Cantillon: North ready to kick off fantasy budget

Fans of fantasy football might be interested to hear that a new beautiful game is set to be launched in Northern Ireland next Tuesday.

The as-yet untitled league of "fantasy" budgets is expected to feature all local political parties lining out to kick around a proposal from the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

In short the North's Finance Minister, Arlene Foster of the DUP (above, with Nigel Dodds), plans to get everyone to pretend they have resolved the ongoing row over welfare reforms and agree a new budget – a real one that is.

The elusive “real” budget is just one of the many casualties of the never-ending row over welfare reform in the North, which each day further weakens the Assembly.

The Northern Ireland Executive has failed to implement welfare reforms that were introduced by the UK’s coalition government in 2013. Because widespread welfare reforms have not been implemented the UK Treasury has imposed penalty fines on the Executive, equivalent to what the savings would have been in the welfare reforms had they been introduced.

According to Simon Hamilton, the current Health Minister and former finance minister, this has so far has cost the North around £100 million.

So desperate is the budget crisis in the North now – and so delicate is the political balance – that even the Northern Ireland Secretary of State Theresa Villiers thinks a "fantasy" budget is a good idea.

Ms Villiers said yesterday that a budget agreed on the basis of welfare reform would be “tremendously positive”.

But she warned that failure to agree a budget of any kind “would mean that we face those emergency budget measures which could detrimentally start to impact on public services”.

The Secretary of State, who yesterday met in private with representatives of the Confederation of British Industry, also warned the impasse will continue to delay any prospect of the devolution of corporation tax setting powers to the North. Ms Villiers said: “We are certainly some way from the finances of the Northern Ireland Executive being stable enough for that devolution to take place.”