Northern Ireland Economy

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Wednesday 11th May 2016 Westminster Hall

[David Simpson]

I wondered how long it would be before someone brought up Brexit.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

A source close to you.

[David Simpson]

A source very close to me, yes. My hon. Friend the Member for East Antrim is right: despite all the nonsense that has been talked, the manufacturing sector certainly will continue if we leave the European Union.

According to reports this week, Northern Ireland’s growth is dependent on the retail and service sectors, as they

“continue to report the fastest rates of job creation.”

I have certainly witnessed that in each of the three towns in my constituency. Growth is slow, but small retail businesses—I am not referring to charity shops—are starting to move back on to the high street, which is a good thing.

We may be the smallest region in the UK, but we are powerful on the world stage. Some 30% of the famous London red buses are manufactured in Ballymena by a local firm, Wrightbus. That is of course a big contract in London.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Upper Bann (David Simpson) for securing the debate and for acknowledging the role of the real job creators—people who start businesses and take them forward, sometimes through difficult challenges. They create new products or find new applications for products; they find new markets and new customers. That is what creates new jobs, before all of us in politics claim the credit for that. What we have to do is make sure that we give these people the best possible environment in which to do that.

The hon. Gentleman quoted Tom Hall of Allstate. I recall signing up Allstate for investment in Northern Ireland along with Mo Mowlam and the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Mr Donaldson) as far back as 1998. We told Allstate that it would be impressed by the people, the talent and the skills in Northern Ireland, and that it would invest further. I asked it to promise that it would not keep the second wave of investment in Belfast but would come to the north-west instead, and so it did.

Listening to the hon. Members for Upper Bann and for Strangford (Jim Shannon), it would have been easy to be lulled into a culture of contentment with all this talk of economic miracles and the economy going well, or, as the Deputy First Minister put it a few weeks ago, the economy being in a “happy place”. The reality is that in my constituency the jobseeker’s allowance claimant count is 10.3%, whereas the Northern Ireland average is 4.6% and the UK average is 2.5%. The 18 to 24-year-old JSA claimant count is 12% in my constituency in the north-west, whereas the Northern Ireland average is 5.8% and the UK average is 2.9%. The disparities are similar in the child poverty rate.

Although the emphasis in the previous programme for government, and from the UK Government, has been on the need to rebalance our economy—the move on corporation tax is one part of that—we also need to rebalance our region. We need greater investment in the west and elsewhere. We cannot just have policies and benefits that concentrate on Belfast.

I have limited time, but will the Minister tell us about some of the opportunities for the next Assembly to work with the UK Government on city deals and enterprise zones? Those opportunities were available to us throughout the whole of the last Parliament, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer said that he would give Northern Ireland enterprise zones and city deals if he got proposals from the Executive, but proposals came not until one finally came in 2014 for an enterprise zone in Coleraine. We still have no proposals for the areas that are most mired in high unemployment.

Will any prospective city deal include support for further university expansion? Why could there not be a cross-border dimension? We have made a move on corporation tax, but if we are to learn lessons from the south, we must see that it is not just corporation tax that has underpinned its economic performance. It is also key investment in higher education and skills and in infrastructure. Those two things are missing in the north. In fact, the Northern Ireland Executive have been going the wrong way on higher education, which is no criticism of the outgoing Minister for Employment and Learning, Stephen Farry, who has done a key job on skills and apprenticeships. I take fully on board the point that the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) made about the apprenticeship levy.

I do not expect an answer today, but will the Minister talk to colleagues here in Whitehall about whether, when we next sit down to serious negotiations about taking Northern Ireland forward economically, some of the money that the Irish Government are having to repay to the UK Government to cover the loan could be earmarked to support north-south funding mechanisms? It could also support British-Irish measures through the British-Irish Council, and it could be used to encourage much more co-operation between the devolved regions, the London Government and the south. Such an identifiable pool of money could be earmarked for some constructive and imaginative investments that would release all our energies and capacities, not only in Northern Ireland but throughout these islands.