the sustainable, high-quality care that the people of Northern Ireland deserve, the Assembly and the Executive must be prepared to take a long-overdue approach to budgeting. Year-to-year budgeting has forced the Department of Health and our trusts to operate in constant firefighting mode.
Funding that arrives late in the financial year or that shifts unpredictably with each Budget settlement makes long-term workforce planning virtually impossible.
When Departments find themselves in financial deficit, in-year savings plans are often more difficult and counter-strategic than they would have been had a multi-year approach been taken. Short-term budgeting not only slows progress, it actively costs money. When Departments cannot plan ahead, especially those of the scale and size of the Department of Health, they end up paying more for temporary solutions, such as expensive agency staff instead of permanent recruits, short-notice contracts instead of strategic investments and sticking-plaster fixes instead of long-term reform. The uncertainty created by year-to-year Budgets directly affects the patient experience. The projects that are designed to modernise care are unavoidably disrupted when the funding stops and starts, whether they are in mental health, where critical investment is needed for in-patient mental health facilities, elective surgery, primary care or digital innovation. Of course, staff morale suffers when they cannot see a reliable path forward for the services that they are trying to improve. The public lose confidence when announcements of progress are repeatedly followed by announcements of delay. We must also be honest with ourselves about the impact of political instability. The stop-start nature of the Assembly and Executive over the past decade due to collapses of the institutions — first by Sinn Féin and then by the DUP — has compounded every one of the challenges. When the institutions collapse, the strategic direction is in a vacuum, and there is zero accountability for the political governance. As we all know, health is the sector that suffers the most when our politics fail because it relies the most on continuity, long-term planning and stable decision-making. A multi-year Budget will not solve every problem in our health service, but it will provide the foundation on which real solutions can finally be built. Allowing the Department to plan workforce growth over several years instead of several months will let the trusts invest in improving services with the confidence that the funding will be there to complete the work. Crucially, it will help to ensure that money is spent wisely rather than reactively. As MLAs, we owe it to patients and the wider public to break the cycle of short-termism that is strangling our health service. Clarity in the budgeting process must go hand-in-hand with stable government. I hope that the Executive can come together in the coming weeks, especially after tomorrow's Budget statement, set their political differences to the side and act in the best interests of the people whom we are elected to serve. Having watched the political positioning of some parties over recent weeks, however, I am becoming increasingly concerned about whether the Executive have the political desire and bravery to fairly consider a multi-year deal. If the Executive Ministers are not able to set their political differences to the side and consider a draft multi-year settlement, it will be another catastrophic failure of this place.

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

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