SF and DUP at loggerheads again as haggling leads to budget delay
Stormont plans for spending up in air due to spat
A DUP-SINN Fein spat has been blamed for holding up Stormont’s budget after Finance Minister Conor Murphy claimed First Minister Arlene Foster had blocked his spending plan.
However, the DUP said Mr Murphy must produce a budget which enjoys the support of all five parties around the Executive table.
In a statement issued to MLAS yesterday, the Finance Minister said the DUP leader refused to allow his final budget for 2021/22 to be tabled for Executive consideration.
The Sinn Fein MLA said the situation left him in breach of a legal requirement to set a draft budget before the new financial year and it would “result in uncertainty for businesses and vulnerable people as proposed additional funding for Covid support measures is delayed”.
Mr Murphy said it would also have the knock-on effect of preventing Stormont departments from planning effectively.
In response to the claims, DUP MLA Paul Frew said Mr Murphy had failed to bring forward proposals which could be supported by the entire Executive.
Mr Frew, who sits on the Assembly’s finance committee, said it was not the minister’s task to simply indulge “his own or his party’s wishes”.
He pointed to the “need for movement on significant issues such as the funding of victims’ payments, where the Finance Minister must also pay regard to the ruling of the courts in this area”. “All parties should also want to see the commitment to additional police numbers met and the Finance Minister needs to ensure that he steps up to that,” the North Antrim MLA said.
“No one is pretending that bringing forward budget proposals within a multi-party Executive is easy, but it has been a task successfully achieved by most of Conor Murphy’s predecessors.”
UUP leader Steve Aiken said the failure to agree a budget “shows a shambolic approach to public finances”.
“Reading between the lines this appears to be about the internal feuding between Sinn Fein and the DUP,” Mr Aiken said.
He claimed the delay would have an impact on the pension scheme for Troubles victims, health funding, increasing policing numbers and supporting the economy and infrastructure.
The South Antrim MLA said it “just demonstrates that elements within our Executive are still incapable of making the grown-up decisions that any other democracy would expect”.
Mr Aiken said the hold-up “must seriously bring into question whether some of the parties in the Executive possess even the basic skills to govern and really understand the responsibility needed to manage our finances”.
Agreeing with Mr Aiken, SDLP MLA Matthew O’toole blamed Sinn Fein and the DUP for the delay. He said the parties had been “haggling over the budget for weeks”. The SDLP’S finance spokesman described the failure to set a budget as “yet another error” by Mr Murphy and said his tenure as minister had been “shambolic”.
Mr O’toole questioned the timing of the statement “when his and his party’s conduct is under such intense scrutiny”.
“The failure to agree a budget is also a reminder of the chaos that marks the DUP and Sinn Fein’s approach to Government,” he said.
Mr Murphy announced his draft budget on January 18. This was followed by a period of consultation until February 25.
The Finance Minister said he then circulated a paper to his Executive colleagues on March 15 setting out his final budget proposals.