The Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly are under fire for their record in delivering public policy and services. In a new working paper published as a Constitution Unit report today, Alan Whysall argues that their under-performance threatens the stability of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement settlement. Specific measures to improve matters have been little discussed. The paper – Improving Government in Northern Ireland – offers an agenda for early debate on such measures. The debate must have a clear and urgent purpose – to develop a programme of effective potential changes well before the May 2027 Assembly elections, when the institutions’ performance is likely to be an issue.
The political environment in Northern Ireland has become more tense in the last year, with parties in the Executive repeatedly taking aim at each other. The campaign has effectively started for the May 2027 Assembly elections. And serious financial difficulties loom, which may raise tensions further.
The institutions will probably avoid collapse until those elections, and may do so thereafter. But can they achieve a great deal more than simply being there?
The problems
The record of delivery of the Northern Ireland Executive, long questioned, is coming in for ever more criticism. Northern Ireland faces serious economic and social problems. The health service significantly underperforms even the rest of the UK. The economy has long-standing weaknesses, despite some highlights, because of low productivity and skills shortages. Infrastructure gaps hobble parts of it (like housebuilding). The lows – and highs – of performance are brought out in regular reporting from the Northern Ireland think tank Pivotal.
Part of the difficulty may derive from the absence of devolved government for five of the last nine years: it collapsed twice, when one of the two main parties, first Sinn Féin and then the DUP, withdrew, which under the power-sharing arrangements brought the system down.
But much of the failure appears due to serious inaction in the Executive before and since the collapses. There has been much talk recently of parties blocking Executive decisions. There has rarely been much sense of energy or shared commitment to drive forward essential policy and provide better services (although many demands on London for more money). Meanwhile substantive activity in the Assembly is limited – with little legislative output, and some of that of doubtful quality.
The long-standing debate about reforming the institutions continues, but without clear focus. The Constitution Unit produced a detailed report on options for reform last spring. Most pressure for reform in the recent past has been directed at avoiding a further collapse, or ensuring the system operates equitably between different interests.
Our report analysed reform options by reference to those two themes. But it also considered in outline steps to improve the quality of policy-making, implementation and service delivery in Northern Ireland. These are issues that have been little discussed; certainly, few remedial measures have been formulated in detail.
Now a new working paper from the Unit looks more closely at these problems, and possible solutions.
Failures of government matter in Northern Ireland, just as elsewhere, in the way that they impact on the lives of citizens. But they have a particular importance there, because institutions publicly seen to deliver effectively would be more stable – there would be a greater political price for collapsing them.
If on the other hand the public permanently lose faith in them (and polling suggests that most people have little faith in them already), support for the 1998 settlement may weaken, leaving behind only the underlying polarisation in the Northern Ireland political landscape. Good government may thus be a critical factor in the success of the Agreement settlement – which Keir Starmer has several times described as the greatest achievement of the Labour Party in his lifetime.
The causes of underperformance
The paper considers what causes the institutions to fall short on delivery, and suggests two sorts of factor.
One concerns political culture. Political debate in Northern Ireland has long been fixated on larger constitutional questions, around which most political parties are still structured, rather than more bread and butter social and economic issues. Brexit, the impact of social media, and the current style of politics of much of the Western world have exacerbated this emphasis; as have fights between politically adjacent parties looking for the same vote.
Secondly, the unique structure of the Northern Ireland power-sharing institutions may also at times inhibit effective government. That structure was devised to accommodate the community and political divides in Northern Ireland, which for a quarter of a century had prevented any elected government from functioning there. It largely succeeded, and Northern Ireland has done much better under the Agreement than it did before. But little thought was, understandably, given in 1998 to questions of government performance and efficiency. That omission now constitutes an increasingly significant gap in the Agreement scheme.
The system of power-sharing makes it hard to decide on and see through new policy, particularly decisions that, however necessary, are unpopular with all or part of the community. Membership of the Executive is open to all parties that reach a certain size threshold – so it is composed of ministers with fundamentally opposite political outlooks, and limited thinking in common. Special vetoes and other checks and balances, designed to protect the interests of different parts of the community, make obstruction easy. Meanwhile, the centre is weak. And the system offers at present no plausible alternative government.
To be clear, though, the working paper does not contemplate radical change in the Agreement structures – because in the present condition of Northern Ireland politics power-sharing arrangements are still necessary to ensure there is a government at all.
Nor is there here an argument for large-scale constitutional change, which, whatever its other merits, is unlikely to resolve problems of government, and indeed would probably exacerbate them. These problems need focused attention, whatever the overall constitutional framework.
There will be public scepticism about institutional tinkering: change needs genuine commitment by the parties. But if they acknowledge the problems, adjustments to the structures consistent with the overall architecture may have an impact on performance. And such steps might help move on the political culture incrementally.
Who can bring about change?
Ideally the Northern Ireland parties would deliver such reforms. More of them seem to be moving towards acknowledging that change is necessary – though specific proposals for doing things better are still thin on the ground. A committee of the Assembly has been considering reform issues for over a year. Alliance and the SDLP have made substantial proposals for reform; and Sinn Féin, which has increasingly suggested that reform is necessary, has very recently undertaken that it will bring forward its own proposals “in the next number of weeks”. In the run-up to and aftermath of the 2027 elections, we may expect more attention to be paid to delivery issues.
But others in politics remain opposed to change, notably the DUP, with suggestions that proposed reform is, or is feared by unionists to be, a Trojan Horse designed to undermine unionism.
It is perhaps unlikely that, at least without outside help, the parties will spontaneously generate and agree a great deal of significant change – certainly by the sort of consensus by which the Agreement was reached, and which has generally been required for a change in the Northern Ireland system.
It is possible that one or more parties may at some point, before or after the Assembly election, leave – or threaten to leave – the Executive, out of frustration at the way it is currently operating, raising the profile of reform issues. The Alliance Party and Ulster Unionist Party are the most obvious candidates for such a step (and their departure, unlike that of larger parties, would not bring the institutions down). Alliance, which has repeatedly proclaimed its frustration with the way the institutions work, has recently indicated that this is a real possibility.
And the paper argues that London, and perhaps Dublin, who have both lately taken a passive attitude to reform, should be encouraging steps to improve the devolved institutions’ performance – if only out of self-interest. The way the institutions are functioning, and the impending financial stand-off, suggest increasing risk to the 1998 settlement, and trouble ahead for the governments. London faces many pressures at present, but a little more action in Northern Ireland now may reduce workload later.
Certainly if there were a risk of the institutions collapsing, we might be back in the territory of the governments brokering agreement for them to resume work.
Achieving that would not be easy. It would be likely to involve a programme aimed at them delivering better, or else increasing numbers of people would ask what was the point. In such a context, though, the governments’ leverage for bringing about reform might be significantly increased.
The need for a serious menu of possible reforms
Given the potential developments, there is a need, well before the 2027 elections, to have available a catalogue of possible reforms, consistent with the 1998 architecture, that might lead to the institutions performing better.
While there has been much criticism of their performance, how in concrete terms it might be remedied has not generally been explored in detail. There is a danger here that, if the political moment comes for reform, ill-considered or tokenistic measures will be adopted. We need properly thought-through ideas.
The working paper is intended to kickstart their development. Addressing both the cultural and the institutional barriers to government performance, it considers a number of possible specific steps:
- to encourage prompt internal development of, and decisions on, policy, coherently across the Executive, and then its effective implementation. That might involve improvements to the process for developing and implementing Programmes for Government; making the Executive formally subject to collective responsibility; and establishing a statutory duty on ministers to cooperate, with a view to overcoming silo mentalities;
- to streamline processes in the institutions, and limit opportunities for blockages; so for example the veto of each of the two main parties on discussion in the Executive might be restricted. There may also be scope for reforms in the organisation of the government machine and the way the civil service operates;
- to facilitate policy development, and encourage public dialogue about it, outside the institutions, given the inhibitions they are under – by encouraging the independent policy sector, perhaps also by establishing a Public Policy Council with substantial day-to-day independence;
- to facilitate more effective working in the Assembly, including enhancing the provision for the Opposition;
- to promote stabler public finances, ensuring the Executive raises funding to meet its needs.
So this is a paper with a mission: it aims to lay the groundwork for production of a possible package of measures well in advance of the 2027 Assembly elections, that would realistically improve performance.
The paper does not claim to be comprehensive, nor are its proposals elaborated in detail. It is an annotated agenda for more searching discussion.
That discussion needs to cover what is going wrong, why it is going wrong, and the process by which change might come about; and then the meat of what kinds of change, and what specific changes, might improve matters. It needs to involve people close to the existing system, to ensure that the proposals that emerge are feasible, and practically effective.
Such proposals will not succeed without political will in Belfast: but given the signs that the parties are beginning to appreciate the need for the institutions to achieve more they may go into the election with commitments to change. The UK government might usefully encourage them. Certainly, the Executive that – it is to be hoped – takes office in May 2027 needs to begin and continue on a very different footing from the present one as regards public policy and public services.
This is a guest slot to give a platform for new writers either as a one off, or a prelude to becoming part of the regular Slugger team.
Discover more from Slugger O'Toole
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
