NI: Spending review 'to make best use of taxpayers' money'

The British government is to order a comprehensive review of how taxpayers’ money is spent in Northern Ireland to ensure funds are not wasted.

In a speech to the Fabian Society at Stormont, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain said the review across all British government departments would examine every spending programme.

The Northern Ireland Secretary said that if the North’s economy was to grow, it must deliver public services in the most cost-effective way.

“We must be prepared to abandon established and entrenched spending programmes whose value has diminished with the passage of time,” he said.

“Instead I will want to see public expenditure targeted on those areas that will enable Northern Ireland to take its place as a highly competitive region, with a growing and vibrant economy and where public services are delivered in the most cost-effective way to meet the needs of the community.

“I am announcing today that we will be carrying out over the coming weeks our own Comprehensive Spending Review covering all the departments of the Northern Ireland devolved government.

“This will be a ‘year zero’ review – no existing expenditure should be assumed to continue. No specific funding stream or programme exempt.

“Because if we do not radically reassess our spending priorities and ensure we are making the best use of taxpayers’ money, then we will lose their trust to spend it on their behalf.”

Mr Hain said the review was needed as the province embarked on an ambitious programme of reforming how it was governed.

Northern Ireland was hugely over-administered, he said, with 26 councils, four health boards, 19 health trusts, five education and library boards and around 100 other public bodies serving a population of just over 1.7 million.

“If ‘education, education, education’ has been our government’s mantra, then Northern Ireland’s has been ‘bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy’,” he said.

“Government in Northern Ireland needs to be smaller to be more effective, ensuring that taxpayers’ money is spent on the front line.

“Therefore we will be rapidly implementing the radical, cost-saving changes in structures for local authorities, health and education that we have announced following the Review of Public Administration.

“And in March, I will be announcing a reduction in the numbers of quangos and the transfer of accountability to the new local councils.”

Mr Hain said the reforms could deliver savings of up to £200m (€293m) each year which would be reallocated to frontline services.

The review would see the number of local councils in the North slashed by 2009 from 26 to seven.

The new super councils would play a major role in ensuring health and policing services meet the needs of communities.

There would also be a single education authority for Northern Ireland and a regional health and social services authority.

The number of trusts responsible for hospital and community-based services would be reduced from 18 to five.

Mr Hain stressed: “Reform is vital.

“By the 2007/08 financial year, we will be spending in excess of £16bn (€23.4bn) in regional public services in Northern Ireland.

“That is 50% greater in real terms than when our Government came to power in May 1997, with health spending up by around 80 per cent and education by more than 60%.

“Yet public service performance, in some areas, is among the worst in the UK with, for example, the longest hospital waiting lists only now starting to come down under our new policy levers.”

The Northern Ireland Secretary reminded his audience that the Government had also launched a strategy for investment in public services which had the potential over the next decade to deliver up to £16bn-worth of projects.

Public and private funds could deliver through this plan new schools and hospitals, better universities and further education colleges, a big upgrading of social housing and new strategic roads.

“Whether in health, education, housing or roads, all this investment has to be funded,” the minister said.

“If we want world-class public services and infrastructure, then we need to be willing to pay for them.”