Editorial: Treasury’s Open Book Review underlines the bad stewardship of Northern Ireland finances

A report into Stormont’s finances manages to be simultaneously astonishing and unsurprising. (Click here to read our news article)​

The review into the executive’s budget has been subject to a review undertaken by the Treasury in London. It underlines the bad stewardship of our finances that makes a mockery of the Sinn Fein-DUP demand for fresh financing last week.

The Treasury’s Open Book Review of the budget reaffirms what financial experts have previously said.

The review said Stormont leaders could have avoided a budget overspend if they had taken an eighth of the options open to them.

We have reported on such refusal for years. MLAs insist on pay rises for the public sector that are pegged at a level that is unsustainable and – worse – never accompanied by performance demands . They support every freebie such as lowering the age at which people get free public transport in an age of rising life expectancy or free prescriptions even for wealthy people. They refuse reforms to NI’s bloated welfare bill, which is per head far higher than in the rest of the UK. They refuse any rationalisation to the inefficient hospital provision, no matter how many expert reports tell them this is needed. They refuse to plug the gap with, for example, a rise in the regional rate.

The Treasury report points out that NI gets £1.24 to spend compared to £1 on comparable public services in England, and some departments spend even more proportionately than £1.24 to every £1 spent by their Great Britain counterparts.

For decades, NI has been allowed by London to act as if money grows on trees. It is shocking that unionists often appear to join in a grievance culture about supposedly insufficient funding from the Treasury which is a claim that can only bolster Irish nationalists who will obviously then depict the generous UK as mean.