Below are the comments by TUV leader Jim Allister during yesterday’s debate on the budget:
“I suppose it should be no great surprise that a Budget cobbled together at the last minute is such a deficient offering. I note that PwC had comments to make about the fact that this is a Budget that, as currently constituted, probably does not balance. Of course, it made the same comment more recently about the overarching 2011-15 Budget, which, it said, did not really balance. So it seems that, even after those years, we are still back in the same territory. The matter is now compounded by the fact that this is a Budget that, I suspect, is now dated and has changed. We are told that, in consequence of the Stormont House Agreement, there is new money to be levered in. There are certainly opportunities, it seems, of new borrowings and new debts to be paid back. I suspect that this is a Budget that will be significantly, if not radically, altered by developments since it was published.
“This would have been a far more fruitful and useful debate if the Minister, at the start of these proceedings, had taken a portion of his time to expound to the House the impact on the Budget of what has been agreed since the Budget itself was agreed in draft form. If that information had been laid before the House by the Minister at the start of the debate, this could have been a far more informed debate, because it is quite clear that there must and will be changes to it, but we deal with it as it is.
“I will make some general observations. There seems to be a considerable disparity in the distribution of pain in this Budget. We have one of the most squandering Departments of all, that at the centre of government — OFMDFM — getting away very lightly indeed. We have bodies such as the SEUPB asked, it seems, for only a 4% efficiency cut. However, when we come to education, which is vital and a resource for the future, the cuts have all the appearance of being quite savage, and quite savage in a context of really failing to grasp a nettle in regard to the future.
“I am quite clear, because the Department of Education sets out its aspirations in paragraph 5.15 of the draft Budget. When you measure those aspirations against how they will be impacted by the Minister’s proposals, you discover just how aspirational they will be. It talks about “raising standards for all”, but one of the consequences of the attack on the front-line delivery of education is fewer teachers. We will have a higher pupil : teacher ratio in our schools, so how are we going to raise standards for all in that context?
“I do not think that this is schools crying wolf. Like other Members, I attended a briefing with between 40 and 50 principals from County Antrim last Thursday. The stories they were telling and the prospect they were painting were quite frightening. Far from this aspiration of raising standards, I think that we will see a diminution in standards.
“We then have a promise and aspiration in the Budget about “closing the performance gap”. I think that this Budget will widen the performance gap, which is already skewed by the fact that there is not a fair distribution of funding across the education sector because of the overgenerous provision made if you have enough free schools meals in your school and the deficit to those schools that do not.
“The draft Budget talks about “developing the education workforce”. That has to be laughable, because the import of these cuts will be a reduction in the number of teachers in our schools.
“Improving the learning environment” is one of the aspirations. This Budget will impoverish the learning environment for generations to come. Then, it talks about “transforming the governance”. I wonder how many governors, who come with a civic responsibility, will, when faced with impossible cuts, simply say, “School governor board membership is not for me”, and walk away from the contribution that they make in education because of the impossible demands. Yet, all the time, they look around and see the squander of this Executive on so many issues.
“I said that the draft Budget is an attack on skills and the future. I was about to make the point that the Executive are besotted, to the point of being blinded, with the single goal of getting corporation tax transferred. They have lost the run of themselves so much that, at the weekend, the Enterprise, Trade and Investment Minister was proclaiming, Santa Claus-like, that there will be £3,000 extra in workers’ pay packets. This Executive are so besotted with that, but what does the Budget do for the attraction of inward investment? It takes the skills that have to be in our workforce and slams cuts of momentous proportions on them through the Department of Education and the Department for Employment and Learning. Those are the very people whom we need: they are the very people whom it is essential to train up, skill and equip in order to become the skilled workforce that will be the real attraction for inward investment. This is a Budget that savages that.
“Along with what the Executive propose in education, that seems to me to be a double-whammy that will set the economy back very considerably. The reality needs to be much different.
“If this Budget is truly interested in building the economic future, it needs to preserve rather than attack that which is essential to it.”