Ms Elaine Crory:

Picking up on what Ms Crickard said and going a bit further about funding and the relationship with the Department for Communities, it is worth saying quite a lot of the work we are doing in our organisations is funded by charities. Both Ms Crickard and I are 100% funded by charitable trusts. None of that whatsoever comes from Government. Many of my colleagues are funded by a patchwork that comes from different Government Departments or arms-length bodies of Government Departments like the Public Health Agency, PHA, an arms-length body of the Department of Health. For example, the Department of Health was funding little pieces of staff funding or core funding, which was ended entirely last September. This connects to so many of the issues we are describing, which are devolved issues.

I agree completely that one of the big problems is a culture of unaccountability. There is also a degree to which the lack of money is used as an excuse for everything. In the last financial year of 2023-2024, when there was no Executive in place, the budget was set by the Secretary of State and significant cuts had to be made to every single Government Department. Those decisions were made by civil servants. One of the things they did was cut the Department of Health core grant to quite a lot of organisations, including my own, and the only state funding received by the Women's Aid Federation Northern Ireland. It is now the only Women's Aid Federation on these islands that does not receive any state funding at all. It causes ongoing problems because sometimes that is the funding on which they then apply for programme costs to deliver things. That is the funding that keeps the staff in place. They are not the only ones, by any means, but it is a really good example to illustrate what happens when that core funding goes.

It is cut upon cut upon cut. If you ever get an uplift, it is immediately taken away after any crisis. Realistically, by keeping things exactly the same, it is an effective cut anyway, but usually it is an actual cut. We have to deliver more with less every time. The argument always comes down to there is not enough money. I know there is a fiscal framework being set up in agreement with the Treasury in Westminster around restructuring how Northern Ireland is funded, the Barnett consequentials, which will be changed to reflect need in Northern Ireland and what powers are and are not devolved. Wales had a similar agreement where the funding received is 115% of what is received per head in England. The Northern Ireland figure at the moment is 124% but the argument would be that still does not meet the level of need. It would be if we were starting from zero but we are starting from far behind.

Even with that agreement in place and with various other financial ongoings whereby money is coming in to stabilise, normalise and modernise these Departments, apparently, none of that has been spent yet and we do not know how it is going to be spent but it will not be coming down to people like myself, Ms Crickard and our organisations. There is an overall approach from the Executive which very much speaks to the question about the relationship with the Ministers for the various Departments where they will come to us and ask us to work on strategies they want to produce because they have agreed to do it in some agreement, be it the New Decade, New Approach, the fresh start or whatever. They will come to you for their work, they will contribute nothing financially to your organisation and they will take your time and then that strategy may or may not ever see the light of day.

In the last mandate, my organisation, and me personally, spent two years working on a gender equality strategy. I do not know where that is. When the Executive was reinstated and a new Minister came into place, we wrote to that Minister and asked him to tell us the status of that strategy, whether we were going to meet again and whether he was going to sign off on it. We were told he would not meet with us and nothing else. That was February, it is now nearly July and we still have not really heard what has happened with that.

This is a common practice. A piece of work is started, political circumstances change and it is dropped. You are asked continually for your input, but you never see that input reflected in the outputs coming from Government. It speaks again to the point about having no regard for the opposition. There is a different culture in the Assembly compared to this House and, indeed, to normal functioning parliaments elsewhere, which is there is no regard to the issues raised by the opposition. Opposition is, in fact, not the normal state of affairs. You have nearly all the big parties in government together, so they are not really holding each other to account but they have a very siloed approach. It is said this issue is for the Department for Communities, this issue is for the Department of Finance or this issue is for the Department of Health and they all are as separate as possible. They are quite protective of what is in their area and whenever a new piece of work appears, nobody wants to take responsibility for it because they are squaring things off.

Anything that has to be shared among Departments goes to the Executive Office, which used to be called the Office of First and Deputy First Minister, and sometimes that will get things done. Other times, that is the site of the collapse, or relations within that office are the cause of the collapse. You can never be sure when you begin a piece of work that it is going to be seen through to the end, successfully or otherwise. That speaks to the point about the civic panel as well. That has never appeared or been discussed. There was never any move towards making it happen. Of course, the civic panel was a little bit like the civic forum but rebranded and rejigged. I do not think that idea is popular for the same reason they do not have regard to the duly elected official opposition.