Debate contribution: Waste and Inefficiency in Government

Debate contribution by Ms Diane Forsythe on 23 March 2026.

MLA

Ms Diane Forsythe

Party at the time

Democratic Unionist Party

Date

23 March 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Waste and Inefficiency in Government

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5465920

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I beg to move

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. The DUP has tabled today's motion, as we face the extremely challenging task of trying to agree a multi-year Budget for Northern Ireland. In these most challenging financial times, there is a need to take practical action to tackle waste and inefficiencies in our government systems. Some have sought to frame the motion as an attempt to attack and vilify individual Ministers and parties, but that says more about them and their petty politics. Alliance is pushing selective and misleading claims instead of engaging with the real issue of waste and inefficiency in government that we raise today. I care about improving efficiencies in government systems and about safeguarding and improving the quality of front-line public services in Northern Ireland. That is the intention of the DUP motion. Despite day-to-day spending by Departments rising over the past six years, the quality of many public services is declining. We have seen inflationary pressures, ongoing pay costs, changing demographics and a lack of progress towards public-sector transformation all contribute to a perfect storm in which rising demand outmatches available budget envelopes and Departments struggle to maintain even their current levels of service. One approach to that is to reduce the constraints on public spending, including making the case for a fairer and more responsive funding settlement from the UK Government. The DUP leader, Gavin Robinson MP, has long made that case, as have others across the House. It is important that we continue to do that. However, inefficiencies in how our available funding is allocated, how it is spent and how services are configured are also a major drag on delivering better outcomes. There needs to be strong leadership to drive efficiency and tackle wasteful spending across the public sector. In recent months, some Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO) reports have been shocking. There is a projected £3 billion overspend on major capital projects. More recently, we had the follow-up report, 'Leading and Resourcing the Northern Ireland Civil Service'. There has been a renewed focus on the need to increase productivity and deliver better value for money in Northern Ireland's large public-sector workforce. In Northern Ireland, we have consistently had a higher proportion of public-sector jobs per capita than the whole of the UK. If the proportion of Northern Ireland public-sector jobs were matched by the proportion of public-sector jobs in the UK population, the figure would be 11·9%, which compares with 8·7% for the whole of the UK. That is disproportionate and needs to be investigated as to why and whether it delivers value for money here. When public-sector pay awards and the like of increases to employers' National Insurance contributions are applied, that high proportion means that the cost to the Northern Ireland public purse is significantly more than it is elsewhere. Agency spend on staff across the board costs too much, and that money could be better spent on properly paying some of our Health and Social Care (HSC) workers. In December 2025, the Minister of Health indicated that £120 million less had been spent on off-contract nurses, midwives and health workers since May 2023. However, to put that into perspective, the total health agency expenditure between April 2022 and March 2024 was £770 million. The Audit Office report, 'Leading and Resourcing the Northern Ireland Civil Service', which was published in January past, identified a number of key findings. Some 97% of the Civil Service staff were in non-industrial roles; two thirds of the jobs were categorised as "general service"; there were 5,486 vacant posts declared across the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS); there was a greater reliance on temporary staffing solutions, with 4,939 agency workers employed as of April 2025, which is more than double the number recorded in April 2019; and we see an increase in sickness absence rates, with an average of 13·4 days lost per staff member and costs rising from £32 million in 2018 to £48·8 million in 2024-25. It was reported that the Civil Service does not routinely collect data on the underperformance of staff, and we see that HR Connect — the designated shared recruitment service — is unable to meet the scale and pace of recruitment demanded by some Departments. Workforce productivity is not formally measured across the Civil Service, and that limits the ability to assess performance. We have seen recent developments in the public-sector reform strategy in Scotland that are worth learning from. The Scottish Government published a major public-sector reform strategy in June of last year. In that strategy, they committed to adopting a preventative, joined-up and efficient approach to the delivery of public services through their work streams. An important pledge was the application of a presumption against the creation of new public bodies by assessing and challenging any new proposals. We have too many arm's-length bodies (ALBs) in Northern Ireland — in excess of 120 — and new commissioners are created regularly and at a minimum cost of £1 million a year simply to exist. Some cost substantially more. That is unsustainable. An assumption against them, unless essential and fully costed, would be welcome.

Public spending priorities reflect the growing disconnect in our politics between ideology and the everyday realities facing our voters. We need to restore a primary focus on the day-to-day issues affecting the lives of the vast majority of people, and we need to be open to the arguments about scrapping net zero, protecting single-sex spaces and ending uncontrolled immigration. We see huge overspends and waste as a result of the culture of political correctness gone mad, and the Democratic Unionist Party has been a strong advocate of common sense over ideology in the Northern Ireland Executive and the Assembly. The costs that come with that need to be challenged. The DUP does not believe that public policy should place aspirational climate change targets ahead of investment in and advancement of the high-quality public services that our communities not only deserve but require. The cost of achieving those unrealistic climate change targets has been cited as being in the region of £90 million a year until 2050. Do Members really believe that that is the best use of public money? Ending ideological spend also needs to be a priority. In recent years, significant sums of money have been directed towards equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives across many Departments and arm's-length bodies, often with limited scrutiny and little measurable assessment of outcomes. For example, the Department of Finance continues to pay £2,500 annually for Civil Service membership of the Stonewall Diversity Champions Programme, despite serious and ongoing concerns about that organisation's role in political activism and its perceived influence on public policy development. Meanwhile, the Department for the Economy's arm's-length bodies, including Belfast Metropolitan College, other colleges and tourism bodies, are projected to spend over £64,000 on EDI-related activity. Worryingly, despite significant operational and financial pressures in the PSNI, it spent more than £1 million on EDI staffing between 2020-21 and 2024-25, which is a level broadly comparable to the annual spend in our health and social care trusts for the same purpose. While equality before the law and fair treatment in the workplace are principles that we strongly support, spending of that scale and nature must be subject to rigorous oversight. Where EDI initiatives risk straying into areas of political advocacy or where their benefits are not clearly defined and measured, public trust is undermined. In proposing the motion today, we highlight the fact that we believe that an efficiency agenda for Northern Ireland that aims to eliminate wasteful spend across government is needed. Almost two decades have passed since Departments last committed to making cumulative efficiency savings as part of the Budget process. In particular, we support agreeing mandatory rolling targets for every Department to identify and deliver efficiencies in their day-to-day spending. That will hopefully include seeking to reduce corporate costs; Departments taking a more hands-on approach to efficiency savings from their ALBs; advancing ambitious Health and Social Care efficiency programmes; supporting an overhaul of the commissioning and delivery framework for major infrastructure projects; driving down legal bills across Departments; targeting better cooperation between Departments; exploring opportunities for estate rationalisation; exploiting opportunities provided by newly agreed arrangements on the transfer of surplus land between Departments and public bodies; and reducing ideological spending across government. We in the DUP believe that this is the time to set those targets and that efficiency agenda as we move towards setting the Budget. Whilst everyone agrees that we need more funding in Northern Ireland to deliver better public services, we need to deliver better with the funding that we already have and tackle the waste in the system. I commend the motion to the House.

1,460 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Flagged Gender, sexuality, abortion and related social issues

Second assessment

Jev’s answers did not settle this record, so a second model, claude-opus-5-5, read the same text (without the MLA’s name or party) and gave its reasons on 21 October 2026. How the second assessment works

Verdict

Flagged

Public interest or divisiveness

Mixed

Against the published rubric

Most of the speech is substantive budget scrutiny, drawing on Audit Office findings on capital overspends, agency staffing, sickness absence, vacant posts and the number of arm's-length bodies. However, it also uses the efficiency motion to argue for 'protecting single-sex spaces' and 'ending uncontrolled immigration', neither of which is costed or tied to waste. It blames overspends on 'the culture of political correctness gone mad' and singles out a £2,500 Stonewall membership as 'ideological spend'. Those lines meet the rubric's dog-whistle and escalation tests: populist 'common sense over ideology' framing, and a minor sum spent with an LGBT organisation pursued well beyond its practical significance next to £3 billion capital overspends.

Public interest or divisiveness

The bulk of the text deals with the real issue of public-sector efficiency and makes concrete proposals, such as rolling efficiency targets, estate rationalisation and a presumption against new public bodies. Alongside this, it inserts a set of recognised culture-war flashpoints (single-sex spaces, immigration, Stonewall and EDI) and presents them as 'ideology' set against 'the vast majority of people'. That is identity-based point-scoring rather than costed scrutiny. Both elements are substantial.

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:08 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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