Supply Resolution for the 2013-14 Excess Votes and Supply Resolution for the Northern Ireland Main Estimates 2015-16

Part of Executive Committee Business – in the Northern Ireland Assembly at 4:00 pm on 15 June 2015.

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Photo of Stephen Farry Stephen Farry Alliance 4:00, 15 June 2015

All in good time.

At this stage, it is important that we understand and recognise what we are doing today and what we are being asked to do today and over the next couple of weeks, namely to pass a Supply resolution to authorise the supply of resource and pass a Budget Bill to give legal authority to Departments to spend that money. That should be the normal course of action during any financial year. The Executive and Assembly take policy decisions in terms of the Budget resolution, and then there is a responsibility on the Assembly to ensure that that money flows.

As people know, my party opposed the Budget in the Executive for a host of reasons, including a lack of strategic thinking for the future and difficult decisions not being taken, including a fair and balanced approach to revenue-raising issues and issues around the cost of division. Those are all issues that are big structural difficulties within our Budget. Once that debate happened this year and a democratic agreement was made, we all had a duty to ensure that we follow through with the supply of the necessary resource. So, as we find ourselves in June, our duty is to ensure that we follow through with that Budget, albeit one that we believe was flawed in a number of respects. That is our responsibility as legislators in this context.

As we meet today, that context takes on a certain air of unreality, because we all know that there are some major financial challenges facing Northern Ireland, most of which are self-inflicted wounds due to our lack of ability to agree on the politics of the way forward. Northern Ireland is in a bad place financially and politically, in the sense that we do not have a sustainable framework of public finances. The immediate issue, above and beyond those wider structural difficulties that I have alluded to, lies in the non-implementation of the Stormont Castle agreement and the Stormont House Agreement, including the thorny and difficult but inescapable issue of welfare reform.

Obviously, we would not wish to start from this place, but the least irresponsible thing to do is to proceed and ensure that we have some sort of legal framework in place around money. We have a duty to ensure that the money does not run out, and anyone who is thinking of voting against the Supply resolution this evening needs to think very long and hard about what the consequences would be of a no vote and, indeed, if the Assembly were to follow suit and endorse their perspective on a no vote. That would mean that, in the absence of an intervention from the DFP permanent secretary, the money would run out. In that eventuality, there would be not only a political problem but a financial problem, in that we would be facing much deeper cuts even than those that we wrestle with at present, with all of the pain that has been articulated not just by MLAs but by people across society over the past number of weeks and months.

At the very best, agreeing the motion does not in itself resolve any of those political and financial issues, but it buys us a little time. I have to confess that I have a slight reservation about proceeding on this basis because, true to form, there is a danger of people sitting back and becoming complacent: somehow, having got over one hurdle, money can be spent regardless. We have to use the time that we buy wisely, and time is not a luxury that we have. We have to act quickly to resolve the outstanding issues because, if we keep putting off their resolution until the late summer and into the autumn, when we finally reach a conclusion on the way forward, we may well face even steeper cuts than those that we have had to face so far. Much less time will be available to deliver those cuts, meaning that the options available to Ministers and Departments will be much more constrained and the pain across society even deeper. We have a duty to give those whom we serve a degree of financial certainty as early as we possibly can.

There was a degree of unreality in some of the remarks that I heard from Members from all Benches, particularly from the two nationalist parties. I know that the Green Party will join in later. The two nationalist parties articulated concerns about the cuts and talked about how terrible it is that this is happening, that that is happening and that we are missing out on opportunities. If they had any sense of joining the dots, they would recognise that the failure to deliver the agreements at Stormont House and Stormont Castle and the failure to face up to the realities of welfare reform are plunging Northern Ireland into financial uncertainty, and that is making the pressures on public services and on the economic levers that transform our economy even more acute. Every time individuals stand up and talk about cuts, they need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask what they are doing to help or hinder that particular situation. Are they part of the problem or part of the solution?

If we drill even more deeply, we find troubling issues that need to be teased out. I appreciate that a lot of people have very deep concerns about the cuts made to the Northern Ireland block grant over the past number of years. Also, there is uncertainty about the future, with the very real prospect of cuts to welfare payments and the Northern Ireland block grant in the immediate years to come. If we are to fight that process and join forces with Scotland and Wales to present a common front, surely our position will be strengthened if we are able to show that we are capable of acting in a responsible manner through having resolved the financial pressures facing us this year. By contrast, if we go into that process with those issues unresolved, our credibility will be so much weaker. I do not see how having an understanding of this year's financial framework will, in any way, shape or form, prejudice our ability to argue our case — our special case and our special circumstances — in any process of dialogue with the Treasury over the years to come. Those who are deliberately holding out on providing financial certainty because of their stated concerns about what may happen in the future need fundamentally to reassess their position.

Perhaps even more fundamental political and constitutional questions are being raised. We hear talk, particularly from Sinn Féin but echoed implicitly by the SDLP, that they want to be masters of their destiny in Northern Ireland and that they are not here to administer cuts on behalf of the UK Government.

That is not what they were elected into politics for. Certainly, I do not want to be in a situation in which I am cutting budgets; I find it incredibly difficult, and it pains me every time that I am forced to make a cut. However, we have to recognise the wider constitutional reality: we are part of a UK framework, and that is where our public spending comes from. We do not have the resources to go it alone and have a free-standing situation. Insofar as tax-varying powers can be considered, it has to be in a framework in which we are still dependent to a very large extent on the Treasury. Indeed, if we were to imagine a future united Ireland, unless there were a major change of circumstances, Northern Ireland or a devolved Administration in the northern part of the island would be very heavily dependent on a fiscal transfer from the Irish Government as a whole, which themselves have gone through a process of austerity and spending cuts. They could then put a lot of pressure on public spending in Northern Ireland, and the same arguments would be voiced again.

The approach also does a great disservice to the creativity and innovation that has been shown under devolution. We are not simply here to dole out money on behalf of others. We are here to add value and make a difference, not always by spending money in different ways but by showing creativity in policy and the type of projects we put in place and ensuring that those projects are much more in keeping with our set of affairs.

Most troublingly, if you join the dots in what Conor Murphy said implicitly on 'The Stephen Nolan Show' last week, Sinn Féin not only insists that it be immune from what happens in the UK as a whole, bypassing entirely the principle of consent, but believes that Northern Ireland must have the ability to determine its own future and that, because in itself Northern Ireland is not sustainable, there needs to be an all-Ireland framework. If Sinn Féin is essentially linking delivery of a united Ireland in the short run and as a precondition to progress on all these issues, it is obviously erecting a bar that is —