Remarks made by Ged Nash at Labour’s Manifesto launch – Building Better Together
*** Check against delivery ***
We launched our economic and fiscal plan last Tuesday and our alternative Budget barely 7 weeks ago – back when FG and FF were still besties. My, how things have changed since the whistle blew.
The self-serving staged spats serve only to illustrate that there is no measurable policy difference between them.
Simon Harris’s ‘new energy’ is starting to look like a Charlie McCreevy and Brian Cowen tribute act. Most of us remember the hangover and some of us don’t want to go there again.
To set the scene, I’ll do a quick run through of our plans.
Policy measure costings are relatively unchanged from our alternative budget and sample figures are provided in the policy papers we’ve published and a sample first year budget is provided for context.
As outlined in the Appendix Labour is proposing average net spending increases of over 5.1% over the next five years.
Inclusive of annual net revenue raising of €400m a year in each Budget – for example including a doubling of the Banking Levy – this will provide for net spending increases in voted expenditure of just over €40 billion by 2030.
There are a number of measures we are proposing that are not factored into our Budget plans but that will also increase the budgetary space available for spending including:
- Revenue buoyancy and savings that will arise from increasing employment to 3 million people in work, and lowering unemployment to less than 4%.
- Savings that will arise from a healthier population, better educated workforce, reduced homelessness and waiting lists, digitalisation and less emergency spending on measures like agency staffing due to better planning.
- Savings from a Comprehensive review of public spending and waste.
Based on the last four years we are also proposing that the medium-term fiscal plan be submitted on the basis of a 6% expenditure ceiling, and this will provide for a contingency fund of nearly €6bn up to 2029 for unforeseen emergencies.
We provide an average of €850m a year for the indexation of income tax and USC tax bands and credits.
And a baseline average of €800m a year to index social welfare rates with further increases to Budget negotiation.
Under our plans this allocation will rise to over €1.4bn a year to provide for minimum increase of €15 per week in social welfare payments and phased reforms like a cost of disability payment, a second targeted tier of child benefit to end child poverty, and the removal of the Carer’s Allowance means test and increases in the half rate carers allowance.
Understaffing is a chronic problem in the public service. We provide an average of €1.6bn a year for the costs of public service pay deals in line with wage growth, and critically the recruitment of the extra public servants we need across education, health, policing, local government and elsewhere.
We have a teacher staffing crisis, our Gardai and Defence Forces are undermanned, across the health services there are thousands of suppressed positions.
Parties are waving around pie in the sky figures about the number of Gardai they’ll hire but won’t address the root causes like expecting grown adults with families to live on a training allowance of €350 a week.
Labour will set up a Teacher Staffing Taskforce to address the crisis in teacher recruitment and provide incremental credit for teachers working abroad.
Labour will develop key worker housing in our cities so that we can staff our critical public services – starting with turning hundreds of vacant HSE properties into homes, like Baggot St hospital – ringfenced for nurses, healthcare assistants, non consultant hospital doctors, so they can live close to where they work.
We also provide for demographic costs and maintaining existing levels of service of approx. €2.8bn a year. This is a significant amount of money.
This will cover significant costs of a growing population, and importantly ensuring we meet the needs of children with additional needs – a massive issue in this election; and ensuring that our health service can plan properly.
We will bring much greater transparency to the Budget process with annual resourcing statements. What will this mean in practise?
It will mean growing up as a country. Bringing some honesty to the annual Budget process. Ministers will be forced to be clear on what new measures will cost, what it will take to maintain existing levels of service, to plan for demographic growth and the cost of changes to tax and social welfare. They will also have to do this early in the Budget process.
As it stands the annual SES only reveals what money is available to spend – and nothing about the cost of the measures in the annual pre-Budget leak-fest costs. The relevant information must be available to the public so we can make up our own minds. This will be done so we can move to multi-annual budgeting to provide certainty for citizens and providers of services.
Schools will know what special needs assistants and teachers and classes they will get earlier and shine a line on costs in the health services.
The full costs of staffing Children’s Disability Network teams and carrying out assessments of needs will be known every year.
Every canvas these issues are coming up.
It’s why we are guaranteeing an appropriate school place for every child with additional needs.
We will make the HSE publish monthly figures of the waiting lists for AONs and therapies. This is called accountability – and children and families are entitled to it.
Because of the failure of the State we will have to expand the waiting list initiative for private assessments of children waiting for AONs, and we will reimburse parents who have to resort to private therapies until public services are improved.
Parents are spending thousands of euro a year on occupation therapy and speech and language therapy because the State is failing them.
Instead of trying to bribe parents with €1,000 in a savings account when their child is born why not give them access to the services their child needs now.
Labour will ensure we have the resources to deliver better public services by transforming the State and managing the economy well.
We will introduce an infrastructure unit with a mandate to address blockages and delays in large projects.
The notion of the self-made man or woman doesn’t exist. Even Michael O’Leary, if he is honest with himself, has a teacher to thank.
We will develop a new generation of public enterprises like a State Construction Company. A century ago nobody thought it a bad idea to set up a State company owned by the Irish people to bring electricity to all four corners of Ireland. That was the pressing issue in the 1920s and 1930s. Now it’s housing and only the State has the power and resources to fix it, working, yes with the private sector.
And we will set up a Strategic Investment and Development Bank.
The bank will be grown out of the ISIF and Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland – it will take direct equity stakes in offshore wind using €1bn of the apple money.
It will provide billions in long term stable finance to support private housing developments and approved housing bodies.
It will help Irish companies scale up to expand into the EU and become global leaders.
How will it do this? It will have a mandate to invest a portion of the €4 billion plus a year we place in the Future Ireland Fund.
So that Ireland isn’t reliant on vulture funds and the whims of investment managers in New York.
Labour will take on the cost of living. Instead of using once off payments and tax cuts we will address the real underlying issues.
That means real affordable housing, cheaper public transport, free GP care, adequate income, free education, lower prices.
Labour will drive down the cost of energy starting with a moratorium on data centres, and the scaling up of offshore wind.
If insurance companies don’t reduce their prices we will levy their profits.
We will open retailers to scrutiny on their profits and prices and investigate cartels and price gouging. Shoppers are still being stiffed at checkouts.
And we will take on the scandal of low pay in this country. We will finish the job we started, when I set up the Low Pay Commission. Ireland will have a Living Wage and only Labour – only Labour – will guarantee your right to be member of your trade union and be represented by it.
Labour will support workers – with a new Freedom to Learn scheme with free courses and skills vouchers for workers who want to upskill after 10 years of social insurance contributions, funded through the National Training Fund.
And we will reform the system of accountability for Ministers and Secretary Generals and the office of Attorney General, introduce a duty of candor, and overhaul standards in public office.
We will also reform how we do local government, giving a pathway to the largest urban areas in the country (like Drogheda) to become cities, with local Councils bring restored too. In doing so, we will also reform the Victorian commercial rates system for good bricks-and-mortar Main Street business.
Labour through our history showed we are the party of reform and of accountability. FOI. Anti-political corruption laws. Taking big money out of politics.
The last government abandoned any pretence of reform and we’ve seen the consequences of it with laissez faire ministers allowing spending spiral out of control and no oversight of projects.
Accountability doesn’t begin and end with a clip for a TDs socials, berating a civil servant at the PAC on a slow news Thursday morning.
We will drag ministerial and public service accountability into the 21st Century.
I’ll be happy to take any questions on that later.