Belfast Council's £1m hole in hardship fund, weeks after giving twice that to Irish signs blitz: Just £75k left for people hit by cost of living crisis
Belfast Council has revealed it has a £1m hole in its hardship fund, just weeks after it voted to splurge double that amount blitzing Irish signs across the city.
Officials have revealed the council has just £75,000 left of an underspend that could go towards a hardship pot that handed out £1.1m to programmes helping people and families struggling with rising food and fuel costs.
Seven weeks ago, politicians voted to ringfence £1.9m of the local authority’s underspend to pay for Irish language signs, as part of a new policy to blaze them on every council-owned park, playground, leisure centre and sports pitch – even ones in staunchly unionist areas.
The £1.9m sum is to cover the first two years of the policy, which prioritises building signs in the city centre as well as west Belfast’s Gaeltacht quarter, and landmarks such as Belfast Castle and Belfast Zoo.
For the past two years, the council has run a hardship programme helping people struggling with the cost of living crisis and fuel poverty. Politicians are looking at doing it again, but they’ve got less than 7% of the money to give to it.
In council reports, officials reveal: “There is a current budget of £75,000 from previous years’ underspends available to support a hardship programme.
“This is significantly lower than previous years and unless any additional funding is secured, the impact will be greatly reduced.”
At a committee meeting today, politicians are due to debate asking Communities Minister Gordon Lyons to help cover the cost of running the hardship programme.
The first year of the system was paid for using a combination of a £720,000 grant from the Department for Communities and underspends from a Covid support grant scheme; the second year’s was entirely from the council’s coffers, allocated on a one-off basis from VAT receipts.
In a draft version of a letter to Mr Lyons, officials ask for a department grant to help pay for the hardship programme, stating that programmes aimed at helping children, older people, and those in fuel poverty will be particularly badly hit by the £1m hole.
Reports do not draw any explicit connection between the £1m gap in the Hardship programme and the £1.9m recently allocated for Irish signs over two years, while the council has not said what its budget underspend is from.
The signs policy states that in addition to major landmarks, the city centre and the Gaeltacht Quarter, any electoral wards in which more than 15% of residents told the last census they had some ability in Irish will be a high priority for new signage on council-owned facilities bearing both English and Irish.
But the signs will eventually be rolled out across every building, park and pitch the council owns, even in unionist areas where the language is barely understood and often opposed.
Belfast Council’s current logo is to be junked and replaced with one that includes Irish; that, it’s stated, has staff who live or work in loyalist areas worried about their safety if the Irish-text logo features on their uniforms and vehicles.
Unionist councillors have voiced fears that taxpayers will be left footing the bill for the blitz after the initial £1.9m cash pot runs out.