The Northern Ireland Executive has set out a further £300m in departmental spending allocations for 2024-25 – but created a political storm by announcing the move three days before the UK general election.
Social Democratic and Labour Party MLA Matthew O'Toole, leader of the opposition at Stormont, said the decision to push ahead with the June Monitoring Round announcement yesterday was in conflict with pre-election guidance and undermined civil service impartiality.
O'Toole published a letter to Jayne Brady, head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, asking whether she was "content" that the announcement complied with "the letter and spirit of pre-election guidance". He also asked whether Brady accepted that the fact that Northern Ireland finance minister Caoimhe Archibald had made the allocations based on "indications and assumptions" was a breach of pre-election guidance.
O'Toole said executive parties Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party had "widely publicised" the outcome of the monitoring round on social media yesterday, "undermining the absurd idea that [it] was simply routine business with no political or electoral context".
The biggest winner in the monitoring round is the Department of Health, which has been allocated £122m. The Department of Education has been allocated £44.5m and the Department of Justice £35m. One-sixth of the overall £300m is for capital spending.
In a statement accompanying the monitoring round, Archibald said it was clear that all Northern Ireland departments were under significant financial pressure.
"This is evidenced by the vast quantum of bids far exceeding the funding we had available to allocate," she said. "Indeed the departments of education, health and justice all submitted bids [that] totalled more than the overall amount we had to allocate."
Archibald insisted she had given careful consideration to whether the monitoring round should proceed ahead of Thursday's UK general election – at which Sinn Fein and the DUP are among the parties fielding candidates in Northern Ireland's 18 parliamentary constituencies.
"My view is that this process represents normal and routine business of the executive," Archibald said of the monitoring round.
"There is also an urgent need to provide funding certainty to departments and even a short delay presents risks. Not proceeding could have resulted in departments taking decisions that would not have been needed had an additional allocation been confirmed."