BELFAST (Reuters) -Britain set out a budget for Northern Ireland on Thursday that gave the region two years to repay an overspend from the last 12 months but warned “difficult decisions” will be needed with funding set to remain flat year-on-year.
Northern Ireland has been without a power-sharing government for over a year due to a dispute about post-Brexit trade rules, leaving Britain’s minister for the region to set a budget and civil servants to make the subsequent spending decisions.
Minister Chris Heaton-Harris said department spending would total 14.2 billion pounds ($17.68 billion) over the next 12 months, the same as the last fiscal year, even as pay demands in parts of the public sector remain outstanding and UK inflation is running at 10%.
He said the 297-million-pound overspend from last year will initially come from any further funding that comes automatically as a result of higher spending decisions in England, such as in the autumn statement later this year.
“This will provide some protection to front line public services in Northern Ireland from having to take the most severe reductions. However, difficult decisions remain in order to live within the funding available,” he said in a statement.
Heaton-Harris said the spending per person in Northern Ireland is around 20% higher than in other parts of the UK but that the level of public services offered are still not affordable, urging politicians to get back to government to progress “much needed” public service reform.
A lawmaker from the party whose boycott of power-sharing collapsed the assembly said that while there is a pathway to settling the post-Brexit dispute, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) would not be pressured by a “punishing” budget.
“Any idea that putting in a punishing budget to Northern Ireland is going to bully the DUP to get back sooner is for the birds, absolute nonsense,” DUP lawmaker Emma Little-Pengelly told national broadcaster RTE.
($1 = 0.8031 pounds)
(Reporting by Amanda Ferguson in Belfast and Muvija M in London; writing by Padraic Halpin; editing by Sarah Young and Andrew Heavens)
