Debate contribution: Budget Bill: Second Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Paul Frew on 24 February 2026.

MLA

Mr Paul Frew

Party at the time

Democratic Unionist Party

Date

24 February 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Budget Bill: Second Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5404198

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I thank the Member for his contribution. He makes a valid point about joined-up government. Can we be really sure that the money that goes to TEO before filtering down to councils is being spent appropriately and profitably to ensure that we protect women and girls properly? That is a question for the Finance Minister. I doubt that he will be able to answer it, because he is so far removed from the different stages of that funding. That is why we need to see better Executive funding and to work together to see an end to the silo approach. Instead, we need to work together to ensure that the money that we spend is spent appropriately. I will come on to that in a moment. We have also seen a wave of court cases for sexual offences. It is very welcome that such cases, some of which are historical cases, are coming to the fore. People now feel that they have the ability and confidence to come forward to report crimes of that very serious nature that have been committed against them and that they can then seek justice. For so long, they did not have the confidence to come forward. Their doing so, however, results in a cost to policing, to the Public Prosecution Service (PPS) and to the court and judicial systems. The increase in the number of sexual offence cases is not being funded appropriately to meet demand, to keep us all safe and to ensure that people can get justice. Our prison population has increased by over 20%. There are so many more people spending time on remand awaiting the outcome of their case. Again, that may in part be down to the influx of sexual crime cases. It is affecting the day-to-day running of our justice system and what cases are taken forward. I come on to police numbers. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the lack of an establishment figure for the police is creating a risk to security. To ensure that the population is kept safe, we need our PSNI to be fully funded up to the establishment figure and above.

I thank the Member for his contribution. He makes a valid point. During my time on the Justice Committee in this mandate and the 2016 mandate, not only as Chair but as a member, I have visited prisons and spoken to prison officers. I have seen the pressure that they are under. I also saw the tremendous work that they do to keep the prison population safe and to rehabilitate. It is crucial work, but it is thankless and is not really that popular. If you were to ask the population whether it would rather see a brand new hospital or a brand new prison, there would only ever be one answer. However, it is up to the Justice Minister to inform not only the population but the Executive where that spend needs to go. A lot of work is done in our prisons by our prison officers that goes unseen. It is thankless, but our prison officers do tremendous work in keeping us all safer. Is that not one of the priorities in the Northern Ireland Executive's Programme for Government? That brings me to my next point: where in this Budget and over the past year have we seen alignment with the Programme for Government?

The Member makes a valid point. I agree that, if a report is pending, it should be released. I can tell you now, however, that any report released by any Minister in the Executive will sit on the shelf if it is not funded appropriately.

I thank the Member for his contribution. I look at all amendments with great interest. As the Member knows, I love amendments to Bills, especially miscellaneous Bills. I look forward to the year ahead — I am probably the only MLA who looks forward to the final year of a mandate — because I see opportunities to amend Bills. A Justice Bill is coming soon; we will not talk about it now. The important thing about the Budget Bill, considering last year, next year and the next three years, is that, if it is not aligned with a programme, it will go nowhere. With no strategic footing for it — no strategic direction whatever — the Finance Minister becomes a bean counter, and he hands his beans out. I have this message for the Finance Minister: those beans are not magic beans. They will create nothing other than a salami-slicing of Departments, when we face some of the most challenging fiscal pressures that we have ever faced. The amount of day-to-day funding available to the Northern Ireland Executive in 2026-27 will generate unprecedented pressures. The Executive will face difficult choices about efficiencies, and it is time for decisions. That underlines the urgent need to accelerate the transformation of public services so that they are affordable now and in the future, yet I see nothing in the blue pages of the Bill that will lead to that transformation. It is not a matter of allocating a token £5 million here and £7 million there; we need to transform our public services completely to ensure that, when people pay their taxes and their rates, they get value for money. We cannot say that at the minute. Why is that the case? Why have the Finance Minister and the Executive not stepped up? We have received a £400 million reserve claim loan. That is a massive injection into the heart of our finances that we badly required, yet we will face massive issues in our finances. We cannot simply keep on carrying on; something has to change. We have to do something different. We have to transform our public services, and we are not doing that; we are nowhere close to doing that. I thank Gavin Robinson MP for the work that he did to secure that £400 million reserve claim loan. Where would we be without it? It is vital that the Finance Minister and Sinn Féin get to grips with what they are about. Forget the nonsense that Sinn Féin comes out with every day. All we have heard about for the past two weeks is 50:50 recruitment, whereby Sinn Féin would discriminate against my children, my grandchildren and my nieces and nephews. Sinn Féin ignores the fact that our establishment figures are well below what they should be, which means that none of us is as safe as we should be. We have had enough of the nonsense from Sinn Féin, its play in the media and its mantra about a united Ireland. I have a message for you, folks: people in the Republic of Ireland are much shrewder than you make them out to be. They do not want Sinn Féin in government; of course they do not. They see the policy difference between the North and South. They see how the drama is played out in Northern Ireland compared with Sinn Féin's policies in the South and vice versa. People in the Republic of Ireland are no fools. They do not want Sinn Féin about the place when it comes to forming a Government and rightly so. There are opportunities to do something really good in the three-year Budget. I have spoken about the fact that the three-year Budget cannot be three one-year Budgets. That is not strategic, and it goes absolutely nowhere. Therefore, it is important that we do something different. The Finance Minister has missed opportunities this year. The things that we, as an Assembly and an Executive, have to do are the things that most households do: to look at the inescapable pressures. Those, for Northern Ireland, will mostly be in pay. Sinn Féin signed up to pay parity. It signed up to making sure that teachers, nurses, police officers and everyone else in the public sector get pay that is sufficient and that they deserve, yet the Finance Minister will not fund it.

Yes, I will.

I thank the Minister for that. He neglects to mention the other inescapable pressures in the Department. It is not good enough just to say, "I funded this, this and this", when Departments, in trying to get the money to deliver that pay parity, have to exclude other inescapable pressures that they cannot deliver. Then, when Departments complain to the Finance Minister, the Finance Minister says, "You have your budget. You agreed to your budget. Live within your means".

Yes, I will.

It is good to spend money on keeping our young people safe from the internet and all of the issues that they face. It is a failure of the people on the opposite Benches that they did not support the Education Minister in keeping our children safe from the problems that all Western societies face as regards mobile phones and the internet.

Yes, I can.

With the Budgets from previous years, the Minister of Finance has missed so many opportunities. I will give him a couple of examples. The Communities Minister has a housing strategy: why can the Finance Minister not support it? After all, housing is a Programme for Government aim. The Programme for Government is called 'Our Plan: Doing What Matters Most', but why is it, when we prioritise housing in it, the Minister of Finance fails to fund it? Not only do we have a Budget that is not strategic and is going nowhere, but we have a Programme for Government that sits on a shelf and is ignored. The Communities Minister is doing something about saving money for the Executive. He used Housing Executive reserves to purchase 600 homes, keeping families out of hotels and saving the Northern Ireland Executive £75 million over seven years. If something works, why are we not encouraging it, increasing it or funding it appropriately? The Finance Minister will have to ask himself why he is curtailing a Minister who is effective in saving money. There are Members across the way who want fiscal powers. They call it "tax-varying powers", but what that really means is that, if they get tax-varying powers, they will raise taxes. That is basically what it means. They will raise taxes so that the public will have to fund their inefficient public services. Over the past year, however, the Communities Minister has used reserves to buy 600 homes to make sure that families are not stuck in hotel suites but have a proper home and a roof over their heads. That is not being supported properly, even though it is saving and could continue to save £75 million over seven years. Why will Sinn Féin not support tackling fraud and error in the benefits system? That is about rooting out fraudulent activity in our benefits system that will save the Executive £25 million. It will also save the Treasury the same amount of money, but, of course, Sinn Féin does not care about the Treasury; it just wants more money from the Treasury. It does not care about saving money for the Treasury so that maybe we could speak to the Treasury with a wee bit more kudos. Those are all things that the Communities Minister wishes to deliver, but he is hamstrung by the Executive, the Finance Minister and Sinn Féin and cannot do so. The disability strategy aims to get people who are disabled and deaf people into full-time, wholesome employment. Why can the Finance Minister not support that? If we can get more people into work by creating wholesome jobs that help their life and their physical and mental health and produce something for our GDP, why will Sinn Féin not support that? We are good at placing duties on Ministers and Departments through the laws that we pass: it is about time that we started to fund the issues that really matter. That might be by way of a legislative programme, through a Programme for Government or a capital strategy and all of the things that have been mentioned today. At the moment, however, all we see is a rudderless Finance Minister going round in circles and not delivering for the people of Northern Ireland.

2,040 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Flagged Constitutional question, Brexit, the Windsor Framework and sovereignty

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:01 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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