Debate contribution: Budget Bill: Final Stage

Debate contribution by Mr Eóin Tennyson on 10 March 2026.

MLA

Mr Eóin Tennyson

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

10 March 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Executive Committee Business

Heading

Budget Bill: Final Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5436847

Read the official Assembly record

Text

On behalf of the Alliance Party, I support the Budget Bill at Final Stage. The Bill signals that we are coming to the end of another challenging financial year for the Executive, with demand on resources again outstripping, by a considerable margin, the funding available for allocation. That has been driven by inflation and a funding formula that does not properly reflect our relative need and the consequences of stop-start government, along with a failure to properly undertake sufficient public service transformation. I will say again, as I do in all these debates, that our financial stability cannot be divorced from political stability and that reform of public services cannot be delivered without significant reform of these institutions. The Fiscal Council has pointed to what it termed "financial mismanagement" during the year. That was perhaps made most evident by the £450 million overspend that accumulated in the Department of Health and the Department of Education alone. I suggest that that has been driven, at least in part, by a failure of either Minister, in contrast to other Departments, to properly plan for public-sector pay at the beginning of the year. Progress on a Treasury reserve claim to ease those pressures is, of course, welcome but it is not a silver bullet, as it stores up trouble for further down the road.

Of course it is reinforced. However, when it comes to significant reform of these institutions, turkeys will not vote for Christmas, so it is not sustainable for the Secretary of State to believe that that can be achieved in the absence of support from the two Governments. The Government have a role to play. They cannot fly in and lecture the Executive about failure to transform public services or to stabilise finances if they are not willing to play their role in stabilising the institutions to do that. There are examples of significant pieces of transformation being blocked by the structures of the Executive. I will return to the reserve claim. It is clear that the £380 million of Barnett consequentials announced last week could easily be hoovered up by repayments in the forthcoming financial years. The 2025-26 financial year was our tenth single-year Budget in a row, and, as other Members have said, it ought to be our last. Single-year spending envelopes are not an efficient or effective means of managing public money, so, difficult as it may seem at this point, the opportunity of a multi-year settlement must be grasped. In closing my remarks on this financial year, I will, with your permission, Mr Speaker, make some brief remarks on the potential route forward. In any plan for a multi-year Budget, we must learn the lessons that have been taught in debates over the course of the passage of the Bill and, indeed, this financial year. We must see robust public service transformation from across the Executive, meeting the principles of the Bengoa review and the independent review of education. Any such commitment could and should be supported by an enhanced transformation fund, building on the success of the public-sector transformation board to date. We must also see Ministers get serious about tackling the costs of division and duplication in public services. We need progress towards a permanent fiscal framework with a funding formula that truly captures Northern Ireland's relative need and is properly baselined from the beginning of 2021. It was short-sighted of the previous UK Government not to engage with those issues at the time. It is regrettable that, since the restoration of the Assembly, the Department of Finance has resisted calls for the establishment of an independent commission to jointly adjudicate on some of those matters in order to chart a way forward. In the interim, a rollover of stabilisation funding from the Executive formation package may well be necessary; I am sure that the Finance Minister will make that case. We have gone through yet another year of capital spending in the absence of an investment strategy. Capital spending has often appeared to be completely divorced from Programme for Government commitments, which is a situation that must be urgently addressed. We must — I agree with the leader of the Opposition's remarks in this regard — have a mature conversation about the capacity to raise revenue in Northern Ireland. We should, of course, reject the orthodoxy that taxpayers in Northern Ireland do not contribute their fair share; they do. Nor should we stand for a position where people in Northern Ireland are asked to pay more for less or to fill a gap that was created by the UK Government. However, we can, and should, take steps to raise revenue in a fair and progressive way that properly supports our public services. The financial challenges facing the Executive are enormous, of which the 2025-26 financial year is more clear evidence. The challenges that we face, however, are not insurmountable. For our part, the Alliance Party stands ready to work with the Minister and other parties to seek to resolve them and move forward together.

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

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:12 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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