Northern Ireland Budget Bill

Jim Shannon Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 23rd January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baker]

I expect the hon. Gentleman knows that clauses 8 and 9 put in place a vote on account for next year. I will come to that as it is in my notes; if memory serves it covers 65% of the spending, but I will confirm that when I reach that section. That puts in place the spending for next year, but of course we would like the Executive to return to set the Budget for next year. If they do not return, we will have to do the job, and it will be tricky; there is no getting away from that. Without Northern Ireland Executive Ministers in place, it has not been possible to take the difficult political decisions necessary to balance the Budget at this very late stage in the year, and that of course compounds the problem for next year. It is with great sobriety that I stand here and acknowledge that it is going to be very difficult. I for one would be up for the challenge of doing it, but it is not the Government’s position that we as UK Government Ministers do that; we would like the Northern Ireland parties to step up to that duty.

If the Executive are not restored on time, we will continue to work with the Northern Ireland civil service to prepare for next year’s Budget. The Government’s priority for that Budget will be to deliver a fair outcome for all taxpayers and citizens in Northern Ireland. We will work to put Northern Ireland’s finances on a sustainable long-term footing, which means appropriate consideration of a wide range of options including revenue-raising measures, as well as reviewing all spending.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Baker]

I will give way once more but then will give a Bill overview in the hope of making progress.

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the Minister for giving way and respectfully say to him that I have a suggestion for saving money in the Department of Health. We all know that agency costs for employing nurses are sometimes 25% to 30% higher than the costs within the NHS system; the obvious solution is to employ more nurses in the NHS system in Northern Ireland. Does the Minister agree that in order to make savings we should reinstate nurses who want to work and do away with agency staff whose costs are higher?

[Mr Baker]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising that point, but I hope he will not mind my saying that today’s Bill is a technical Bill to put on a legal basis the written ministerial statement laid before the House last year, and I am reluctant to get into particular decisions. However, I think every Member of this House will know that agency staff are very expensive and it would be much more preferable to avoid their use.

I do not propose to waste the House’s time by going through every detail of every clause on Second Reading—I will come back to that in Committee—but in summarising the Bill I want first to thank Opposition Members, in particular those on the Front Benches, for the approach that they take to these matters. I know they do not hesitate to hold the Secretary of State and me to account, but equally when necessary measures need to be taken, they are constructive, for which I am grateful because this Bill is about making sure that public services can be provided in Northern Ireland.

The Bill will place the Budget that the Secretary of State outlined to the House in his written ministerial statement on 24 November 2022 on a legal footing. It will also allow Departments and other listed public bodies to continue to deliver public services into the first half of the 2023-24 financial year through a vote on account. I do not propose to repeat the contents of that written ministerial statement, which set out the respective allocations reflected in this Bill; what I will say is that those Budget allocations were developed as a result of extensive and sustained engagement with the Northern Ireland civil service. I want to thank again the Northern Ireland civil service, and indeed our own officials in the Northern Ireland Office, for working with great passion and at great pace to work through this Budget; it was inspirational to see and I am particularly grateful to our senior leadership team for the way it rose to the occasion.

The Secretary of State has met Sir Robert Chote, the chair of the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council, and has received a range of representations from public groups and individuals. We have prioritised spending in health and education, with an overarching objective of protecting the most vulnerable: this Budget increases education spending by just under £300 million and delivers a £786 million increase in non-covid-related health spending.

The challenges that all Departments now face are due to the repeated failure of previous Northern Ireland Executives to take strategic decisions to reform public services and deliver sustainable finances. When Ministers left office in October, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and several other Departments were set to overspend significantly, with no plan in place to address that. The best solution for Northern Ireland’s health, education and other public services is a functional and effective devolved Government taking much-needed decisions to place those public services on a sustainable footing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

The good book says that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, so I am happy to speak, whenever it may be—and in this House that is nearly always last. However, that does not take away from my comments, and it is a real pleasure to add some Strangford commitments and comments in relation to this essential Bill.

The difficulty with the Budget is not a new problem, and it is not a DUP problem, despite what has been said by some colleagues in this place and in the media. The problem is that the then Finance Minister, Conor Murphy, was unable to find agreement within the Executive. He was unable to do so not simply because the funding was tight, but because he was allocating it to political aspiration projects, rather than to nurses, postal and health workers, and teachers in the classroom.

We all understand that money is tighter than it has ever been, and we cannot ignore that. I have constituents who have trained for eight years or longer to get their early years qualifications, only to learn that their 17-year-old daughter can work for Lidl and get paid more than them. Sometimes it is hard to understand how that works— a person trains, qualifies and does well, but they get less than their daughter.

It is tough for these people to make ends meet, and they are having to cut their cloth to suit them. We have to do the same, but the first cut must not be to our schools, and I commend the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle), for saying that. Many others have latched on to that—in fairness, the Minister of State referred to it as well—but it is a massive issue. Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis shows that, since 2009-10, spending per pupil has been consistently highest in Scotland and lowest in Northern Ireland. In 2021-22, spending per pupil was estimated to be £7,600 per pupil in Scotland, but only £6,400 in Northern Ireland. What is the reason for that?

The additional funding in the Chancellor’s autumn statement is restoring pupil spending to 2010 levels in real terms, yet under the Barnett consequential we are not able to do the same in Northern Ireland. How is that appropriate? Why does wee Rosie Murray in my constituency deserve £1,200 less in educational support than her cousin, wee Rosie Murray in Glasgow? She does not, and she must not be discriminated against because of her nationality. The disparity is quite clear; there is something wrong with the system. My hon. Friend the Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) was here earlier, and he referred to Northern Ireland’s Barnett consequential reducing almost every year.

I have had representations from all education sectors—from the controlled sector as well as the Catholic maintained sector—begging me to make it clear that the Budget must not be used as a whipping post for political gain. Our children have not yet recovered from covid closures, and now their education and their future are at risk of being sacrificed due to the refusal of the EU to do the right thing and the refusal of this House to take the EU on. I am a great believer in the idea that money spent on education and children today is money well spent on giving them a chance tomorrow.

I could find an easy way to cut costs without affecting quality of life or increasing the price of goods: do away with the protocol. We cannot ignore the fact that the protocol costs so much, and if those moneys from the Treasury were spent in Northern Ireland, they would make a big difference.

I received an email only this morning from a local supplier who asked me to make this comment. He is being chased by His Majesty's Revenue and Customs for the duty costs of purchasing artificial flowers from a supplier on the mainland—that is an extra cost because of the Northern Ireland protocol—and I do not mean mainland China; I am talking about a company based not too far from this House. Members should let that sink in for a second. The protocol, which gives no accountability, no representation and no benefit to Northern Ireland constituents, ensures that the flowers my constituent buys cannot be sold at £1 a bunch, as they are here, to lay on a grave, but cost £1.25—a 25% charge because he is from Northern Ireland. The protocol means not only that excise duty paid in the UK costs the customer more, but that HMRC spends man-hours chasing up bills that should not be in place and never should be paid.

Where can we get the moneys from? Everybody has referred to that issue. We in the DUP have an opinion, and others have too. That brings us to the trader support service, which deals with the costs and the customs. The cost of the TSS was estimated at £340 million until the end of 2022, with another £113 million for 2023, giving a grand total £453 million up to the end of this year—or approximately half a billion, to round it off. Those are the savings that could be made, and they could have an incredible impact on health, education and prosperity in Northern Ireland. Nor do the figures take account of the additional money that our businesses are spending on trying to do the right thing, the cost of which naturally has to be passed to the customer. It is little wonder that local businesses are unable to put their wages up to help their staff; they themselves are barely surviving.

Approximately half a billion pounds could easily be saved in the Budget by doing what this House promised: passing a Bill to deal with the protocol. What a difference half a billion pounds could make to education or to the NHS. Perhaps it would allow our nurses to be paid the same as the mainland nurses. What possible justification is there for cutting NHS budgets and education spending when we seem happy to throw money away for no purpose other than to facilitate the EU’s grudge against us?

What has been the total cost to the public purse of recruiting and training veterinarians to fulfil the requirements of the Northern Ireland protocol since 1 January 2020? That is another cost of the Northern Ireland protocol that does not need to be paid—another potential saving for Northern Ireland. The Government say that

“DAERA reported in August 2022 that a total of £15.3 million capital, £16.4 million resource and £1.7 million depreciation has been expended on the provision of the infrastructure, IT systems and personnel for the work necessary to carry out the required SPS checks at Northern Ireland’s Points of Entry as a result of the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol.”

Again, those are savings that we could make and that we could use for the benefit of Northern Ireland.

That is not even the full picture. As we are not implementing the full scheme, the costs will be even greater. These millions could already have made a difference. We could have provided support to farmers to buy new, more efficient and eco-friendly farming aids with all the money from that scheme, the digital assistance scheme, the mutual enforcement scheme and the scheme for temporary agri-food movements to Northern Ireland—all schemes that are at best unnecessary and at worst morally wrong and divisive.

Last week, with my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast East and other representatives, I had a Zoom meeting with Roisin Coulter of the South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust, who outlined very clearly what the costs and impacts on health services will be. As the shadow Secretary of State said, cancer waiting lists are the worst in the whole of Europe; Roisin outlined that point last week and told us that waiting lists for cancer services are the longest that they have ever been. She also referred to other health issues.

We recognise clearly that something needs to be done about pressures on A&E. In my intervention on the Minister of State, I mentioned agency staff, who cost 30% more than nurses on the equivalent pay grade. We should be employing more nurses and paying them the correct wage: that would be cheaper than paying agency staff, and it is something that I would particularly like to see if at all possible.

To those who point to this restrictive Budget as the DUP’s punishment for obeying the clearly held view of the people of Northern Ireland, I say this: we will be in our seats within a day of the protocol being eradicated and reason and common sense prevailing. We will be in our seats, taking our positions to make tough decisions as soon as we can do so, but that will not happen until the Government and the EU come to a decision that satisfies the tests that we have set out. Those tests are not the result of obstinacy or political point scoring; they are tests that the people we represent have told us, through wide-ranging engagement, are the red lines for Unionism.

The hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) has referred to this: the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill is sitting in the House of Lords like the Mary Celeste—it seems to have got lost there. We need it to come back from the House of Lords so that we can move it forward.

The hon. Member for Foyle (Colum Eastwood) referred to Dáithí’s law, which I fully support. I have always supported the organ donation opt-out process: I supported and sponsored the private Member’s Bill about it that the then Member for Coventry North West promoted in this House, and I supported the proposal back home. Others whom I know quite well did not support it then, but they all do today, which is good to see. If we can pass the Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act 2022 and the abortion legislation in this House, we can do it for Dáithí’s law as well. I urge the Government to grasp that; perhaps the Minister can give us some indication.

Those who consider overriding democracy and the Good Friday/Belfast agreement, and allocating positions to those who will take their seats, do so in the knowledge that they are saying that Unionists have no place in Northern Ireland and that democracy is dead. Be mindful of the statements made which will be deadly serious in Northern Ireland. For some in this Chamber, Unionism may be nothing more than a pain, but we have a mandate and our people have spoken. The requirements from this place are clear and simple, and must take place soon.

I understand that we are here under protest to decide on something that we did not want to decide on, because the Assembly should be doing it, but if this place has to decide, let us ensure that it does so equally and fairly. If laws can be brought in for other things, they can be brought in for that. Savings can and should be made.