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Budget (Northern Ireland) Order 2006

As I said, the get-out there is that when the Northern Ireland Assembly returns, a decision can be taken on the forum’s future. I will not have to take it. The noble Lord, Lord Kilclooney can take it and argue the case. That is what it is all about. He disagrees with it, and that’s fine. Over to you, Madam Chairman, if I may say so. The noble Lord, Lord Shutt, also asked about the figures quoted for the superannuation funds. They are non-cash. They do not represent cash flow from government at this stage, but cash requirements that will arise in future. The reason it is done that way is that the generally accepted accounting practice is that they are recognised now. On whether EU funding is spent properly, we are required to follow the rules of the EU auditors. I know there is a lot of criticism in Europe about where EU funds go. I know that from my agricultural role at DARD, which is my main connection with the Peace funding. I have been told a number of times, ““we have to do this because we have to meet the requirements of Brussels, otherwise we don’t spend the money””. Most of the money is spent only according to those rules. So there is a question, but we do not knowingly spend money that we do not get value for. The whole point is to ensure that the money we get from Europe is monitored properly and spent according to the regulations. On pupil numbers, the noble Lord, Lord Shutt of Greetland, is quite right. There are 50,000 empty places, which could go up to 80,000 in the next 10 years. Part of our work in the Comprehensive Spending Review will be to undertake a strategic review of that. There will be a lot of in-depth work. We cannot just leave the situation as it is. On the point of the noble Lord, Lord Kilclooney, the annual shortfall in government spending in Northern Ireland is £5 billion. I do not want to be misunderstood or misquoted, but the issue is that England, Scotland and Wales send £5 billion a year to Northern Ireland. Public expenditure per head of population is 29 per cent higher in Northern Ireland than in the UK as a whole. Let nobody tell me that we are not putting money into Northern Ireland; it is a huge amount of money. What I question as a new Minister—as the rest of my colleagues have—is what value we are getting from it. We arrived there last May and found massive amounts had gone into health, but there were huge—absolutely appalling and disgraceful—waiting lists. So we are asking where the money has been going, which is why my colleague Shaun Woodward has been doing so much work on this, and why we have re-jigged parts of the budget and organisation of the health service. That £5 billion is the equivalent of more than £3,000 per capita in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland financial deficit—which is the polite way of putting ““the subvention from Great Britain””—is £5 billion, and the Republic of Ireland population is approximately 4 million. So the cost per capita would be about £1,250 rather than £2,000. It is a substantial sum of money, as the noble Lord said. But he knows as well as I do—I do not criticise him for this—that that is a very simplistic way of putting it which would not reflect reality. When you are spelling things out to people in figures—like the amount of profit per minute, as a way of getting an issue about exploitative companies across—or deficits, you can get people’s minds attached to a figure. It is simplistic, but it tells people what the cost is. In other words: it is not for free; it is not neutral. There is a cost flowing, but it would be £1,250.