Northern Ireland Affairs Committee
15 July 2026
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Northern Ireland Affairs Committee House of Commons
00:00 - 01:06
Speaker 3
Order. Welcome to the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee. This is our session on Northern Ireland Executive Finances. We are joined by Sir Robert Chote, Chair, the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council, Maureen O'Reilly, member of the Northern Ireland Fiscal Council, and Jonathan McAdams. So welcome everybody.
So we are also joined today by Diane Forsyth MLA, our deputy chair of the Northern Ireland Assembly Committee for Finance, who will be asking questions on both the panels that we've got this morning. The Committee for Finance has been undertaking valuable scrutiny of the ongoing absence of a budget in Northern Ireland, and we wanted to formally join with them today as we take evidence from yourselves and the Secretary of State. So thank you Diane for joining us. Sir Robert, without a budget, departments are now reliant on limited contingency funding provided through the vote on account and the Northern Ireland Act. What impact will this have on the provision of public services?
01:06 - 02:25
Speaker 2
Thank you, Chair. Well, thank you very much indeed for the invitation. It's a pleasure to be here as always. Clearly it's not unprecedented, but it's regrettable that the Executive hasn't managed to agree a budget even at this stage into the financial year. That's not good for accountability, for ability to plan services and delivery and reform.
And you know, clearly it's a, it's an environment that is, is not conducive to the best possible fiscal and public service decisions. The immediate impact is that under the vote of account at the moment, there's the ability to spend essentially 45% of the amount of resource and cash that was allocated under the previous year for the, in the Budget Act for the previous year. At the end of July, if there isn't a agreed budget, there's then the ability for the Permanent Secretary at the Department of Finance to be able to agree to higher amounts of spending relative to last year, potentially up to 95%. In previous years in this sort of situation, sometimes those limits have been, have been used gradually. You move to 60% first and then, then further on to that.
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