Budget Bill 'bulldozed' through Assembly - Allister says MLAs diminished and demeaned

Caoimhe Archibald insisted a request to suspend the normal rule that legislation should take no less than ten days to pass was ‘exceptional’ and will not set a precedent.

Ms Archibald said without the rapid passage of the Bill, departments would be unable to release cash required for making public sector pay awards.

Mr Allister said: “Voting money is one of the most important things that the Assembly can do, particularly as a scrutinising Chamber. Yet here we are: one of the first acts of the Executive is to ask the Assembly to rush every fence in relation to a money Bill and not just to have a day or two's pause. The First Stage of the Budget Bill was today, and now, just over an hour later, we are invited to proceed to the important Second Stage. That seems to me to be unseemly and wholly disproportionate to the obligations on the House to properly scrutinise legislation, particularly when it comes to something as important as voting money.“The circumstances here are even more egregious, because, up until this time, with past Budget Bills, we have always had a Supply debate, in which the spring Supplementary Estimates (SSEs) were produced. You could, therefore, see a precise breakdown, line by line, of where the money was going in each Department and subdivision in the Departments. This Budget Bill, however, has been brought without a Supply debate and without the publication of any supporting documentation that shows where the money is to be distributed. Members are asked to debate a Bill that has just headline figures while absent from it is that which we normally would have from the Supply debate, which has been abandoned.“The provision of the expenditure lines for each Department — I hear no explanation for this – has also been abandoned. What are they? When x Department gets y tens of millions of pounds, where is that money to be spent? What is it that we are voting on, other than a global figure for each Department? We are entitled to know, as the scrutineers of the Bill, where the Minister is asking us to put the money. We always could answer that question when we had the spring Supplementary Estimates. We cannot answer it today.“We then compound the situation by saying, ‘Let us rush it through in a day’. That seems to me to show the utmost disregard for a primary function in the House, and, indeed, it diminishes and demeans the role of MLAs, who are not even taken under the Minister's notice. “We are not even taken under the Minister's notice in respect of where the money will be spent. It is quite appalling.“I wonder what the Comptroller and Auditor General thinks of the process, if they have been asked. I wonder how the Departments will do their end-of-year accounts, when they do not even have their expenditure lines with which to compare them. None of that seems to matter; just bulldoze it through. For that reason, I will vote against the suspension of Standing Orders, if given the opportunity to do so.”