Stormont ministers have a “way to go” in efforts to convince the Treasury to bolster funding arrangements for Northern Ireland, the First Minister said.
Michelle O’Neill provided an update after she, deputy First Minister Emma Little-Pengelly and Finance Minister Caoimhe Archibald met Chancellor Rachel Reeves in London on Thursday to discuss the perilous state of the region’s finances.
Ms O’Neill and Ms Little-Pengelly were asked about the issue as they attended the North South Ministerial Conference in Dublin on Friday.
The ministers are pressing the Treasury to upwardly adjust the formula for calculating the amount of Government money allocated to the devolved Executive.
On Monday, the joint leaders of the Executive launched a programme for government identifying nine key priority areas for the administration in the remaining two-and-a-half years of the current Assembly mandate.
Both made clear that delivering all the objectives would require enhanced funding for the region.
They have insisted they are up for the challenge of reforming and restructuring public services but contend that they need upfront investment to be able to undertake that work.
Ms O’Neill urged Ms Reeves to ensure the interests of the people of Northern Ireland are “firmly on the agenda” when she sets her Budget next month.
“Just as Labour have inherited a mess from the previous administration under the Tories, we too have inherited that same austerity agenda, and we have had public services that have been crushed completely to breaking point as a direct result of that,” she said in Dublin.
“So we were there (Treasury) to make the case for a proper funding model that allows us to deliver sustainable public services, that allows us to deliver good public services.
“It’s part of an ongoing engagement with the Treasury, because we believe that as they make their plans for the Budget in October, it’s important that the interests of the people that we serve are very much firmly on the agenda, and that is to get to the point where we actually have adequate funding in order to deliver public services.
“But, alongside that, we need to transform a lot of our public services, and we’re very much up for that.
“But, in order to be able to do that, you have to be able to invest and therefore that’s the case that we made to the Treasury.
“So I suspect that we have a way to go in terms of that conversation as we run into the Budget period, but certainly we’re determined to continue to make that case.”
Ms O’Neill said ministers had already made some progress, citing the agreement of a new interim fiscal framework pending deliberations on a final funding model.
“So we just need to keep building upon that to get to the point where we have what we need in order to deliver upon the programme for government commitments that we’ve made and the public services that people just rightly deserve,” she added.
Ms Little-Pengelly told reporters in Dublin that she and her Stormont colleagues were “very, very clear” with the Chancellor on the need for Northern Ireland to have “sufficient funding”.
“We will always stand up for Northern Ireland to get the best possible deal for Northern Ireland, but the people of Northern Ireland deserve those adequate public services, those good public services, and the sufficient funding in order to meet that,” she said.
“So we did raise a wide range of issues.
“I raised the issue of the funding requirement on our water and sewage infrastructure; our concerns about the cut in winter fuel payment; the needs that we have in terms of affordable childcare and what the tax system can do in terms of increasing tax-free childcare across the United Kingdom; the issues around our NHS and our waiting lists in Northern Ireland, and our shared desire to tackle that issue and to make sure that the many, many thousands of people sitting on waiting lists, very often in pain, that we can get the right budget, the sufficient funding in order to do what our ambition is as set out in our draft programme for government, just released at the beginning of this week.
“We are an executive that wants to deliver.
“We want to deliver against the issues that matter most to people.
“We can only do that with sufficient funding, but that also means that we need to have that funding to invest to transform.
“And that’s going to be critical in terms of our sustainability moving forward.”
