Long issues ‘significant consequences’ warning on justice department funding

Stormont Justice Minister Naomi Long has warned of “significant consequences” if the Executive continues to “eat away” at her department’s budget to fund others.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the Prison Service and the courts are among Ms Long’s responsibilities.

Ms Long insisted that she, and her predecessor and party colleague David Ford, took difficult decisions but that the department is “disproportionately underfunded”.

Last week, senior department official Deborah Brown warned the Justice Committee of £444 million of pressures facing it, including to cover the outworkings of a major PSNI data breach last year.

Ms Brown criticised the budget settlements which the department has received over the last 10 years, saying it has “maxed out” efficiencies and landed in a “very critical situation”.

She told MLAs that 2024/25 will be a “most challenging year” and without more funding the department could face a “very big overspend”.

Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday Politics Northern Ireland, Ms Long said she made a similar point before leaving office as justice minister in 2022 following the latest Stormont collapse.

She also contended there are no difficult choices that she can make as minister to “get us out of that problem”.

“The issue is that the Department of Justice is disproportionately underfunded when compared to other departments over the period,” she said.

“They (other departments) are underfunded but not disproportionately – and it isn’t me saying that, it’s the Fiscal Council who did an independent assessment.

“In the time that justice has been devolved, the health budget has risen by 68%, the education budget by over 35% and the justice budget by 3%.

“We have been doing more and more with less and less for as long as that is sustainable.

“We have done the reform. We took difficult decisions, we reformed legal aid, we brought in committal reform. In fact, David Ford took a decision to close courthouses that were surplus to requirement and then had the Executive reverse that decision because they didn’t want to take a difficult decision.

“The bottom line is we have shown ourselves able to take the difficult decisions to do the reform. That has happened in justice, and we will continue with that work, but the difficult decision here is the priority that the Executive are willing to attach to justice.

“Our services are about protecting the public and the preservation of life. There is nothing more important and if the Executive continue to do what they have done, which is eat away at the justice budget to fund other things, there will be significant consequences.”