Overspend of £400m looms for NI Health Department

Northern Ireland's Health Department is facing a £400m overspend this year, Robin Swann has warned.

The health minister is understood to have written to other ministers in the Northern Ireland Executive to set out the financial position.

About half of the overspend relates to meeting below inflation pay increases.

Mr Swann has said he would need a reallocation of funds or more funding from Westminster to avoid the overspend.

The alternative would be not implementing the pay settlement, a recruitment freeze and stopping some clinical activity.

Mr Swann's letter is understood to be explicitly clear that he is not prepared to take those actions.

Stormont is operating with standstill financial arrangements because no budget was in place when the executive collapsed in February.

The Department of Finance (DoF) said if Stormont departments exceeded the total amount of funding available to the executive, then the "following financial year's budget would be reduced by an equivalent amount".

That would be keeping in line with the Treasury's statement of funding policy.

On Wednesday, Neil Gibson, a senior civil servant in the DoF began using emergency powers to keep funds flowing to departments.

The move means departments can continue to operate but Mr Gibson cannot start funding new policies.

The Department of Health accounts for almost half of Stormont's day-to-day spending - about £8bn a year.

Normally, it is the major beneficiary of budget reallocation exercises known as monitoring rounds.

However, monitoring rounds have not been taking place in the absence of a fully functioning executive.

Speaking on BBC News NI's Good Morning Ulster on Thursday, Economy Minister Gordon Lyons said: "I think it is going to be the case that the [UK] government will have to step in at some stage and put a budget in place.

"Other parties have been coming out and saying there is money there to be spent, but I think the intervention from the health minister shows that the money that is there is required for those changes to be made in health."

Aside from pay pressures, other factors contributing to the overspend are general price increases, such as energy, and £80m which is needed to tackle huge waiting lists.

The letter is also understood to say that the department has made efforts to introduce savings but these will fall far short of cancelling out the overspend.