Speaking after the Secretary of State for NI announced a draft budget for 2023-4, ICTU Assistant General Secretary Gerry Murphy commented
This budget will have an immediate impact on the thousands of workers who took industrial action this week to seek a fair days pay for a fair days work. It means that if the UK government ever do decide to make a reasonable pay offer to public sector unions in the rest of the UK, the same will be denied to hard-pressed public-sector workers in Northern Ireland.
This is such an obvious injustice, it is difficult to see how any of these pay disputes will be resolved for our hard-pressed workers in Health, Education, and across our public services. There is an additional cruel irony that the very people delivering government services in the absence of political leadership from the NI Assembly and Executive, are the first to be punished.
The fact that Northern Ireland’s Barnett Consequentials will now automatically be redirected toward debt repayments to the UK government represents the most pernicious element of this budget.
The tables below outline the scale of the cuts we are threatened by – an average of 10 percent once inflation is taken into account. This is simply not sustainable, and cannot be imposed without creating long-term harm for people. There are a hundred human stories which illustrate this, but we can mention one, which has not only implications for thousands of healthcare workers, but the democratic settlement which was praised by all last week, including by the Secretary of State at the 25th anniversary of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.
Congress has been notified of a proposal by officials in the Dept of Finance ‘considering the feasibility of reversing the Hospital Parking Charges Act.’
This is legislation passed by all-party votes in the last session of the NI Assembly. That laws passed are so vulnerable to fit an accountant’s requirement, makes a mockery of the spirit and letter of the Agreement and the choices made by the electorate.
Budget % changes by department.
*Earmarked Items removed include Farm/Fisheries payment funding, welfare reform mitigations, housing benefit, transformation funding, security funding and funding for Historical Institutional Abuse/Victims/Truth Recovery. The amounts required are ring-fenced for those purposes. As earmarked funding can change from year to year excluding these items gives a more direct comparison of day-to-day spending within departments.
