Slimming Down Stormont?
I talked to Nigel Dodds today after the Executive mulled over the details of yesterday's budget. He took the view that the budget could have been "much worse" for Northern Ireland, with the £122 million in expected savings next year offset to some extent by increased provision of £116 million over the next couple of years.
Challenged over where savings might be found, Mr Dodds pointed to the layers of bureaucracy at Stormont. He reckons £40 to £50 million a year could be saved by halving the number of departments. Over the Easter period Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness accelerated the review into the numbers of MLAs and departments.
My colleague Martina Purdy has a report going out on examining the implications of root and branch reform.
So far as MLAs are concerned, the current crop of 108 cost around £12 million a year in wages and allowances. If you had just 4 MLAs per constituency that would bring the number down to 72, yielding a potential £4 million saving every year.
Of course any change would have political as well as financial implications. If voters in the last Assembly election had been choosing a 72 strong Assembly, the Alliance Party's Executive Director Gerry Lynch reckons it would have looked like this:
DUP 26 (-10)
SF 20 (-8)
UUP 11 (-7)
SDLP 9 (-7)
All 6 (-1)
Ind 0 (-1)
PUP 0 (-1)
Green 0 (-1)
Such a line up would obviously increase the bias towards the big two, and if the Executive had just six departments Mr Lynch thinks the SDLP mjight miss out on a ministerial seat altogether.
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