A choice, not a crisis: why Stormont still has no budget

Seven months into the financial year, Stormont still has no budget. That would be unthinkable anywhere else in these islands, and this time there is no collapsed Executive to blame. Ministers are sitting, the money is on the table, and the Finance Minister has decided it is not enough.

After Chancellor John Healey’s Budget yesterday, Northern Ireland Secretary Sir Chris Bryant said agreeing a budget was now “a no-brainer”. The Budget brings Stormont an extra £131 million this year, including funding to extend a £100 cost-of-living payment to lower-income households.

Bryant says none of it can be spent without an agreed budget. John O’Dowd’s reply was that a “significant gap” remains.

A precondition, not a negotiation

The Sinn Féin minister set the terms of this stand-off himself. In August he said a budget could only be agreed after a fair funding deal with Westminster. That turned more money from London from a goal into a precondition. Since then the Treasury has put a little over £1.5 billion on the table over three years, and Bryant has said there is no more.

To be fair, the refusal is collective. Every Executive party signed the letter to Andy Burnham calling London’s funding insufficient, and none has yet accepted Bryant’s offer. But it is the finance minister who brings the budget, and O’Dowd has chosen not to bring one until London moves.

Even the nationalist opposition is not buying it. The SDLP’s Matthew O’Toole accepts there is a case to make to London, but says that “wanting a better deal from Westminster cannot excuse the extraordinary irresponsibility” of failing to set a budget.

What it costs

On Bryant’s terms, signing up is worth about £631 million this year and more than £1.6 billion over three. Not signing means departments stay capped at 95% of last year’s spending, while the think tank Pivotal estimates shortfalls of around £250 million in education and £800 million in health.

If Westminster has to set the budget instead, there is no guarantee any of the offer survives. The last time it stepped in without an Executive, in 2017, it simply used civil service figures.

A shaky premise

The case for holding out rests on the claim that Northern Ireland is underfunded. The independent evidence is less obliging. The Fiscal Council puts the region’s need at about 124% of England’s spending per head, and FactCheckNI’s reading of its work is that funding has generally been at or above that level.

On the comparison with Scotland and Wales, the Council’s answer is that they should get less, not that Northern Ireland should get more.

The Council does warn of a genuine cliff edge this year. But its way through includes water charges and a higher regional rate, but Sinn Féin has ruled water charges out, a position which has stymied house building right across NI just as the demand in its growing economy increases.

Inside the Executive, the Ulster Unionist leader Jon Burrows has put it more bluntly: more money must come with greater responsibility, and a cycle of crisis followed by another demand for cash is not a real budget process.

Nowhere else works like this

When the Dáil rejected a budget in 1982, the government fell that night. When Holyrood rejected one in 2009, it passed a week later. The Senedd has never failed to pass one, and at Westminster a defeated budget would bring down the government.

At Stormont, Westminster has had to set five of the last ten budgets: three during the collapse Sinn Féin triggered in 2017, two during the DUP’s boycott. Nobody resigned, and no election was forced. Mandatory coalition means no vote can bring the Executive down, and no deadline forces a decision.

Meanwhile, in the real world

While ministers argue about the size of London’s cheque, the services that cheque is meant to pay for keep getting worse.

Health. At the end of June, more than 81,000 patients were waiting for hospital treatment, and over a third had waited more than a year. The target is that nobody waits that long.

Housing. Almost 51,000 households are on the social housing waiting list, nearly 40,000 of them in housing stress. In the three months to June, another 3,900 households presented as homeless.

Infrastructure. About 15,000 homes are held up because the sewers cannot take them, with development stalled in more than 100 towns and villages and NI Water facing a £2bn funding gap. Nearly 2,000 planned social homes are among them.

The Scottish writer Darren McGarvey has a name for this. In The Social Distance Between Us, he argues that much of what goes wrong in UK public life comes down to the gap between the people who make decisions and the people who live with them. Stormont, where the system is built so that nobody pays a price for failure, may be the purest case of it.

None of this gets fixed by winning an argument with London. Each needs a budget, a plan and someone willing to take a decision. The stand-off is conducted in letters, briefings and press releases; its consequences land in waiting rooms, on housing lists and on building sites that cannot open.

This is a choice, not a crisis

Sinn Féin has held the Department of Finance since 2016 without agreeing a multi-year budget; the SDLP and DUP never missed a budget in theirs. This year there is no collapse, no boycott, and an offer the Secretary of State says is final. If the Executive turns it down, Westminster will set the budget instead, on a Sinn Féin minister’s watch and as a result of a position he chose.

“The fact that all of this was happening in virtual space made no difference.”
— Douglas Adams