Select committee: Northern Ireland Affairs Committee
Recommendation 5
First Report - Investment in Northern Ireland
Published 8 Nov 2022
Paragraph 32
Addressed to Northern Ireland Executive; Northern Ireland Office
Northern Ireland Affairs Committee Investment in Northern Ireland All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
The commitment to funding under the New Decade New Approach agreement was instrumental in: re-establishing the Executive in 2020; the allocation of funding for health workers’ pay and public services and securing the Executive’s finances on a sustainable footing. The extent to which NDNA has turbocharged infrastructure investment is, however, unclear. We ask the Government to set out how much 32 Investment inNorthern Ireland Barnett-based and other NDNA funding has been allocated for infrastructure investment since 2020. We note the Government’s general six-monthly updates on progress against NDNA objectives. However, we recommend that to increase transparency the Government publish periodic, detailed financial updates, breaking down how it has allocated NDNA funding so far, and how it plans to allocate the funding that remains, against NDNA objectives, including for example against the objective of using that funding to achieve 5,000 cybersecurity professionals by 2030.
From: Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, First Report - Investment in Northern Ireland (HC 85), paragraph 32, 8 November 2022
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 2 February 2023 (deadline 8 January 2023).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government's response to the Committee's report on investment in Northern Ireland sets out funding already allocated and published, says several areas are for the Executive or local partners, and declines some specific requests.
- On Levelling Up, it says the first round gave 2.9% to Northern Ireland and Rounds 1 and 2 together £119.8m, which is "3.16% of the Fund".
- On New Deal funding, it "can confirm" that funding provided to Northern Ireland Executive Departments "will be ringfenced", and says the Secretary of State will make further decisions "in due course" on the remainder.
- On trade agreements, it says it "consider[s] it unnecessary" to provide separate explanatory memoranda on how agreements interact with the Protocol, and that impact assessments do not currently consider specific Protocol measures.
- On the university cap and City and Growth Deal day-to-day resourcing, it says these are matters for Executive Departments and local Deal partners respectively; on engagement with local stakeholders it "will explore how this can be best achieved".