North’s draft three-year budget sidelined due to Stormont crisis

A draft three-year budget which prioritised health spending in Northern Ireland cannot proceed due to the political crisis at Stormont, the North's Minister for Finance has announced.

Speaking in the Assembly on Tuesday, Conor Murphy said he had received legal advice from the attorney general which made it clear it could not proceed without Executive approval.

He also said the lack of an Executive meant more than £300 million (€357 million) in additional funds earmarked for the next financial year cannot be spent.

Northern Ireland no longer has a functioning Executive following the resignation of the DUP first minister Paul Givan earlier this month as part of his party's campaign against the Northern Ireland protocol.

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Under Stormont’s powersharing rules this meant Sinn Féin deputy first minister Michelle O’Neill also ceased to hold office and the Executive collapsed. Other Ministers remain in post, but cannot take significant or controversial decisions in the Executive’s absence.

Mr Murphy said: “This means that on April 1st the health service will not be able to plan on a three-year basis, nor will it be equipped with additional resources to invest in waiting lists, cancer services and mental health.

“In this circumstances, rather than improving, the health service will decline.”

The draft budget was the first multi-year budget in Northern Ireland for more than a decade. It would have allowed departments to plan ahead for longer than just 12 months. The budget proposed a 10 per cent increase in health spending, with £21 billion earmarked for services over the next three years. Other departments would have to reduce their baseline funding to divert resources to health and social care.

Mr Murphy said the DUP was to blame, saying that last week Minister for Health Robin Swann had "apologised to people on waiting lists because without a multiyear budget the opportunity to rebuild the health service would be 'cruelly taken away'.

“That analysis is sadly correct, although it should be the DUP apologising for the damage it is inflicting on the health service, not Minister Swann.”

DUP MLA Keith Buchanan accused him of “amnesia”, saying he had made “no mention of your own party when they pulled this entire, and I mean the entire, Assembly down in early 2017.

“No budget, no health support, no nothing. Surely a case of amnesia from the members on the far side of the house,” he said, “purely for political gain”.

“Can you and other parties not see the damage the Northern Ireland protocol is doing to this place. Are you blind to seeing that?” he asked.