Northern Ireland Budget Bill

Claire Hanna Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 23rd January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Claire Hanna (Belfast South) (SDLP)]

Like other Members, I regret that we are considering this Bill in this place in this way. I regret the lack of scrutiny, innovation and imagination that can come from Budgets being done in this way, and I regret the lack of shame from some about the collective failure that we are again foisting on the people of the region. There is definitely a sense of “same stuff, different day”, because it is worth saying that the way public spending is overseen in Northern Ireland is nearly always convoluted and untransparent. I joined the Finance Committee in Stormont in 2016, and when I was trying to get my head around the process I think had to go seven or eight years back to find a textbook Budget year. The process is so far from transparent as to put people off even understanding what we are doing.

It is also worth saying that this is not a Budget in the way people would understand the use of that term, in that it is not a list of political priorities. Again, that is increasing the cynicism among citizens about our ability to spend on things that matter to them and our ability to address the short-termism and the ingrained lack of responsibility-taking that unfortunately characterises Stormont for many people. Nowhere is that clearer than in health, where many years of this sort of stop-start governance and can-kicking has left that service and the people who deliver it for us in a really parlous state.

No party is without fault in that regard, but the two largest parties deserve the most opprobrium for walking off and staying off the job in late 2016 after the Bengoa report created a little bit of shared purpose and the little bit of hope that we could possibly reform services. What we are doing instead is allowing little bits of the national health service to fall down one by one, bringing all of the downsides of reform and none of the upsides. Just one example of that is the closure of a rehabilitation ward at Whiteabbey Hospital. It is a successful rehabilitation facility and it makes no clinical sense to remove it; its closure will send patient blockages back up the system for each one of those beds that is not reopened due to a lack of decision making. As well as the failures in those people’s lives and the pressures that that builds in the staff who are delivering the services, it will make it harder to achieve buy-in and confidence in health reform in subsequent years when we finally get back to working properly, because people associate the reforms only with closures and not with the enhanced services that they can bring. We know that there are challenges across the services, including waiting lists. Yes, people have said that they are bad everywhere, but they are far worse in Northern Ireland. GP services are facing an existential crisis, and deepening levels of mental ill health are engulfing many parts of the service.

We know that it is not just in health that we are failing people. If the climate targets that we finally agreed in the dying days of the last Assembly are not mainstreamed and given effect through Budgets and plans, they are not going to mean anything. The labour shortages that employers across Northern Ireland are facing are not going to be mitigated by, for example, parents, and particularly women, coming back to work, because there are no Ministers in place to finally get a grip of childcare. Adults with some vulnerabilities but who have plenty of ability to work will no longer be supported by the many European social fund projects. They will fall by the wayside in a crude Darwinian process that seems to be happening at the moment. Projects are failing, and we will have to see which ones survive. Without ministerial intervention, we will keep exporting thousands of students because of a cap on numbers, to say nothing of the challenges in schools that many colleagues have raised.

The hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) touched on an issue that underpins all of this. As I say, yes, I am prepared to share the responsibility of failures over decades of devolution, but we cannot ignore the austerity that has been imposed on Northern Ireland, as on other regions, over the past decade and a half. No one pretends that devolution is perfect, but we have to —and our party certainly does—imagine a much better way to run our public services than being dependent on a little bit of a hand-out and being tethered to a vision of an economy that is related to Brexit, deregulation and threadbare public services. The SDLP does not believe that it has to be that way, even when we are operating within devolution. The Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), said that it was our job to do the bits that we could. To paraphrase Wesley: “You do all the things you can in the places you can for as long as you can.” It is probably simpler than that. Woody Allen said that 80% of success is just about turning up, and that is something that devolution is failing to do.

The SDLP has tried to make the constitutional set-up work, and will continue to do so, but it is not the limit of our ambition. Members have given all the reasons why devolution cannot work. They have mentioned the trader support service and the cost that that imposes on the Budget—not the Northern Ireland Budget, but the Budget from the Treasury. That is another cost of Brexit, but they fail to mention the £1.3 billion in increased exports from Northern Ireland to the Republic that have been achieved as a result of the protocol. We would want to caution them: if you take away even the status quo, even the possibility of cut-and-paste devolution in the UK, you have to be aware that people will look at other ways to meet their basic needs. As I have said many times before, and as Hume said, if you ask for all or nothing in governance, you often end up as nothing. We are prepared to work with anyone who will work with us to try to make some lemonade out of the Brexit lemons that we have been handed. There are opportunities and options, and there is space for compromise, both in the EU-UK talks and in the Executive when we finally have Members there.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

We come to the last Back-Bench contribution, from Mr Shannon.