The DUP has been urged to re-enter the Executive to ensure people in Northern Ireland will benefit from new UK prime minister Liz Truss’s plan to tackle the spiralling cost of energy.
“What we really need to see is the DUP getting to grips with the scale of the crisis that is facing people and join with the rest of the parties and form an Executive so that we have ministers that are able to make those decisions and get money out to people,” said Sinn Féin MLA and economy spokesperson Caoimhe Archibald.
Addressing the UK’s new leader at her first prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons on Wednesday, SDLP leader Colum Eastwood said Northern Ireland needed a “tailored solution” but this was “much harder to achieve because the DUP are refusing to form a government at Stormont.”
This has been rejected by the DUP, with the Minister for the Economy, the DUP’s Gordon Lyons, saying that “even if the Executive was fully functioning, the best way to get help for people’s energy bills is direct from Westminster” and this was the case in Scotland and Wales “where they have fully operational devolved governments.”
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Ms Truss is due to unveil proposals on Thursday which are expected to involve borrowing money to pay for a cap on household energy bills at about £2,500.
However, it is not clear how such a measure might be implemented in Northern Ireland, which has its own energy market and is operated and regulated in a different way.
The leaders of Northern Ireland’s main political parties are due to meet new Northern Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris on Thursday for discussions, which will include the need to ensure people in the North receive the same help with energy bills as in England, Scotland and Wales.
Additional funding from Westminster is usually distributed proportionally in Northern Ireland using the Barnett formula, which allocates money to the devolved government where the Executive decides how it should be spent.
The Stormont Assembly has been unable to sit since the election in May, when the DUP refused to re-enter the powersharing institutions until issues around the Northern Ireland protocol, which is opposed by unionists, are resolved to their satisfaction.
An existing UK scheme which will give customers £400 to help with energy bills — which will be paid to households in Britain from October — has not yet been adapted to Northern Ireland and it remains unclear when or how people will receive the money, though it is expected to be resolved eventually.
Sinn Féin, Alliance and the SDLP have called for the restoration of the Executive to enable any assistance to be distributed quickly and in a manner tailored to the Northern Ireland market.
Speaking to The Irish Times ahead of the announcement on Thursday, Ms Archibald said first it was important to see the detail of what was being proposed and what the UK government intended to do to extend the assistance to the North.
“Energy is devolved, and we have a separate regulator and a different landscape too in terms of the fact that the majority of households in the North are still reliant on home heating oil whereas a lot of households in Britain are gas,” she said.
“What we’ve seen to date in relation to the £400 payment is that due to the lack of an Executive in place workarounds are having to be found.
“That’s far from ideal and there are millions of pounds that are sitting for months unable to be spent, so if it was the case that there is additional funding being made available in the form of Barnett consequentials, again we would be in that situation where we would require an Executive to be able make the decisions as to how to use that funding,” she said.
Mr Lyons said instead that the scale of the problem was such that only the UK Treasury — rather than the devolved government — has the power to address it, and even Sinn Féin leader Michelle O’Neill “was calling for action in Westminster”.
“This is a crisis of energy and food security. The levers to deal with it and firepower needed is in Treasury not devolved governments.
“Unfortunately, in Northern Ireland the cost-of-living crisis is inflated because the Northern Ireland protocol is driving up cost of moving goods from GB in NI.”
“This is exemplified in construction where steel coming from GB to NI now has a 25 per cent tariff added on,” he said.
