Justice Minister ‘hopeful’ of securing money for police discretionary payments

Stormont Justice Minister Naomi Long has said she is hopeful that money will be found later this month to meet discretionary payments for police officers.

She said she would not commit to money that is not in her budget, but hoped that the money would be found for the payments before the end of the year, following the December Monitoring Round and savings.

It comes at a challenging time for Stormont finances when Health Minister Mike Nesbitt received permission from the Executive to commit to meet pay parity for health workers despite not having the money in his budget to do so.

Ms Long said she “raised significant concerns” about Mr Nesbitt’s actions.

“I could ask to bust my budget too, but the problem is that that will come off my top line next year, and then how do we pay for all the things we need?” she told BBC Radio Ulster’s Stephen Nolan Show.

“Mike Nesbitt has made a decision that he is prioritising pay in the year. So he is going to go and spend money that he currently doesn’t have, and he has accepted the consequence of that will be that it will come out of his next year’s budget.

“He is pushing a significant problem down the pipe.”

Ms Long said she hopes that by the end of the year, she will be able to sit down with PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher and agree that the discretionary payments are affordable.

“So far, he’s (Boutcher) not been able to say that to me, but it’s a small projected overspend in comparison to what others are looking at,” she said.

“I’m not trying to have a row about it, but technically these are discretionary payments. Their contractual payment has already been paid, that went through in October, so what they’re legally entitled to have, they already have.

“The issue here is about the discretionary part of their pay award that’s recommended by the Police Remuneration Review Body (PRRB).

“Every single year since I’ve come into office, they have got that in full. They’ve had to wait for it because there’s processes to go through, but they’ve got it every year. and I believe they’ll get it this year.”

Ms Long also defended her department’s funding of the PSNI, insisting that police get the “lion’s share” of the money.

“About 65% of the entire budget goes to PSNI. That includes an allocation for pay. This year, pay was higher than the allocation that we had calculated, which means that it leaves PSNI with a projected overspend.

“I have 35% of the budget left to run everything else in the justice system, courts, prisons and probation, the whole works.

“So we do prioritise, what I want to be sure is the decisions I made this year don’t put us in an even worse situation next year.

“If we go and we spend recklessly, and we put the Executive in a situation where we have massive overspends, then what will happen is that will come off the top budget next year, which is going to be flat cashed at best.

“So what I need to do is work with the Chief Constable and we have been having tripartite meetings with the (Policing) Board, the chief and myself for the last lot of months, and it’s been really helpful in driving down where we can make savings, where we can find additional resource.

“We’re also looking across the wider department, things that perhaps we thought we would be able to do this year, and we now don’t think we will have the resource to do them and if that frees up some money, that’s good.”