Worth treating claims about Stormont budget with scepticism

The Department of Finance announced yesterday that its Permanent Secretary, Neil Gibson, wrote to Northern Ireland’s other ministries, setting out spending limits for the next few months.

The senior civil servant, who was previously a high-ranking economist, has effectively taken control of Stormont’s purse-strings.

This action is permitted under the Northern Ireland Act, in the absence of an Executive and a budget. The DUP, of course, has insisted that power-sharing cannot ‘continue as normal’, after the first minister, Paul Givan, resigned from this post in February to protest against the protocol.

Since the party decided to collapse the Executive, a large section of the political establishment has implied that ministers would achieve wonderful things and spend lavish sums of extra money, if the devolved government here were restored.

Many of these arguments rest on the fact that Conor Murphy, the finance minister, claimed he was on the brink of delivering a three-year budget, when the Executive collapsed.

It’s worth remembering that those plans were criticised heavily by the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council, an independent body charged with scrutinising public finances, because they lacked coherence and failed to set out priorities clearly.

The budget was based on boosting health spending and requiring other departments to accept cuts. It was a hugely controversial document, the likely effects of which were poorly explained and explored.

Professionals in sectors like education and justice were already contesting the proposals, while rival politicians, including the Justice Minister, Naomi Long, complained about projected 2% cuts.

Whether these problems could have been ironed out we do not now know, but they show that it is sensible to treat the claims that, were they not prevented from doing so by the DUP, rival Stormont ministers would be doing this, that or the other, with healthy scepticism.