Editorial: Stormont has been given another funding reward by the government for its atrocious financial stewardship

​The Stormont executive parties will meet Hilary Benn tomorrow (Thursday) for seemingly another financial bail-out for their appalling stewardship of Northern Ireland’s budget.

The secretary of state is the local representative of a government that is famously weak on almost every major topic of the day, and is now weak on assembly budgets.

We write that with sadness. Obviously we want this province to get maximum Treasury funding. The point is that it is extraordinarily well funded yet there is a cross-party refusal to make efficiencies in any sphere. Health spending should have been rationalised and reformed 25 years ago, when the first of many expert reports called for such.

There is similar waste in other departments. There is also a vastly inflated welfare bill, which Stormont voted – again cross-party – to make more generous than in England, despite such special treatment meaning cutbacks in other areas.

Mr Benn has invited the parties to meet him at Hillsborough Castle tomorrow to discuss the “exact scale” of the financial pressures issue and to “offer support to enable them to agree a budget”. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Lucy Rigby MP, will also be there – she is number two to the chancellor.

The Northern Ireland Office says it is “vital” MLAs “urgently” agree a plan to put NI’s “finances on a more sustainable footing ... toward a multi-year budget”.

That sounds tough. It isn’t – it accompanies further reward for bad governance. The opposite should happen – cut to the budget until existing money is spent prudently. Only then should it rise.

And again we condemn the sorry, sorry saga of unionists having repeatedly stood alongside republicans – who want to destroy the UK – in condemning London for not paying more. This bolsters the Sinn Fein lie about a miserly Britain, when the reverse is true – successive very generous governments.