Northern Ireland Budget Bill

Lord Weir of Ballyholme Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 7th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

My Lords, given the lateness of the hour, I will try to curtail my remarks. The Minister will be delighted to hear that I will try to ensure that he can finish proceedings on the Bill by midnight, or 12.30 am at the latest.

Much has been said about the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Hain. Despite a certain amount of backpedalling by the noble Lord to try to appear even-handed, it seems to many of us a fairly thinly veiled, one-sided attack on the position of unionists. [Interruption.] I hear chuntering from a sedentary position; as I said, it was thinly veiled. The position, I suppose, stands in contrast to the silence over a three-year period with regard to Sinn Féin, and over a 40-year period regarding its allowances in the Palace of Westminster. If someone tried effectively to bribe noble Lords or threaten them with the removal of salary, I think all would have the integrity to say no to that. I say broadly on behalf of the unionist community that no unionist or other person of integrity will be bribed, blackmailed or browbeaten into reducing or giving up strongly and passionately held principles for the sake of a few pounds. There is a very clear message there. Frankly, the amendment is ill judged.

Drawing from the budget Bill itself, three lessons can be learned. First is the importance of political stability. If we have learned anything over the last 25 years and beyond, it is that political stability in Northern Ireland can work only when we have the buy-in of both communities. Frankly, that will not happen until we see the replacement of the Northern Ireland protocol. It is not simply a matter of tinkering around with the implementation of it but of dealing with the fundamental problems: the democratic deficit; the lack of accountability; and the fact that, from a divergence point of view, Northern Ireland would be tied into regulations which are not simply going to be a problem on day one but will get greater and greater as time moves on. That is not simply a constitutional threat; it will be economically damaging to Northern Ireland.

At the moment, Northern Ireland is effectively being treated as a colony of the European Union. I appreciate that there are many in this House who will take a much more optimistic and sympathetic view of the EU than many who would be sympathetic to my views. If, out of generosity, we take that at face value and believe that the EU is trying to operate in the best interests of Northern Ireland, a benign colony is still a colony. That is what we need to address with the protocol. It is disappointing that we are in this position because up to this point there have been missed opportunities and wasted time.

It is eight months since the First Reading of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill. It is 19 months since the Government’s Command Paper on the subject. It is just over three years since the Government, in the restoration of Stormont under the NDNA, gave a commitment to restore Northern Ireland’s place fully within the United Kingdom and the UK internal market. We cannot afford a situation in which we have another facade, where we produce any form of deal, but one which does not solve the problems.

The second lesson to be learned in relation to the budget is that there is a dire need—not just in Northern Ireland; it is a wider lesson for the whole of the UK—for public sector reform. We have seen in Northern Ireland the proposals of the Bengoa report. Within education, I and my successor brought forward the independent review on education. It is important that we all have the political courage to reform public services. Sometimes that will be painful for us but the key goal is the best possible delivery for all our citizens. Against that, there is a caveat: public sector reform does not come instantaneously and quite often comes with a price tag upfront. It is not an instant solution but nevertheless we must grasp it.

The third lesson is that we need to see public services that are adequately and fairly funded. Against the backdrop of the cost of living crisis, public services are very much falling behind. Mention has been made on a number of occasions of how generously Northern Ireland is treated in its finances. The same point could be made about a range of regions. However, as I am sure that Scottish and Welsh colleagues will testify, the convergence that happens because of the Barnett squeeze means that the figure reduces each year. We have reached a tipping point in which the objective needs of Northern Ireland, and indeed of other regions, are greater than what is being provided in finance.

Nowhere is that more acute than in education. That is why recently all four main Churches in Northern Ireland and all the major educational sectoral bodies warned of the situation we were being put in and that the Education Authority is so concerned about where the budget will be for next year. It was quite foolhardy of the Government to seek £110 million of savings in a three-month period from the Education Authority.

The cost of living has hit education so hard because around 90% of funding for education goes on necessary wages. Whatever efficiency savings you make, you cannot have a classroom without a teacher in front of it. As pressure for wage inflation builds up across the UK, it increases the burden. Much of the rest of education funding is on statutory responsibilities and legal entitlements, such as special educational needs, school transport and free school meals. As such, the room for manoeuvre is very limited in education. To keep its head above water in recent years, education has had to rely on in-year monitoring rounds to plug the gap. With pressures applying more and more on other departments in Northern Ireland, that money is simply not available.

The Minister of State in the other House highlighted how generously education was funded and referred to the additional amount that Northern Ireland had compared to the rest of the UK. But let me give one statistic. We have a very young population in Northern Ireland, and the number of state school pupils per head is 26% higher than in the rest of the United Kingdom. That highlights the level of pressure there. I ask the Minister—and I ask for a written reply, given both the time and the level of detail—if he can directly outline from government figures the level of funding per pupil for each jurisdiction of the UK, the level of statementing for each jurisdiction and the level of SEN spend, which is a legal statutory requirement. Given the additional need, can he tell me the number and percentage of pupils on free school meals in different parts of the United Kingdom?

It is undoubtably the case that we are facing a very dangerous situation for education in Northern Ireland. Education is the driver of Northern Ireland’s future. It is key to the economy and to skills, but above all education is the one intervention in people’s lives that can make all the difference. It is a great game-changer for our children, and if we do not invest in our education we will be in a dire situation. I have outlined a range of interventions in this speech that will need to happen or else we will head into a terrible crisis—not simply for education but for the whole of public services within Northern Ireland.