The Alliance Party wants an official figure to be produced for the annual cost to taxpayers of Northern Ireland’s divided society.
Having this number to hand could transform political debates, just as discussions on a united Ireland or on devolution often revolve around the £10 billion (€11.5 billion) subvention from Britain or Stormont’s £19 billion block grant. Even when such figures are disputed, they keep conversation focused on fact and detail, when it might otherwise be dominated by futile arguments about grievance and identity.
What Alliance is proposing would be as authoritative as a national statistic.
The party is bringing an amendment to a Bill at Stormont that would require “the costs of duplicated public service provision” to be published by the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council, the expert body that reports on the public finances and advises the executive on its budget.
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The Bill itself is being brought by John O’Dowd, the Sinn Féin finance minister, to give the Fiscal Council statutory independence in line with OECD standards.
Defining the cost of division as the cost of duplicated public services is usefully precise. It gives the Fiscal Council a credible task and should produce figures that point to practical ways division can be addressed.
Alliance sees this as its natural territory, but it should be wary of hidden traps. Division seems to be a rare example of a broad social cost that gets smaller the closer you look at it.
Two serious attempts to estimate the cost of division have been made since the Belfast Agreement.
In 2006, British direct rule ministers commissioned a report from Deloitte. It put the cost at a maximum of £1.5 billion per year, equivalent to £2.6 billion today.
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This is an enormous sum – and Deloitte was apparently being cautious. It used the duplication of public services approach, producing a long list of surprisingly small figures, such as £24 million for segregated housing and £80 million at most for multiple school sectors. The only very large single cost was for policing and justice, accounting for one third of the total. Deloitte considered more nebulous factors such as lost growth and opportunities due to the Troubles but concluded they were incalculable and “should be considered a sunk cost of the conflict”.
The report was handed over one month before devolution was restored in 2007 so it was bypassed by events.
In 2015, the executive agreed to commission a report on the same topic from Ulster University. Published the following year, it came up with a significantly lower range: between £400 million and £830 million, equivalent to between £550 million and £1.2 billion today. Half of this was due to policing and justice.
However, Ulster made only modest adjustments to Deloitte’s method.
Deloitte had identified duplicate spending by comparing Northern Ireland to Wales. Ulster added comparisons with the east of England and the UK average to get a better picture of how public spending might look in an undivided Northern Ireland.
Deloitte and Ulster both warned that not all the duplicate spending they identified would be due to division. There are many other reasons why public spending might be higher in Northern Ireland than elsewhere.
Looking at individual services, the picture becomes even less clear.
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One of the most common examples people will give if asked for a cost of division is extra leisure centres. The Ulster report acknowledged this perception and found significantly higher spending on sport and leisure than in every other UK region, yet Wales still had more leisure centres per head. In conclusion, Ulster put this cost in a range from £3.7 million to £107 million, or from nothing to a lot.
It put the cost of segregated housing at £2.5 million, also next to nothing, because social housing was in such short supply by 2016 that almost none of it stood empty.
If duplication becomes a meaningless concept when public services are over-subscribed, the issue may have largely disappeared in Northern Ireland.
Schools may be an exception, with a fifth of desks empty and pupil numbers projected to fall. However, Northern Ireland’s solution to segregated education is not to merge schools but to expand the separate integrated sector – triplication in response to duplication.
In the decade since the Ulster report was published, Stormont has mismanaged its finances to the point where spending is squeezed everywhere, making duplication harder to find via a method that looks for higher spending than in Britain.
Policing and justice remain a clear exception, requiring half as much spending per head as in England, although even that is on a steadily downward trend.
It is likely the Fiscal Council would produce a total figure significantly lower than the Ulster report. Alliance should brace itself for that, and the prospect that many people in Northern Ireland might consider the cost acceptable.
