The could save, won't save Executive
16 December 2010
Statement by TUV Leader Jim Allister:-
“The dire warning from John Comptom, Chief Executive of the Regional Health & Social Care Board, about the future of the Health Service under the Executive’s Budget, and his urgent need for tens of millions, points up the total failure of the Sinn Fein/DUP Budget to make available savings so that frontline services could be protected.
“The most obvious candidate for saving money which is being wasted is in cutting back on the useless, non-productive North/South bodies, which will cost us over £400m in this budgetary period. £400m that could be much better used in the Health Service. But, sadly, because the North/South bodies are Stormont’s sacred cows, they rather see the health service go short than cut out such patent waste. Hence not a single mention in the Budget of making savings here.
“Who, for example, can point to any achievement of the Food Safety Promotion Board located in Cork, employing only staff in the Republic, but into which Northern Ireland taxpayers pour millions every year? So long as the political architecture of the Belfast Agreement is more important than frontline services, then so long will we have failing government at Stormont.
“It must also be observed that what was announced as a Budget yesterday is not a budget as we know it in the UK, because it revealed nothing of where money will be spent and where it will be cut. A supposed consultation is underway – a consultation which will change nothing because this is a Sinn Fein/DUP deal – but without informing the public where and how the axe will fall. The DFP Minister sheepishly says this ‘should’ emerge from each department publishing their spending plans, but can’t say when that will happen. Some consultation, some budget, when more than half the story is untold!
“This shambolic approach to the core issue of fiscal management typifies, of course, the amateurish bungling which passes for government at Stormont.”
