18:34 Stephen Farry (North Down) (Alliance)

My wider fear is that public finances in Northern Ireland are on a burning platform. Some retired civil servants have talked openly about the fact that £1 billion-worth of pressure is building up in the system, but our Budgets are shrinking and the longer-term trajectory is smaller, smaller, smaller. Without the time, space and opportunity to reform and transform, all we will see is cuts, cuts, cuts. That means that we will end up with worse health and education systems, we will not invest in skills and, indeed, we will not meet our obligations to invest to mitigate climate change. What we will see, essentially, is managed decline and stagnation, and that simply lets Northern Ireland down.

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19:06 Claire Hanna (SDLP)

We know that it is not just in health that we are failing people. If the climate targets that we finally agreed in the dying days of the last Assembly are not mainstreamed and given effect through Budgets and plans, they are not going to mean anything. The labour shortages that employers across Northern Ireland are facing are not going to be mitigated by, for example, parents, and particularly women, coming back to work, because there are no Ministers in place to finally get a grip of childcare. Adults with some vulnerabilities but who have plenty of ability to work will no longer be supported by the many European social fund projects. They will fall by the wayside in a crude Darwinian process that seems to be happening at the moment. Projects are failing, and we will have to see which ones survive. Without ministerial intervention, we will keep exporting thousands of students because of a cap on numbers, to say nothing of the challenges in schools that many colleagues have raised.

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