Professor John Doyle:

I agree with everything Mr. Hetherington has said. The other difficulty in Northern Ireland is the length of the public sector health waiting lists. Someone may be ill and out of work for something that is easily fixed or needs a procedure to allow the person to go back to work. In England, statistically almost nobody waits longer than 12 months for a procedure once they are referred. In Northern Ireland, as some of us here well know, there are hundreds of thousands of people waiting longer. People may have a desire to get back to work. That compounds issues around poverty and geographically focused deprivation, and other things that lead people to be on disability or long-term illness payments. They physically cannot get the healthcare they need to get back to work. There are multiple layers as to why that will be hard to crack.