Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Members, you will join me in welcoming to today's evidence session Neil Gibson, accounting officer in the Department of Finance; Sharon Smyth, deputy secretary, construction and procurement delivery in the Department of Finance; and Scott Wilson, head of the Strategic Investment Board (SIB). Stuart Stevenson, Treasury Officer of Accounts (TOA) is joining us on the sidelines, and the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) remains with us. Thanks for being here. We are coming to the end of January, but, since we have not seen you this year, I wish you a happy new year. I am allowed to do that until the end of January, I am told, so we will extend that courtesy for two more days.

Mr Gibson, if you are happy enough, I will call you Neil.

Mr Neil Gibson (Department of Finance): Of course.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): You are welcome, and we appreciate you attending. We understand that things are busy and challenging, particularly in the Department of Finance, given the state of public services and the significant financial strain that our services are under. As members highlighted last week when we heard from the Treasury Officer of Accounts, the Committee continues to have concerns about how memorandums of reply (MORs) and ministerial directions operate in practice. We see delays in MORs, variations in Executive sign-off and inconsistencies in the quality of the responses received. The delay in the MOR to our report on 'Major Capital Projects: Follow-up Report', which was published on 27 March last year, remains a particular concern. We recognise the complexity of cross-cutting issues and the wider pressures on the system, but timely and transparent MORs are absolutely essential if the Committee is to scrutinise progress on the 12 recommendations that we made in good faith and that you understood at the time.

Today, we want to understand how the current guidance works in practice, what challenges the Departments at the centre face and what improvements may be needed to strengthen consistency, governance and, of course, follow-up. We also want to understand the specific reasons for the delay to the 'Major Capital Projects' MOR and what steps can now be taken to resolve that. We will also touch on the issue of ministerial directions, which has also been the focus of our deliberations in recent meetings and was the subject of debate at last week's meeting with the Treasury Officer of Accounts. We are concerned, Neil, about delays in the process. Our Committee is keen to ensure full and proper scrutiny of decisions, and, for us to be effective in that role, we need things replied to in an appropriate manner and certainly within the time frames that are expected.

Members will have a series of questions, as will I, and we will give you an opportunity, Neil, to brief the Committee with any opening remarks that you have. It is most likely that what you will say in your opening remarks will come up in questions, and, depending on what you are comfortable with, we are happy to go straight to questions after you have made a few brief opening remarks. I ask that we keep questions succinct and be clear about what is being done. The Committee has become quite frustrated in recent evidence sessions, Neil, when officials have come before us and said, "We want to do" or, "We are doing": we want to know time frames for when things will be in place so that we can ensure that we are effective in our role.

With that having been said, you are very welcome. Neil, if your colleagues want to interject at any point, we are happy for them to do so. I will let you lead the way.

Mr Gibson: Thank you, Chair and members. It is nice to be here, and I extend the new year's welcome to you all. I will make a brief opening statement. As you remarked, I am sure that we will get into the meat of this in questions. Thank you for the opportunity to be here and to discuss the follow-up report on major capital projects. You have already introduced my colleagues Sharon and Scott, so I will not do it again.

I will start by quickly addressing the delay that you mentioned in your opening remarks. I appreciate that a MOR is typically brought before the Assembly within two months of the publication of the Public Accounts Committee's (PAC) report. However, as the delivery of capital projects is clearly cross-cutting, it was necessary to seek Executive approval for the response. The complicating factor was that nine of the 12 draft responses, as compiled by us, rely on an approved investment strategy for Northern Ireland (ISNI), which we had hoped would be in place when the MOR was being developed. I am aware of the debate about that strategy and its timing, which remains out of officials' control. Whilst it is important that that is in place, it is also important that we make sure that we deliver as much progress as we can. We have therefore endeavoured to provide you with updated information as and when we have it through the enabling actions that we have been working, which form the bulk of the proposed MOR response.

At our last session, I was joined by the head of the Civil Service and Patrick Magee, who chairs the investment strategy committee for the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) board. They have a responsibility to drive us forward under those enabling actions, which Scott and Sharon will speak about. We gave you the update from the most recent board meeting. At each NICS board meeting, we take one of the committees in turn, and, this time, it was the turn of the ISNI committee, so we sent you an update on its work. As I said, I am sure that we will pick that up.

In closing, I highlight the fact that, although the delivery of major capital projects largely sits with other Departments and not DOF, we understand that DOF has a clear role in improving project delivery, be it through the outworking of policies that we set, business case approaches that we provide guidelines for, workforce and staffing matters that we have responsibility for or procurement matters. Work is being taken forward on all of those, my colleagues and I will speak to the work that DOF is doing in the areas where it can play a role. However, as we have discussed in previous sessions, I do not have details on the projects that are being delivered by other accounting officers in their Departments.

I will leave my brief opening remarks there. I look forward to answering your questions.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thank you, Neil. Members will touch on a wide variety of issues, so thank you for your brief opening remarks: they are helpful and let us get straight to it.

In your letter dated 8 October 2025, you advise that the Finance Minister wrote to the office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister on 3 July 2025 stating that it was imperative that the Executive consider and agree an investment strategy to allow the MOR to progress. Has a response been received?

Mr Gibson: I do not want to mislead the Committee. I know that ISNI has not been agreed, but I will need to check whether I had a direct response to that letter. Apologies. I should know that, but I do not. Sorry.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): That is a very important question, and whether or not that has been responded to should stand out to you. It is a key element of today's wider discussion, so I would appreciate it if you could give us some clarity on it.

Mr Gibson: Yes, I can. I do not want the Committee to think that that means that I am not paying attention. We have ongoing discussions about ISNI and where it is. In the formation of a Budget, that is a very important document. We have been keeping close to what is going on, but I do not want to mislead the Committee about whether there has been a formal response to that letter, so I will come back to you on that.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I appreciate that. What update can you provide on the progress on agreeing an investment strategy?

Mr Gibson: Sadly, there is little by way of an update from our side. Certainly, we have provided all of the material that we have been asked to provide for that. It remains in the political space, I am afraid. The enabling actions that underpin our response to the strategy continue at pace, as you have seen. I have no update on the political side, other than what is in the public discourse.

Scott, I know that you have provided some information.

Mr Scott Wilson (Strategic Investment Board): The Ministers are still considering the draft. This time last year, we gave an update. When the Programme for Government was published, we produced a draft based on the "People", "Planet", "Prosperity" approach in the Programme for Government and submitted that to the Ministers. We got responses and fed back on their comments. That was around Easter time. In June, we had the A5 judgement, which is important to the context if you are trying to put forward a long-term investment plan. We have also had the Budget situation. We have had feedback from the private office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister in the past three weeks, and we are trying to get a meeting organised to discuss that. However, I cannot tell you when it will be approved: in the Opposition debate in October, it was said that there would be one during the mandate.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): You mention the A5. Obviously, that is a live legal issue. I declare an interest as the A5 is in my constituency and I am a public campaigner for the delivery of the upgrade. I am actively engaged in that process. It is a very obvious problem by all accounts.

I have a number of points on what has been said. Fundamentally, in the interests of the public record, who is accountable for the delay in the MOR? Is it the Department of Finance or the Executive?

Mr Gibson: The Department of Finance is responsible for providing an MOR. We have that responsibility. Where an MOR is cross-cutting, the Executive must agree it, which requires political agreement. However, for the record, it is important that we have provided the work to allow that political decision to be taken. Obviously, we cannot make the political decision, but you have the assurance that the material was provided to enable it to be taken.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Yes, there is no question that it is a difficult situation. However, it is preventing progress and, obviously, to a degree, preventing the Committee from carrying out its functions in this instance. This is a substantial delay: to be honest, it is entirely unacceptable. At what point does the delay become a breach of accountability norms?

Mr Gibson: It is not something that I think about putting a particular time frame on. However, when you think of the importance of our role, the piece that weighs heavily with the accounting officer is making sure that you can do what you are able to do within your gift. Parts of this clearly hang on an investment strategy, but we are progressing many elements of the enabling actions, with ministerial permission, to make sure that we can make progress where we are able to.

There is one particular complication, which is that there could at any point be a political decision to craft a different MOR. For example, if the decision was taken that there would be no ISNI, we would have to do some work to alter the MOR. However, when the instruction is that it is coming, it would be a waste of effort to produce something else when the document that much of this hangs on is still to come. From my point of view as accounting officer, looking at what we have in the enabling actions, political decision-making could, of course, take this in a different direction. Our best advice, as officials, is that the enabling actions still look like the sorts of things that you should be doing to address the questions of concern. That is still be the advice that I recommend at this point.

If you had a clear steer that an ISNI was not coming, you might decide that you had to do a different type of MOR. However, when it is due to come, the best thing that I can do as accounting officer is decide that we will work to the agreed enabling actions, which would form the bulk of what we would give as advice to Ministers for any proper MOR.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Yes, Neil, you are honest in saying that the accountability for the delay of the MOR falls with you, as accounting officer of the Department. Will you give us a brief insight into your role in this? You are responsible for leading this. What happens if you are not getting progress?

Mr Gibson: Yes. I keep referring to the enabling actions. I have to ask myself whether, in not having ISNI, there are other things that we could or should do. Is there anything in the public interest that is being held back by the ISNI not being there? It would provide much greater clarity, and you can see why it would be a miss. However, from looking at what is going on — I am happy to talk about any of that — I believe that the Department is taking forward the things that I, as an official, would recommend. Therefore, I can content myself that the delay is not delaying important work on professions, training, data or projects, which would underpin any response to your report.

Were that not in existence — if we did not have a plan or something that we were working to and that our committee was working to — the actions that I take might be different because we would have to find an alternative approach. It would be a waste of officials' time, but, more important, it would be potentially misleading if we tried to write something else and then left that with the Minister to say, "Yes, but, when an ISNI comes, we will do it again".

It seems a bit odd being here again and still saying that it is coming soon. There will be a point, I suppose, when that will be different. However, as I said, I look down the enabling actions and think that they are what I would put forward to address the questions raised by your report. Therefore, I remain content that, while it is not ideal, providing you with updates on what we are doing in those areas still feels like the best that we, as officials, can do without political guidance to do something else.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Yes, I get that. There is a bit of grey space here. You have said that you are being told continually that it is coming. Given that we are holding you to account right now, I am asking you, as accounting officer, what you have done. Do you go to the Executive and ask whether it is forthcoming and what the timescale will be for its implementation? Given that we are holding you to account, I am asking you what you have done. Are you at a brick wall with the Executive when it comes to getting this progressed?

Mr Gibson: I keep my Minister briefed on what we are doing. That is the main action that I take. He took the step of writing to ask when that would be coming, as we mentioned, so there are nudges that we can provide. However, I will be honest: my main focus is to continue driving forward the initiatives that underpin the things that, hopefully, will help to address the questions that the Committee raised in its report.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): OK. You have told the Committee that the principal reason for the delay in issuing the MOR is that nine of the 12 recommendations rely on the governance arrangements established under the draft ISNI report. When specifically asked, you provided updates on the remaining three recommendations on 20 November 2025, just prior to Christmas. Do you consider that progress in areas that could be reported to the Committee could and should be provided more proactively in order to avoid the Committee's having to continually chase those expected updates?

Mr Gibson: Yes. We are happy to take the Committee's steer on whether, for example, we provide the highlight report every quarter, which takes in all 12 recommendations and includes areas that would overlap. We are happy to provide that proactively if that is of help to you, rather than being chased for it. We can certainly do that. Last week, we took the step of issuing the update after the board meeting. Obviously, the hope is that we will not have to do that much longer. As that continues, yes, we are happy to report on all the progress that we are making.

Ms Sharon Smyth (Department of Finance): I know that you have asked for progress on the three recommendations that are not linked to ISNI, but you will recognise that one of those also needs Executive approval. It is about alternative mechanisms for delivering major capital projects. We need to put the three recommendations in a bundle, as a MOR, to the Executive. As officials, we are doing as much as we can in our line of business, under the direction of the NICS Board, because Jayne took the decision, even before the PAC hearing, to set up the ISNI committee to ensure that she is assured that we are taking actions to address the root causes.

I suppose that the draft MOR went to our Minister and the decision was made that we could not really put that ahead of an ISNI because, effectively, we would be bringing to the Executive something that they had not agreed. What the MOR really relies on is the governance arrangements and the mechanisms that we are putting forward. They could agree to accept them or not accept them. The Executive have to agree to accept even the three recommendations that are not specifically linked to ISNI in order for us to provide progress on the Executive's approach. I hope that that makes sense. The MOR is really a ministerial or Executive response rather than an official response. The best that we have been able to do is to provide regular updates to the Committee. We are happy to continue to do that.

We hope that it does not take any longer because we are very linked in with the rest of the UK in this respect. We know that there is a national strategy and a strategy in the South. We really want a strategy in the North, so that we can say that we have a strategy, and underpinning that strategy is our approach to how we will take it forward. That is really what we are trying to get.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thank you. OK. I will come in later in the session.

Pádraig Delargy MLA is coming in remotely. Pádraig, can you see and hear us?

Mr Delargy: Thanks, Chair. Yes. Thanks to the panel members for their answers so far.

I start by asking about the delays and how they prevent action. How does the delay on ISNI prevent action being taken to ensure a clear understanding across the Civil Service of the importance of gaining social licence?

Mr Gibson: As Sharon has explained, the Executive could make different decisions. They might agree to go in or set a different political direction. However, there have been strong conversations about the concept of social licence. It is one of the enabling actions on which we have been able to make the most significant progress. Scott and I chatted about it earlier this week. It is one of the ones that we have been able to push on most significantly. You can never go ahead of a ministerial decision, but the feedback so far has been almost universally supportive of the concept and importance of social licence. We have made good progress on it. I will let Scott fill you in on that.

Mr Wilson: It is enabling action 8, and, as Neil said, we have made good progress on it. We have put forward a definition to get broad agreement on exactly what it is. I know that that has been talked about in the Committee. The definition that we have established is:

We have set that out as a definition so that everyone understands what we are trying to do. It also helps people to understand the difference between social licence and social value.

Social licence has to start right at the beginning. There is no point in applying social licence to a project that has a contractor on site; in that scenario, you have missed the point. At the very start of a project, there is a document called a "risk potential assessment", which is used to decide whether the project needs to go through the gateway process. We have added elements of social licence so that you decide from a risk perspective whether you need to set up a social licence work stream, which is defined in the procurement policy note (PPN). That alerts the people involved in the project to the fact that they need to set one up. They then engage with SIB. We have set aside some resources for that. We have been writing guidance and compiling a toolkit. We picked the Magee expansion programme as a pilot project. Since we set up the ISNI committee in May 2024, that is probably the first big project that has initiated that from the start. We are working with the DFE team. We secured some resource for it, so it now has a dedicated social licence work stream. Our plan is that, in the next number of months, it will no longer be an enabling action; we will look to operationalise it. We will bring a business plan through the SIB early in the new financial year.

You asked whether that has been delayed because there is not an ISNI: it has not. We have got on with that. It is one that we have had great success with. Not having an ISNI means that you do not have a 10-year view of the pipeline ahead of you. That does not help to manage resources; it ends up being quite ad hoc. Having those enabling actions and a 10-year investment plan that details the projects that we will do over the next 10 years helps you to organise yourself, helps you to organise resources and helps the market to organise itself. We have managed to avoid delay with that one; we have moved ahead with it.

Mr Gibson: The resourcing point comes up a lot on this topic. We have to recognise the size and scale of the economy and society that we have. The level of resource is not simply a matter of getting more, buying more or training more. There is a finite supply of some of the skill sets. Even in areas such as social licence, it is about having trained professionals in order to know that you can deploy them to the appropriate project when they are most needed. That speaks to some of the ways in which the NICS Board is changing its ways of working to think about the capital programme more holistically. There may be specialists needed in different areas at different times. That may not necessarily be in your Department; it might be elsewhere in the system. We realise that, in things as complex as social licensing, procurement and contract negotiation, there will always be a limit. Every other jurisdiction is struggling to get the supply and talent to drive those projects. Given that we know that we will always be constrained, having that clarity on the pipeline is one of the most important things to allow us, where we can, to make sure that the right resource is in the right place at the right time.

Mr Delargy: Thanks for that clarity.

My second question is about the letter that you sent in October about the time frames for the cross-cutting MORs. I know that the long-standing practice from Westminster is that there is an eight-week time frame for those. You noted that that was causing some difficulties and raised concerns about that situation. When did that become an issue and why? In this specific case, what are the barriers?

Mr Gibson: It has increasingly become an issue. It is partly to do with the fact that the more detailed a recommendation is, the more thought it takes from a Department and the more you need to put genuine resource on these things. Of course, if you are holding the central coordinating role, you have a particular responsibility and you must try to persuade your colleagues to get the relevant information that you need. That can sometimes prove a little bureaucratically challenging. You have to make sure that you send it out, and maybe someone will come back and say that they have something coming up in two weeks that is relevant and that they need that to happen first. Then, by the time you find that you have got them all back, one of the dates is out of date and you have to back out again. There is a little bit of what you might call "bureaucratic sluggishness". However, what it requires is something that we have been trying to do, and I know that the Treasury Officer of Accounts took a look at it. It is a call and a criticism that we accept, and it is a leadership criticism across the Civil Service leadership board, where we as a group of accounting officers have to look at what a cross-cutting MOR is and, essentially, treat that as a cross-cutting responsibility for that group of accounting officers.

In response to that particular point, we are already working on ways of recirculating directly through me at accounting officer level rather than sending it at official level. Sorry, I am an official, but that is still a different level of officialdom. One of those key escalations is based on where we have reflected on the eight weeks, and Stuart kindly came back. Essentially, that said that, yes, there are bureaucratic reasons but we could do better. One of the ways that we will lift that up is by having more regular conversations — we did it last week — at our permanent secretaries stocktake (PSS) meeting to say that it is an accounting officer responsibility to make sure that whichever one of us holds the coordinating strings has the support of all of the other accounting officers. Historically, to be frank, we had let that work through the system, and it came back through and then came up to you. Recently, I saw one where I was not content that the quality was quite where I would have wanted it, and I would not let it go out. There was no way that I was going to meet the deadline but not be happy with what was going out in my name. We have had to escalate that a little, but it is a fair and reasonable criticism. We asked for it to be looked at. It is easy to think that you are getting so busy that you cannot manage to find the time. Stuart and his team came back and said clearly, "No, you will just need to do a bit better". We take that criticism.

Mr Delargy: To delve into that a bit more, Neil, I understand what you have raised. The cross-cutting nature makes anything more challenging. You talked about the fact that, if is under your Department, for instance, you will seek the support of other colleagues. You are talking about a broader conversation around the responsibility to make it cross-cutting. I appreciate that you might take the lead for something in your Department. Who anchors the overall conversation, and how do we ensure that there is an accountability mechanism put into that from the get-go? With the best will in the world, we know that, sometimes, when these things come up, they do not progress. It is not really about the specifics of your Department; I am trying to understand for my sake the broader conversation about who anchors that.

Mr Gibson: That is a fair question to raise because, at the minute, that anchoring sits with whichever is the lead Department. You tend to put that down, ask your officials to provide the information, gather that from other Departments and then bring that back. If that comes back to you in a way that you are not entirely content with and you have to go back out again, that is easily done if it is only in your Department. However, if it is out to another Department, that adds a delay. The way, I think, to resolve that is to have more of that consideration as an item at the board or at PSS level when we meet on a Friday: "Where is our regular status with our MORs? Who is holding the pen? Are you getting everything you need?". It is really about that escalation to say that the board or the PSS group takes a level of responsibility, whereas, historically, to answer your question, it has really rested with whichever is the lead Department. That can, necessarily, lead to a bit of back and forth, and you just do not have the same control. The collective group of accounting officers should have that control, so that is something that we have been looking at.

Mr Delargy: I agree with that synopsis and with what you recommend. To push even further on that, I think that someone on that board needs to take responsibility for looking at that so that it does not fall back to each Department. The problem is that, when it is on one Department, it is poor, but, when it is a collective responsibility, the response could also be very poor. There needs to be somebody in that who has the overarching responsibility to look at time frames and at the accountability mechanism. I appreciate that you are all busy on individual projects, but I am worried that we could be back here having the same conversation.

Ms Smyth: I am one of the officials who has led on three Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO) and PAC responses. Generally, they go well, because every official understands the importance of scrutiny Committees and of PAC in particular. I think that they give a sigh of relief when they are not the lead Department, but, in saying that, they definitely put resources towards getting responses for us.

The reason why the TOA looked at the timescale is that, for cross-cutting issues, I had to collate the responses from all the Departments. This one in particular went to the ISNI committee, and then it had to go to the NICS Board. It is about scheduling. I think that the NICS Board meets every second month. If the NICS Board agrees but has comments, those come back and are collated. A final response goes to the Minister, and the Minister then takes that to the Executive. The Executive agenda is obviously outside our control. Landing that within eight weeks is difficult, but it is still good to have a stretching target for cross-cutting issues. The TOA's analysis was that most cross-cutting issues fall outside that. The major capital project one was an outlier, so we definitely should not say that it was typical of those. It has been complicated by the fact that we are dependent on something else going through the Executive that has been delayed for a number of reasons.

Mr Delargy: Definitely. It is not unique either. As a scrutiny Committee, our role involves providing a level of support and working out what can be done better in a positive way. Coming out of today's meeting, we as a Committee could look at where that accountability mechanism is. This follows a Westminster model, but other jurisdictions that are more comparable to ours may have a better way of doing this. Coming out of today's meeting, that is probably work that we as a Committee can do. Thanks for your useful responses.

Mr Gildernew: On social value and social licence, forgive me if I missed part of your answer, Neil, but you essentially said that the skills to do that are in short supply and big demand around the world. Is there any formal work on those skills to at least start to develop courses or whatever?

Mr Gibson: I will hand over to Scott in a moment. You are absolutely right. Although the social value concept is quite well understood and there are some skills around that, there are some great exemplars in France, Canada and elsewhere of the type of sophistication required to do social licence well. The skill set required is a particular type of personality and type of skill. There is a limit to it, so the best thing, of course, is to be involved in that work stream. We now have some dedicated resources in SIB to bring more people through and train them in the service. There are people who are tangentially familiar with that type of work, but it is not stakeholder engagement; it is a different thing. There is quite a subtle level of training and engagement needed to be a real talent in this type of role. Although it is in its infancy, the more it becomes embedded, the better that will become. We are looking at toolkits that people can read and say, "I could be very active in that type of role", which will, hopefully, drive some talent towards it. I am sure that Scott —.

Mr Gildernew: Before Scott comes in, I just want to say that that could be a game changer in unlocking some of the issues around delays. In light of that, we should look at home-grown talent. If that is to be a key skill, we need to get started now.

Mr Wilson: Yes. I slightly disagree with Neil's points. I think that a lot of it is to do with having skills such as comms skills and stakeholder engagement, but you also need to understand how infrastructure works. A lot of people in SIB who have worked on comms for, for example, Strule or other projects have effectively been converted and become the social licence team in SIB. There are six or seven of them. We have put them forward through Sharon's team as certified gateway reviewers, so, when projects come to do their gateways, we will have access to a social licence expert to look at the social licence elements in the gateway. We are rolling it out across our organisation and beyond it. We are having a big session; it was meant to be the other day, when we had the storm. We had to postpone it, but it will be held next week. We are bringing over 100 people from SIB and training them not only on becoming social licence experts but on understanding its importance if you are a project manager. Then we have what we call a senior responsible officer (SRO) event. SROs from across NICS and arm's-length bodies (ALBs) come together, facilitated by Sharon's team. It is a session in a couple of weeks, focused on social licence for the same reasons. We are trying to get people to understand it first and then to build a capability.

Mr Gibson: One of the things that are most relevant to that, as seen through all the lenses of this project, is the building of a community and a network where people feel that there are others in the system whom they can ring and who have been through it. It is the same for contract negotiators or procurement experts. Bringing the SRO group together will probably be the biggest change for me in my time. It allows them to almost reach out to each other. When we talk about breaking down silos, that is what that really looks like: networks of communities of practice or people who know the phone number of the person they need to ring, who might have been through this before. As Scott said, we are really trying to embrace that on this. That is not the only area. There are others around our delivery professions, working stuff in other enabling actions that speak to the same point, which is, "How do we grow our own community of experts?". We will always find it difficult to buy on the global market, which is where they are in demand.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thanks, Colm.

I listened to what Pádraig asked, and it just does not seem like anything has really moved, Neil. I was extremely frustrated, as Chair of the Committee, during the evidence session that you kindly attended alongside Jayne Brady and a number of others. Do you recall the key criticisms that the Committee had of your Department? Our report was damning.

Mr Gibson: I remember quite well criticism of delays and who was responsible.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Delays, who was responsible and what else? Cost overruns.

Mr Gibson: Yes, I am sorry. My head was all in governance and structures.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I deliberately asked you that, Neil, because I want to remind you and the entire table of just how much of a concern this is for the Committee. It was an extremely critical report that we published. It was not reached lightly. The findings that we had made clear recommendations, following on from recommendations made by a previous PAC in 2020. We are in 2026, and I hear the same excuses repeated. That is not acceptable. You have answered questions and said that there are issues in getting responses from the Executive. However, that is the same thing as the previous Committee heard a number of years ago. Yes, the ISNI delays are now an issue as well, but it just seems to be a recurring dead end. What has materially been done that recognises the concerns of the Committee and is putting improvements in place?

Mr Gibson: I can only put forward what we consider to be improvements. You say that you are seeing the same old things: it does not feel like that to me in terms of what we have done around the professions, social licence, procurement and updating our regs. It does not feel like that to me: if it does to the Committee, I can only say that I disagree that we are not making progress. If the exam question, however, is "Are there are some fundamental concerns about cost overruns?", that is clearly the case. As we discussed at the last meeting, the root cause report reflects on the problem that is being faced globally. Therefore, it would be a little churlish to say that there is something uniquely Northern Ireland about the challenge of delivering capital projects on time and on budget. It is absolutely a problem in all the nearest jurisdictions.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): We do it much worse.

Mr Gibson: We have put together what, we think, is an appropriate response and set of actions. If the Committee is not compelled by that, I am not sure I have anything better to offer.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): OK, Neil. You were before us at our previous inquiry. I digress slightly, because members have other questions, but I remind you of what you said to the Committee at an evidence session. You accepted that the Department of Finance needed to take a stronger, more assertive central role in overseeing major capital projects across Departments. Do you remember saying that?

Mr Gibson: Yes.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): OK. That means a number of things in practice. It means that you move beyond guidance and advice. Have you done that?

Mr Gibson: Yes.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): OK. It also means that you actively challenge Departments on cost, schedule and risk. Have you done that?

Mr Gibson: To an extent.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Where is the evidence of that?

Mr Gibson: Obviously it has not landed in the way that I had hoped, but I would have thought that you would have seen it in our enabling actions. For example, an ISNI committee cannot challenge accounting officers or hold them to account on the overruns or the data if they do not have the data.

We are working hard to get the data map system fully completed and filled. We had a conversation this week at our NICS Board about some of the provisional data coming out of that, with a strong message going back to the accounting officers who had projects that were not fully completed on that system to make sure that they were completed in the next couple of weeks. That then provides the data on which to scrutinise. It is difficult. I have said that we have put our best efforts forward in this response. Ultimately, in order to scrutinise the delivery of a capital project somewhere else, you have to have that data and information, so the first building block must be to put that together. I consider that to be going beyond policy statements or "the same words", as you put it.

Our progress is quite good, but it is not where I would like it to be on the data map. That moves the committee from saying, "How are we doing on projects?", to saying, "Let's look at the dashboard, let's see where the key points of delay are, and let's see whether there are any actions that we can take as a collective leadership group to shorten those particular delays or key root causes". We have gone further. There is a limitation. As I said in my previous evidence, we have to try to take that collective leadership in the Department where we are all concerned about project delivery, rather than just looking to whatever Department that delivery might be in.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): You have the difficult task of being the lead of that Department as accounting officer. As a Committee, our expectation from our recommendations was that your role would have been more as an enforcer than a bystander. However, it appears that you are more of a bystander than an enforcer. Is that fair enough, or is it too critical?

Mr Gibson: I am not sure that I like the term "bystander", so I will say that that is too critical. However, I do not see a world where it could be "enforcer" under the current constitutional arrangements. There are nine accounting officers. One of the things that we have to do collectively is hold each other to a level. Ultimately, I am responsible to my Minister, but we have a collective responsibility. I am not a bystander but perhaps also not an enforcer.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I get from what you say that it is a difficult situation. I was playing devil's advocate a wee bit with that.

I will remind you of another thing before we move on. You committed to strengthening the capital governance framework, including clear accountability, earlier intervention when projects drift and better escalation of warning signs. Have you made material benefits in that regard?

Mr Gibson: Yes. I will bring Sharon in on that, but we are getting better, in that we are having conversations about actual data. I can speak about my accounting officer role. I see my own gateway reports. They may not be major capital reports, but it is about how we react to them and how we share common lessons. I know that we have made some progress in that regard.

Ms Smyth: I certainly think that the ISNI committee has turned a corner. You got the board effectiveness review for the NICS Board. Some of the perm secs around the table felt quite uncomfortable, because the ISNI committee was more or less stepping in to say, "Well, what are you doing about this?", or, "You've had successive reds in your gateway reviews. We want to do a deep dive". We have also done an end-to-end review of the Department of Education's capital projects, which was agreed by the ISNI committee, the head of the Civil Service and the Minister of Education. We have stepped in to projects to see what the end-to-end system looks like, whether it is over-processed, whether there is too much bureaucracy, whether we can streamline things and whether the roles and responsibilities are clear when it comes to how people deliver capital projects in education. The next one that we are moving to is health. Neil has also commissioned two reviews of integrated delivery models for the Department for Communities in housing and education.

We are taking strides. It is not a comfortable place for most people. We believe that it is right to make people uncomfortable about the status quo, because we have had a critical report that says that the status quo is not delivering. However, I would certainly not like to call DOF "an enforcer". Once you get the enforcement role, you maybe get silos or brick walls coming down. We are enabling. We are working collaboratively and collectively. Every official in the arena knows about the PAC report and the previous NIAO reports. This is not being taken lightly. There is discomfort about the system. It is right to have that until we get to a settled position in which we can give assurance that the delivery models that we have in place are streamlined and efficient and only as bureaucratic as they need to be.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I appreciate the forthrightness of it, generally. I am just ensuring that we do what we are expected to do as a Committee.

Neil, you positioned ISNI as the main vehicle for reform, stating that it set clear priorities for capital investment, improved sequencing and affordability and strengthened discipline across the system. By our measurement of success, it is not operating. It is the main vehicle, but there has really been no progress in that regard. ISNI remains unapproved, overspends have continued to rise, delays have worsened and many of our recommendations, which we made just short of a year ago, remain unimplemented. There is clear concern for me, as Committee Chair, that there is an accountability gap between what you, as accounting officer, promised and what has been delivered. Now, you have pointed to the frustrations and why that is the case — I appreciate your being forthright — but this does not seem to be moving. That is the key point that I am making. You have attempted to answer — I appreciate it — but I am just reminding you of how difficult the process was when we were going through that inquiry and just how frustrated Committee members were collectively about our findings, all the more so now that, nearly a year down the line and given that you said that ISNI was the main vehicle for reform, we are not really seeing any implementation and it is just not there in practice.

Mr Gibson: Yes. Obviously, I think that most people would recognise that, when you have finite resources, having a clear pipeline and understanding what is coming next would be a prerequisite to having a strategic response to capital projects. That does not exist, and that is outside any official's control. It does not mean that we can do nothing. Hopefully, we have articulated what we are doing, and we will be in good shape when it comes, but there is a limit. When you are sitting, as I have been, in the other role of helping the team to craft budgets and do not have the ideal scenario — the dream scenario — of already knowing what the programme of key projects is and in what order, it is suboptimal and there is a limit to what you can do. I hope that you can see that we are not taking the lack of ISNI as a reason not to ensure that all the bits are ready to go when it finally makes its way out.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): No, I get that. The point that I make is that it is a major stumbling block to effective change. That is my point.

Mr Wilson: Chair, can I come in there, just to add to that?

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Yes, briefly, because I want to bring in Tom. Go ahead, Scott.

Mr Wilson: Right, sorry. I hear you say that your recommendations are unimplemented. However, if you go through the enabling actions and cross-check them with the recommendations, you see that things are being implemented. Our enabling action 1 aligns with recommendations 10 and 12. Enabling action 2 aligns with recommendations 11 and 12. Enabling action 3 aligns with recommendation 9. Enabling action 6 aligns with recommendations 2 and 5. The procurement action, number 7, aligns with recommendation 7. On the social licence, enabling action 8 lines up with recommendation 8. I understand your frustration that the recommendations are not being pushed ahead. However, if you look at the enabling actions that we are taking, you see that they are, in effect, activating your recommendations.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thanks for the clarification.

Mr T Buchanan: I will just follow on from where the Chair was in his line of questioning. At a previous Committee, you advised that, where possible, progress continued to be made on the 12 enabling actions agreed by the board in May 2024. Now, you have touched on some of them, but I want to go back to that. What has been the demonstrable impact of those enabling actions to date on the delivery of major capital projects? What can we look at to see that that has been done and delivered? That is where we are coming from as a Committee. We want to see what has been delivered with the mechanisms that you put in place to allow that delivery to take place.

Mr Wilson: The first point is that a lot of the enabling actions deal with the early stages of a project. If a project has got on-site — in construction — it is less likely to have delays or problems there. Our interventions are targeted at the early stage. I have mentioned the social licence. We are now making a difference to the Magee expansion programme with a social licence resource and work stream there. With regard to the business case, enabling action 3, we have introduced changes through Neil's team.

Every year, £2·5 billion of projects or spend go through the system.

Using the 80:20 rule, 80% of the value is in 20% of the projects, so 80% of the volume is in low-value projects of under £20 million. We agreed, through the NICS Board, that we would move what are called the delegated expenditure limits up from £5 million to £10 million, with an agreement that we could go further, subject to analysis. That takes out the layer of checks at DOF level, which can take up to six weeks for any one project, no matter how big it is. That layer is unnecessary, in our view. That frees up time for that person, taking volume off their desk for them to look at the more important stuff. That is now cascading down between Departments and their arm's-length bodies. For example, in housing, the Department for Communities has moved the delegated expenditure limit with the Housing Executive up to, I think, £12·5 million from £7 million. Therefore, you could get a housing development in the order of 200 units through with just the Housing Executive's board approving it and not having to go through the Department. We are starting to get changes through on pace and reducing volume. It is the volume of approvals that is cluttering the system. We are seeing a difference in that regard.

Enabling action 4, the planning improvement programme, is largely DFI's business, but we have added it into the enabling actions. DFI has made a series of changes around validation checks and around a statutory rule for public engagements. It recently pushed forward the strategic planning policy statement with an addition on renewables. The statutory target for considering a major application is 30 weeks. The results year-on-year show that, in the first six months of the previous year, it was taking an average of nearly 41 weeks. For last year, it is down to 34 weeks. It is not hitting the target, but it is getting closer to the target. We are starting to see already benefits from the enabling actions.

Mr T Buchanan: What pace are the 12 enabling actions moving at? Is it slow, is it fast or is it dead slow?

Mr Wilson: It varies. Social licence is going really well, very quickly. I think that we will be done with the enabling by the end of this financial year. Enabling action 10, which we call the infrastructure needs assessment, is, by its very nature, a very long-term thing. We have been doing that for nearly two years now in stages, looking at economic infrastructure, and we are just about to finish looking at social and environmental infrastructure. That action is looking across the system at how each Department plans, what the state of its assets is, where it sees need and what data it uses to project need. That will be a long-term one. It is not slow; it is just that, in its nature, it will be a long-term one.

The data map that Neil mentioned earlier has been difficult for Departments. We have developed seven KPIs and agreed those with the NICS Board: those cover time, cost, people, capacity and capability, business case process, planning process, procurement process and carbon. The Departments have never collected some of that before. Taking business case, people have naturally defaulted to how long it takes for a business case to be approved. We are now asking them how long it takes to put one together as well. It is same with planning, where we ask how long it takes to put a planning application together. That is information that they have never collected before that we are now asking them to start to collect. I am quite happy that we will meet where we need to be. It has been a bit slow in the past three to six months, but, as Neil said, we used the authority of the NICS Board in November and this week to try to pick up the pace on that and get people to move quicker.

Mr Gibson: As Scott said, the very nature of this in considering the gestation of projects is that the biggest impacts will be in the projects that are about to start. If you start in the right way with the right skills, the right engagement and the right data, your chances of success are greatly enhanced. It is much more difficult to bring a project back into a timeline when it is very well developed or in its latter stages.

One of the important points that Scott touched on is the development of KPIs. With those, we as a board are seeing exactly how long things are taking so that we can really pinpoint that. The truth of the matter is that, across the system, we did not hold that information or collate it or have to carry out show-and-tell, if you will, in front of our colleagues at the board. Sharon picked it out when talking about board effectiveness. The NICS Board is becoming slightly more uncomfortable and challenging for my colleagues and me, in a good way, not quite a PAC way. It is in that direction of travel, and that is a healthy thing.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): That is a compliment, is it?

Mr Gibson: That is the biggest compliment that I could give you, Chair. It certainly feels more of this nature. The question is, "Where are we with those KPIs?". For example, I am asked the same on people matters, which I have responsibility for. "How are we doing on the time?". That is a very different way. If you do not have that data, it is very hard to pinpoint where the slowness is; whereas we are now developing KPIs to help to answer that.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): That is helpful.

Mr T Buchanan: What assurance can you give the Committee that the current approach does not weaken the Committee's ability to track progress and hold the system to account in a timely way?

Mr Gibson: I am very confident that the piece — obviously, subject to an MOR being agreed in line with some of the things that we talked about — will give you access to material that you would not have had before and allow a collective position to be provided and an assurance. Previously, that would not have been in place. We will be in a much better position to answer the question about the pace of progress than we would have been in the past. I am much more confident that the data picture that we are now building, though it is not yet complete, will give us and you much more clarity. Were you to return to that question in a few years, you would have a much richer data source from which to draw your evidence than you did the last time.

Mr T Buchanan: Is it going to take a few years before we get there?

Mr Gibson: Each of the projects that are starting now will have that material, so, from here, it will be easier. Obviously, however, we will have the long tail of some of those that perhaps are still in construction.

I should say, in any conversation such as this, that I am not a deliverer of capital projects myself. There are, of course, very specific things that can catch up a particular project: something may trip something up, legislatively or challenge-wise. That is why it is important to have all the data, so that you can pick out what exceptions are doing to the overall averages, and so forth.

Mr Gildernew: We are moving to the issue of strategic oversight and prioritisation. The Committee has identified a clear need for a strategic approach to delivering the infrastructure that we need; we need it badly in many cases. We recognise that that is within a constrained funding environment and that there is limited specialist capacity, which we have talked about previously and today. That all requires joined-up, long-term planning, prioritisation and clear reporting.

My question, Neil, is this: in the absence of an approved investment strategy, what mechanisms are in place to report to the Executive on progress or emerging issues with major capital projects and to ensure that spend is being appropriately prioritised?

Mr Gibson: That is a very challenging question to answer in the absence of an agreed ISNI, because, obviously, the big driver of the question that you have asked is, "What are the political priorities in the decision that the elected Members have chosen on prioritisation?". As officials, we can make sure that the right material is there for them to make that informed decision. We have talked about some of the material that we have spoken about. Ultimately, the prioritisation of what matters most and in which order is one that has a very strong political overlay. It is not entirely political; you have to have data on economic, social and environmental infrastructure. We have done assessment of the projects through SIB to help the Executive to inform that decision. I feel confident in saying that the material in terms of the data, the access and the understanding of the people and where they are in the system is in a much better shape for when that arrives. Of course, as officials, we cannot make prioritisation decisions.

Mr Gildernew: That takes me back to the actual question. While I accept that there are all those elements to it, I asked about what mechanisms are in place, short of an ISNI. What are the current mechanisms that allow the progress to be tracked and reported?

Mr Gibson: One of the reasons why an ISNI matters is that it will bring a level of cross-departmental view that you do not have at the minute. As it stands, you have a very old-school approach to bidding for capital money at a Budget time, with cases made for different projects and different political brokerage around that. The decisions that DOF can make about the capital allocations come purely from that bids process and our detailed knowledge of Departments through Supply and our teams; they do not come from any direction on what the overarching priority is. Therefore, there is a limitation to that.

We do, however, have our gateway processes around the capital projects that we do. Each accounting officer is accountable to his Committee and, indeed, through this Committee for the projects that they run in their Department. I cannot answer on their behalf, but each one of them has their own assessment of their projects within their area and the order in which they put them. Of course, the big hope here is that we now have systems that allow that to be taken in a more collegial way, rather than just within Departments. Major capital projects have a particular skew; they sit more particularly in a number of particular Departments. We have to be careful, as a system, that that does not mean that all the resources go there; hence, the development of project delivery elements of that.

A very small but important point is that, although a little way away yet, improvements are coming through Intergr8 and the new HR system that will help us to pinpoint where different skills are across the system in order to deploy them where they are most needed.

The groundwork is there, but nothing will really be sufficient on the key question of prioritisation. Each accounting officer can give advice to their Minister about prioritisation in their Department, but they are limited in how they can assess that against what the prioritisation might be. We have the Programme for Government, but, without an ISNI, that tends to be a little bit more departmentally vouched for than you might expect.

Mr Wilson: May I add to that, Colm? I mentioned enabling action 10, which is the infrastructure needs assessment. That is about our looking beyond the current ISNI, when that is approved, and towards the next one on a mechanism to better prioritise or better provide advice on prioritisation. That is built on the approach taken in Scotland. The Scottish Government have just gone out to consultation on their infrastructure needs assessment, which has taken quite a few years to come through. As I said, we have done the economic infrastructure baselining. We are about to finish the social and environmental baselining. In the next few months, the next stage will be to put together proposals on how to undertake an infrastructure needs assessment and who will undertake it. You will remember that, in previous years, there was talk of an infrastructure commission. That is the kind of thing that an infrastructure commission does. It looks at needs assessments and provides advice. That is what the former National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) in London used to do. It has now been merged to form the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA). We are looking to bring forward proposals on how we will do it differently in the future.

Mr Gildernew: Right. This is the final question from me on this section. I will come back in a wee bit later. On the Committee's recommendations, what actions are you, as an accounting officer, taking to ensure that momentum is maintained pending Executive decisions?

Mr Gibson: There are a couple of things. For me as an accounting officer, given the limited capital in DOF, a lot of areas do not fall to it in the same way that they fall to Infrastructure, Health or Education. However, by way of accountability, what we can do, as we have discussed, is make as much progress as we can so that we are ready to go as soon as ISNI is there. In the absence of that, as an accounting officer, I have a role in making sure that the Budget allocation process flows through and that advice is provided up to the Minister on the various bids for capital. Each accounting officer has responsibility for ensuring that their capital is being correctly deployed and prioritised. Much of what we have talked about today is about what the future state will look like, but building that is well in train. The fact that those projects are now being discussed at the NICS Board is a change. We are now getting better data — it is not perfect yet — and we are able to use that to bring forward examples that allow the NICS Board to provide scrutiny and challenge to accounting officers that maybe were not there in the past.

Ms Smyth: I will add to that. I was responsible for drafting the MOR in consultation with all Departments. I find that I am going in every month and updating the draft. I have tracked changes to bring to the Minister when it is ready to go, but a lot of them are done. The first one is, as you know, on the board effectiveness report, which you have been given. We constantly update you on the progress on recommendation 4 on the enabling actions. Social licence has been done. Recommendation 7 is on the attractiveness of the market. We are working with the construction sector on that, and we have given you its feedback, but a lot of it is outside our control. It is looking for waste water infrastructure investment. It wants an investment strategy. It wants a four-year capital expenditure to be agreed so that it has a funded pipeline of projects. Even with a pipeline of projects, it is not sufficient for our industry to gear up. The industry is very clearly saying to us, "We really need a funded pipeline, because we cannot hold our teams here". We have already mentioned the unattractiveness of our market. We know that other sectors are getting their strategies agreed, putting in investment and funding that investment. When we do that, that is where significant progress will be seen. We can do a pipeline and an integrated procurement plan. We can look at the investment, and we can schedule our resources in a much more streamlined way than we have done in the past. We are hopeful that, when we get that, we will absolutely be able to move that forward, because the momentum will continue.

What we are trying to do at the minute is keep people on track. We are trying not to stand down any of the ISNI enabling actions and say, "We'll wait until the investment strategy comes out". Progress is being made on every action. In my work stream, which is recommendation 7 and enabling action 7, I am supposed to be developing an integrated procurement plan, but unless I have a prioritised list of what you want to procure, I cannot give you a plan. We hope that we will get that out. If we get information on how Departments are going to spend their money and what they are going to do when it comes to capital expenditure over four years, that will definitely give the industry the confidence to gear up to deliver that.

Mr Gildernew: Thank you.

Mr Dunne: Thank you, folks, for your answers so far. It is worth setting out the context as a reminder for all of us of the scale of the issue at hand. The Chair and the Deputy Chair mentioned the £3 billion overspend almost a year ago, when the PAC reported. The context is important.

I will ask about the board's effectiveness. An independent effectiveness review was commenced during the Committee's inquiry. We have received that review and the associated action plan. A number of things are highlighted, including the fact that the board's effectiveness is constrained and that there is an overarching lack of authority. It is difficult for us to see how any of the measures that are being taken forward will make any difference to that. Given those findings, I think that all of us around the table are concerned that the action plan may not ultimately address the underlying issues. Do you, as an accounting officer and a team, consider the board to be effective? How could it be improved, ultimately?

Mr Gibson: In the constitutional arrangement that we have, I believe that it is stepping up to be as good as it can be. As you have seen from the board effectiveness response, more challenge is being put to us. The non-executive director is adding a new challenge with a theme of collective leadership and joint problem-sharing etc. However, there is a limit constitutionally while you sit in the current structures. Obviously, it is not within my gift to either comment on those or change them. There is not a fiduciary responsibility; that is all enshrined in our accounting officer duties under 'Managing Public Money NI'. You could ask an exam question about whether the board fits the definition of one, but, within the scope of what it can do, I believe that the effectiveness report lays out some of where we have to go and how far we can do that.

There is a way in which we can choose to lead the service under Jayne's leadership. There is a way in which we can choose to behave, and there are certain behaviours that we can try to exhibit to improve how we operate as a collegial group. However, there are limitations in the constitutional structure in which we operate: there are nine separate Departments delivering to a Minister, each of whom has an accounting officer responsibility.

Mr Dunne: There has been significant turnover at permanent secretary level in recent months, which is natural, normal and understandable. What steps can be taken to improve the stability and continuity of leadership? Does that have an impact across the Civil Service, including on each Department? Ultimately, does it have an adverse impact on the delivery of the major capital projects? We are keen to establish the impact that that has.

Mr Gibson: I have two reflections on that. Speaking as an accounting officer and as someone whose experience was not historically in the Civil Service, this is, by a considerable distance, the most challenging job that I have ever done. There are no waking hours during which you are not worrying about it. Your working day starts before you have your breakfast, and it finishes when you go to bed, and that also goes for every weekend. It is exhaustingly difficult. In that context, we have to be a very strong and collegial group and offer support to each other. One of the changes that is coming in now with the new cohort is that we will offer that support and say, "We all have a collective leadership role, as well as an individual accounting officer's". Historically, the main focus for me would have been to work to my Minister and look after my accounting officer's duties. There may not have been any time left to worry about collective responsibility. We are trying to make a shift in that regard. Doing so will require very significant delegation to senior staff. I am very lucky that I have wonderful senior staff in DOF — I look at Sharon — as you have probably gathered during this meeting as I have turned to them for all their expertise, even though Scott is not in DOF. That ability to have —.

Mr Gildernew: Sharon is not reacting. [Laughter.]

Mr Gibson: I know. I felt a kick under the table.

It is about having people who are trained and ready to step in, step up and answer, as you have seen today. There is a pipeline approach to leadership and what leadership looks like. We have tried to enhance the leadership training and support. As new permanent secretaries come in — I am sure that they will find it out very soon — there will be a much better onboarding and support process for them to make them feel that, if they are dealing with something, the chances are that someone else has dealt with it, and they can reach out to them.

I am not sure whether it is written anywhere or could be codified, but I contend that there is a part of collective leadership that can be in how you act and how you are led that does not necessarily need to be written down or instructed. We have tried to be much clearer now in our onboarding process and support work with those colleagues in saying to them that this is now a group of collective leaders. The concerns or worries that my permanent secretary in Infrastructure has about project delivery do occupy some of my mind in a collegial way, not because I have any formal, written-down responsibility, but because, as a leadership group, we should be worried and willing to lean in. A lot of it is about how we behave and support each other rather than necessarily any structural change. However, we have to recognise some of the limits of having nine separate accounting officers' responsibilities, which is your first and primary concern when you get up in the morning.

Mr Dunne: On the turnover point, there has been quite a bit of change. That is normal and understandable. However, I think that it is fair to say that the average length of time that a permanent secretary stays in the same Department is relatively short. I suppose that we are just keen to see what impact that has on ultimate delivery and improving outcomes.

Mr Gibson: That is slightly worrying, because I have been in post for four years. I am slightly worried about where this might be going.

Mr Dunne: You are probably the longest-serving, or you are getting there.

Mr Gibson: No, Katrina Godfrey has got me beat.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I was going to ask whether you are expected to move in the transfer window.

Mr Gibson: I am not sure whether my transfer value has gone up in recent months.

Actually, jesting aside, one point that I should make, and I say this respectfully, is that most of the work is done by the wonderful officials who work for you. You have an overall leadership and responsibility job. In fact, the hardest thing that I have found in the role is not getting into the detail, because to do so is my nature; you are actually sitting above that. When it comes to preparing people for that leadership, the biggest consideration is the transition into senior leadership and stepping away from some of the detail. In that regard, a regular turnover is less worrying if people are ready to step up and are well supported and trained for that role, because it is not the same job as that of a grade 3 leading an area of departmental priority. There is almost a sort of mindset change, and, therefore, it is probably not as worrying. I would be more worried about regular turnover among my heads of procurement or heads of public finance. I have a wonderfully talented team. If I stepped aside, somebody would come in and lead it just as well, if not better. My concern about turnover would be more if it were occurring in the key specialist subject roles. If we train a good cohort of leaders, it can be less damaging than you might think to have that rotation.

Mr Dunne: Thanks, folks.

Mr T Buchanan: I want to look again at enabling action 6. Progress has reportedly been hampered by reluctance from some Departments to participate. What action is being taken by the NICS Board to address that lack of engagement?

Mr Gibson: Part of it is just as you have articulated: it is writing that down and reporting on it, and then having to sit in the NICS Board and discuss it. Even just the conversation about that today will add to and amplify that. We absolutely recognise the pressures that different Departments are under. At the moment, it is extremely difficult, from budget perspectives, as, I am sure, you are all aware. The level of pressure on different Departments is quite acute. Sometimes, it is just about ensuring that we are forthright enough when it comes to our own ability to get that material, but actually publishing it is the key driver of those behaviours — transparency.

Mr Wilson: I will add to that. This week, I brought a paper to the NICS Board on enabling action 6. I set out what we were aiming for, where we have got to and where the gaps are. The NICS Board took the action to agree my recommendation to get that right by mid-February, so that we can start to look at what the data is telling us on dashboards by March. That is the kind of intervention that you get from the NICS Board. You make a recommendation, you give the evidence to support your recommendation, and, most of the time, you get it agreed.

Mr Gibson: Transparency is the key part of the answer to your question. If you are sitting in a group of your peers, there is a table and your Department has not completed what it needs to complete, that is a lot more difficult than just saying it in words. As Scott said, we had a clear table in front of us. We could see where things were short of where they needed to be. Then, we are all on the clock, so to speak, to make sure that, when we come back the next time, we are not in the same position. Transparency and publishing how you are doing is one of the key drivers of better behaviours.

Mr T Buchanan: Would the lack of that point to a systemic weakness in collaboration and authority across the system?

Mr Gibson: If it persisted, yes, it would. If we were to find that we simply could not get the data completed or could not get transparency, or if we found that the information was not there, your comment would be correct. We were well on the way with the first iteration, however. We wanted it to go a bit further, and we got a fairly strong message from Scott, which was endorsed by the head of that committee, that we have until the middle of February. If we were to come back in another three months and to say, "We've had three goes at it, and we still haven't got it", that would suggest something different. I am confident, however, that all the data are trending in the right direction to get things completed.

Ms Forsythe: Thank you all for being here to respond on this. I will talk a bit about MOR governance. It comes back to that recurring point that you are sitting in the Department of Finance, which has that central role. People talked about DOF as being the enforcer, about it giving guidance and about all those elements. Stuart Stevenson, as Treasury Officer of Accounts, gave evidence to the Committee last week, and it always brings in the question that you are sitting at the centre of it. What escalation routes exist in the Department of Finance to secure delivery on any MORs that are significantly delayed?

Mr Gibson: That is a fair question and a reasonable criticism, because there is no formal mechanism for that. I know that I am making this very basic, but, when we have had challenges around legislative programmes, for example, we have had to design trackers and so forth to provide to this Committee, because that keeps them on your radar. We would check in on whether that had come forward. For example, if there is one that I am looking at that has come to me about which I am not quite happy, I have to find someone — a Sharon, typically — to resource it and go back out. That puts another pressure on an already busy and stretched team.

There is not the kind of cadence that perhaps there could or should be. For example, in my Department, for which I am accounting officer, we have a strict regime around our outstanding recommendations. Those are followed through in our audit and risk assurance committee (ARAC), which looks those for which we hold responsibility. I cannot, however, look at those recommendations that do not pertain to my Department; I would not have the bandwidth to do that. We talked about this earlier. If most of the problems are going to become increasingly cross-cutting, which they are, we need to think about the best way to handle and mechanise that process. That is something to think about, because I do not believe that the process is as good as it could be.

My honest answer is that I am worried about my own recommendations. I try to keep them driving forward and, for those that are collaborative, I get the data back, take a look at it and send it back out again. However, I probably do not feel the deadline in the same way, because, to be frank, I can feel that I am depending on someone else's information, so, although I know that I am accountable for trying to drive that, there is a limitation to my ability to do that when it is not in my control to say, "Can you give me this by next Friday?" There is a good conversation to be had about how best to distribute that, in which we will be happy to play our part.

This will sound self-protectionist, and I do not mean it to, but there is also the slight risk that DOF would end up with an awful lot of them. We have a very small team, for obvious reasons, and it becomes increasingly difficult to manage all of them, particularly when they pertain to issues about which we may think, "Tonally, I don't think that fits where I'd want it to be, but it's not for my Department and it's not my area: am I happy to put my name to it when someone else is responsible for it?" That does not feel right to me, so I would always push back on that, and that can really extend things. My honest assessment is that it does not feel that we have quite got that right. I am sitting, worrying about my ARA committee and my own recommendations — those that I can hold and that are in my gift — and I do not think that we have quite got the structure right. That is my honest answer to the question on the escalation of a recommendation where the responsibility for the content lies outside my Department, and about which we are thinking what we might be able to do through the NICS Board and so on around that.

Ms Forsythe: Everything that you said has captured the Committee's frustrations, over the past two years, with most of its inquiries, reports and recommendations. The issue is the cross-cutting nature of everything. Most of the things that come through the Committee hit across a number of Departments, and the requirement for a joined-up approach in government that moves away from siloed thinking is a theme that has come through in most of our reports. You talked about the MORs coming through and your looking at what recommendations you own, so you can immediately see how and why we feel the way that we do in the Committee when considering why they are not progressing. When they get to that next stage, if the accounting officers are taking that and looking at the recommendations in that way, that is definitely the forum for some sort of reform in thinking. I do not know what the answer is, but the way that you explained it definitely feeds into what we see when we do our reports.

You said that there is not really an escalation process. At what point does a delayed MOR become a matter for which you, as a senior official in the Department of Finance, would consider taking Executive-level intervention or any other action?

Mr Gibson: There is no trigger point at which we would say, "Well, it has reached a certain number of weeks". Other accounting offers may do it differently, but this is how I approach it. I have regular engagement with my Minister. I may think, typically on the back of an ARAC meeting, "Oh, I'm thinking governance matters. Where is that MOR?". I will then check in and find out that it is delayed or that we are waiting on something. I might then trigger a letter from my Minister to the Office of the First Minister and deputy First Minister (OFMDFM) around ISNI, which is one example. The process does not necessarily involve us saying, "Right, that's two weeks past due", but that is certainly something that we could think about.

Your point is good, and it is one that I thought about before coming before the Committee today. I do not have the answer for how it would work, either, but it is the right exam question to ask, because everything is becoming more intertwined and cross-departmental. It is a question of whether there is bandwidth for an accounting officer to fully understand the detail of a recommendation that is not in their area. They can get a gut feeling that it does not fit or is not in keeping with another recommendation, and they have to take that. It is hard for any one accounting officer to do that, particularly when four or five different Departments are sometimes involved. It is a real and lively issue, and it will only become more of an issue.

One thing that I have considered but not yet implemented is that process becoming a regular check-in, perhaps at my ARA committee — that could be one way of doing it. That would not mitigate the problem of there being limited levers by which to enforce the quality of information and its coming in as quickly as we would like. Sharon mentioned the number of stages: it can take quite a bit of time to get the information out, get it back, make sure that I am happy with it and get it to my Minister. There can be a bit of a backlog, if you like, in the weekly calendar. I am happy to continue the discussion. That area will become increasingly challenging.

Ms Forsythe: Absolutely. The Committee has been talking about that issue and will continue to think on it.

Mr Burrows: I will look at quality and assurances. How does the Department assure itself that interim updates or highlight reports are not used to substitute for the formal accountability of an MOR?

Mr Gibson: It is important to note that an MOR has a very particular definition. That requires going through the Minister, for example, to make sure that an MOR is, indeed, the level of response that they feel is appropriate. I am trying to blur that distinction a little bit, however: we are trying to make sure that the highlight reports reach as high a standard of governance as they can. Highlight reports do not carry the same weight as an MOR, and they never will, but we want to try to make it so that there is not a duplicative process. If we do good highlight reports, we will already be sitting on the type of content and material that can be slotted in when there is a relevant MOR asking about that area, so, although they are not the same thing, we are trying to get the quality of the highlight reports up.

We can, however, do a highlight report within our own structures, without needing ministerial sign-off or any political overlay on the recommendations. As officials, we can take the highlight reports forward.

Mr Burrows: My next question leads us on, but I might come back to that point.

What steps can be taken, early in the process, to improve MOR quality and reduce the need for repeated correspondence — to get it right the first time?

Mr Gibson: A key thing to do in respect of that, if we can coordinate it, is to make the request of all the Departments that have to feed into the MOR at the same time, filter the responses through the same level of quality assurance — that is to say, their accounting officers — and get that back to you. That sounds remarkably straightforward, but, in practice, it proves not to work like that. For example, officials at a Department might say, "We have an ARAC meeting next week, and we need to see what that says before we can provide that data" or, "We are just about to publish a report on a new strategy" — on whatever the topic might be. We will want to wait until we have done that before we send it. By the time we get that information, the stuff that we got from the other people may be out of date, and we look at it and say, "That date has passed; I had better update it". That may sound very low level, but that is the practical quality issue.

One way to do it would be to say to the Departments, "I need a response within 14 days with all the information that you have at that point". The risk with that is of the Committee getting something that feels is a little inadequate, to which it will say, "Well, this response refers to a strategy that has now been published, and this does not refer to it." There is a balance to be struck between setting a deadline by which you need the response and not allowing those deadlines to slip, even in instances where people thing that doing so would allow them to bring in some additional information.

The other thing, of course, is to make sure that the quality is as good as it can possibly be. This is something on which we have engaged with the Committee before: making sure that there are clear, succinct and time-bound answers and that they answer only the question that has been asked, without including a lot of additional information. That can often be one of my biggest challenges as an accounting officer. As a man who is not known, on stage, for his brevity, I like to see responses that are brief. One of the challenges can be that there is a lot of very good information, but it is not quite as clear.

Another thing that is relevant, Jon, is that, if there is a cross-cutting question, and five or six Departments have written responses, it is very hard to make those look like a cohesive whole. They are not written in the same tone, language or pen, so there can be quite a bit of editorial work. You would probably not expect that, but it is needed.

To answer your question, one thing that we can do, which we are trying to do a little more now, is to accept that the world is always changing, that people might just have to give their best answer at a point in time and that the Committee might just have to be respectful of that: you might be surprised to see that there was a strategy coming, because we could not tell you, because it had not been agreed by the Minister. Therefore, there is a sense in which we can probably be a little more formal about that. Getting it right the first time, of course, depends on ensuring that you have the right quality to answer the question, and that goes back to some of the stuff that we talked about with regard to putting the right information in place so that it is there on the top. One of the things that I like to do as an accounting officer is to think about what the Committee has asked as a recommendation and ask myself, "Might we be asked that again?" and to think about whether we need to put a system in place so that we can answer it more routinely than we have done in the past. A lot of what we have done with the enabling actions is to try to codify KPIs and things that we would expect you to see if you were asking in the context of a similar inquiry in the future. You would then not have to do the hard data-mining that has had to be done in, for example, the gestation of this particular report.

Mr Burrows: I will pick up on one piece. It is something that I have observed in the public sector for many years, and something of which we are all guilty. That is flannel — answering in more words than are required. We need a culture change whereby people are as concise, direct and relevant as possible.

Mr Gibson: I would not deny that. With that, I will pass to Sharon, as I am a man who is not brief.

Ms Smyth: You could not be any more accurate, Mr Burrows. As someone who has had to implement recommendations from a previous MOR, I asked what we had actually committed to. In the past, there have been MORs to which we have agreed "in principle". I do not know what that means, so we are very clear now that, if we accept it, we accept it, and that, if we are going to partially accept it, we think about what we are partially accepting. When it goes out for that accountability grid, therefore, and people are asked, "Have you completed what you said you were going to complete?", we at least know — or, if somebody else picks it up, they know — what we have committed to, how long it is going to take and who is in charge. I could not agree with you more. There should be a red pen through flannel.

Mr Burrows: It is about precision. I am pleased to hear that. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thank you, Jon. Colm, were you looking in briefly.

Mr Gildernew: Is there not a simple way to do things better, whereby it is made clear to people, from the start, that they are working on a project that is to do with a particular Department, but for which Departments are working together and have to agree the language that they will use? Would a simpler way to go about it not be to make it about specific projects or outcomes, rather than it being Department-dependent?

Mr Gibson: That is a good point. We do that now, and are doing it increasingly. We have done a number of interesting things, even on policy questions. I have worked with other perm secs to say, "Can we ask this team to just work and give us collective advice?" We might put a different front end on it to give to our Minister that reflects their priorities, but the facts and information should still be the same.

The challenge with responding to an MOR is almost always about getting the right people to be able provide the bandwidth, at the same time, to do it. We might be able to free up Sharon for a couple of days in a particular week to really focus on an MOR, but the relevant colleague in DFC might not be available that week, because they are out. Therefore, although that sounds like the right answer, in principle, the people who can write the MORs to the required quality and give the assurances that I would expect are, typically, pretty senior people, and we will be taking them out of something else in order produce a decent answer. We cannot always coordinate that easily, but the principle that you alluded to is correct. I often say to my Minister, "You will get the advice of officials, but not of your officials. It will be whatever the best answer is from within the Civil Service. They may not be DOF officials". It is easier for DOF to say that, because we are, in part, a shared-service supplier. That is the right answer, but there are logistical challenges to making that happen, because of people's diaries.

Mr Gildernew: Is there a role for AI in drawing the information together and as a tool for all those people to do the analysis and put it together? People could then agree on whether it is accurate and what the best way is.

Mr Gibson: There certainly is. The capability of the technology will grow, and it is growing every week. To use the tool analogy, however, someone still has to hold it. It is very important that we do not see AI as being a route out of personal responsibility being taken for understanding exactly what has been written and by whom, or what the legislation is. That can help to draw information together, but I am very clear with my team that, while it can help to bring together more information, we are personally responsible for what it says and for making sure that it is used in the right way: as a contributor to get things done quicker. It is only in its infancy. When we — or whatever Department I have been transferred to — are back before a Committee in a few years' time, there will be a hugely different technological landscape in respect of what AI could and should do. AI builds everything on the information that is there. Nothing gets us away from the fact that high-quality data is needed in order to start almost any question. Hence, a lot of our focus is on getting the quality of the data right.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Data is a big problem for this place.

Mr Gildernew: It is another repeating theme.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Only in Northern Ireland could the lack of data fool AI.

It has been an intense enough session, but we are near the end. I will round up on quality and assurance. Given the continued delay to agreeing the investment strategy, are you able to provide the Committee with a clear and realistic deadline for when the MOR will be laid before the Assembly? That is the million-pound question. If that cannot be confirmed today — it probably cannot — can you set out precisely what further decisions or actions are required and by whom as well as when they would be required in order to enable its publication?

Mr Gibson: As you suggested in your framing of the question, no, I cannot tell you. It depends on the point that we raised about ISNI. Subject to the Committee wishing to see it, however, we can commit to providing the continued updates that we bring to our board on the progress we are making that underpins it, which the Committee has seen. I will also bring up the conversation with my Minister again at our next session to see what progress I can make on where we are going and get the latest update on ISNI.

To give the Committee some assurance, I can say that we are very much ready to go, whenever that document is published — I hope that you get that feeling from the material. It could change significantly, of course, and it might mean that we will have to go back and do some work. I am fairly confident, however, as Scott already outlined, that the enabling actions map to your recommendations. I hope that that gives you a strong feeling — we can send that to you proactively, once we have it — until such time as ISNI appears. We may draw out some of that for you where it ties across to some recommendations, just to help you in that regard.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Thank you, Neil. OK, we have exhausted questions on MORs. I have one other brief question about the consistency and the guidance that is provided to accounting officers. Is guidance provided for MORs, and is it generally adhered to?

Mr Gibson: Yes, there is guidance. All of us are well aware of the eight-week turnaround. There is no sense in which we mean any disrespect to the Committee and its authority. I believe that there are very clear guidelines. I am certainly not in any doubt about the responsibility that I have to the Committee and the implications of not providing you with information when you need it.

Ms Smyth: I will add to that. As soon as a PAC report lands, Stuart's team comes to us and says clearly, "Here is what we need". They help us to form the responses to each of the recommendations. If it is going to go beyond eight weeks, Stuart's team consults with the Committee Clerk. Every accounting officer or person whom the accounting officer directs to take forward a PAC report clearly understands the process and how it gets to the Minister to be laid in the Assembly.

Mr Gibson: When we get NIAO reports, we take them to our ARACs and look at where there are recommendations that are relevant to us as a Department. That is before they are even picked up by PAC.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): This is probably a question for Stuart, and I will come to you in a second, Stuart. Following on from what Jon said about the quality of responses, it is important for a response to be of an acceptable standard and of good quality, cutting out the nonsense and getting straight to the point. This Committee loves getting straight to the point. Is that sort of approach stipulated in the guidance?

Mr Stuart Stevenson (Department of Finance): Chair, the guidance —.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Do you want to come down from the Gallery now, Stuart?

Mr Gibson: I threatened to bring him down before now, and he said no.

Mr Stevenson: Thank you, Chair and members. The key document is the guide to the scrutiny of public expenditure. That is what we use to expand on the MOR process, towards the end of the public audit process. There is a focus on timeliness, the clarity of the opening statement — acceptance should be clear from the off — and the need to insert target dates. We have supplemented that guidance since the start of this session, and we have seen improvements. However, I agree on the point about brevity and consistency. Those remain my concerns, as I set out last week.

The guidance is fairly robust, but it is not a silver bullet. I looked back over the MOR process for the 'Report on Major Capital Projects: Follow-up Report'. The Committee published that report on 3 April 2025. By 8 April, we had written to Mr Gibson to commission the response. I eventually got in contact with the clerking team, and we realised, around 27 May, that there were delays. There were at least 12 interactions in that period, whether by correspondence or in meetings in the Department, to try to resolve the issue, yet here we are, much later in the process. It is good that Mr Gibson wrote to the Committee on five occasions during that period to provide updates, so we remain in regular contact. It is deeply frustrating that, while we are doing the right things, we are not managing to get across the line by completing our role and getting the MOR formally laid in the Assembly.

Mr Gibson: It will come as no surprise that Stuart has given me many a lecture about brevity. One of the things that his team does well is to support us in looking at responses and upskilling the team a little when it comes to the quality of response. As I mentioned, one of the most difficult things to deal with is when the responses do not quite hang together, because they have been written by various Departments coming from different perspectives. Such a response does not feel adequate to me, and that often leads to a bit of an iterative process. As the old joke goes, it takes a lot longer to write a short statement; it is harder to get to the nub of it rather than to just fill it out. The team has helped us quite a bit with that.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): OK. Remain there, Stuart. We have exhausted the subject of MORs, for now. I appreciate the responses that we have had, and we hope to get others, particularly on ISNI. I would appreciate your keeping us up to date on any potential changes.

Mr Gildernew: I will move on to ministerial directions. Neil, does the Department consider the current pattern of ministerial directions to be exceptional, as intended, or is there a risk of normalisation?

Mr Gibson: That is a good question. We have seen patterns at other times of there being more ministerial directions. The theme of pay runs across two of them. As we have seen clearly and as is in the public discourse, no Minister is saying that they are finding it at all easy to live within the budgets that are available to them. There is significant criticism that there is not enough money to allocate, which will make it incredibly difficult to come in within budget envelopes. That puts every accounting officer — I include myself — under tremendous pressure to come in on budget. For many colleagues, staffing is the main component of that. You will have seen the ministerial directions on pay.

One of the most unfortunate phraseologies in our accounting officer lexicon is pay being "discretionary". In a technical sense, that is true in that you have to decide that you are going to pay it, but, when it comes to the delivery of public services, that is not how I, almost ethically, think about it. You will struggle to deliver public services without public servants. Therefore, you need to think about that consideration at the beginning.

I do not think that there is a slew of them or any loss of discipline per se, but we are facing into a Budget that does not go as far as any of us want it to when it comes to public service delivery. The inevitable outcome of that is that accounting officers, under their duty, will need to find directions to cover decisions that they simply know are not doable within the budget envelope that they have.

It does not surprise me that some came forward on pay, given the public narrative and the data that we see. I do not think that there has been any loss of discipline around the process. However, it is fair to say that, in the climate that we are in, the ability to deliver the services that people expect with the budgets that we have is becoming a more systemic problem, not one limited to one or two Departments.

Mr Gildernew: That leads me on to the second part of the question. What role does the Department play in identifying and responding to emerging, system-wide affordability pressures that potentially give rise to repeated ministerial directions?

Mr Gibson: There are many things that we have to do. It speaks to something that was mentioned earlier. One of the great challenges of the DOF portfolio is having a responsibility, as an accounting officer, to deliver for your own Department while also having the unique role of having Stuart and Joanne's team — the public spending group (PSG) team — within the portfolio, because they have a role to set out guidelines and to make sure that the correspondence is correct, and each of us, including me, is held to account against that.

Aside from the formal process of managing ministerial directions, we have another role, which is direct engagement through our Minister with the Treasury on Budgets. Those conversations about the size and quantum of Budgets continue all the time. Ultimately, however, the Budget is determined by the Executive, and accounting officers then have the responsibility to operate underneath that. We provide the guidelines to which they are held, but there is not a day-to-day marking of the homework of other accounting officers.

I have no overarching responsibility for accounting officers. I have the functions in my Department to provide guidelines and to provide clarity. We look very much to the Comptroller and Auditor General and this Committee. If, during your work, you find anything as you scrutinise things, or if Committees, which have the key role, look at the spending in their Departments, or if there is anything that we feel is short in the guidance or if any of the procedures are not tight enough or have not covered for occasions that we find ourselves in, it is our duty to make sure that that guidance is up to date. However, it is not a day-to-day checking-in. There are scrutiny Committees, including the PAC, to hold people to account as accounting officers in their own Department.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): I have a few follow-on points, because it is a bone of contention for me as Chair of the Committee, and there is a growing trend that is of concern. I have a few short, sharp questions, Neil, and I would appreciate brief answers because time is moving on. Does the increasing use of ministerial directions indicate a systemic failure in budget planning and affordability?

Mr Gibson: No, I do not think that it does. I think that it more reflects the fact that — it is not unique to Northern Ireland — we have an envelope of public finance that is proving inadequate for the delivery of services that citizens require.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Why do we have a higher level of use of ministerial directions than other jurisdictions?

Mr Gibson: One of the potential reasons is that we have a unique constitution that means that, however hard we try to work against it, individual Departments look at their own priorities and are perhaps unable to see the wider picture. For example, I make the decisions and give advice to my Minister based on the DOF budget that I have, and I have to try to keep one eye on everyone else's budgets. However, your primary concern is your own budget. The fact that two of our recent ones relate to pay is no surprise, given what we saw at the beginning of the year.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Yes. That is important for public-sector workers, who are more than deserving of what they are entitled to. However, those are not new problems. They probably should have been factored in as much as humanly possible.

Does the reliance on ministerial directions risk encouraging Departments to commit to spending that they know is unaffordable? Is it an easy way out?

Mr Gibson: I hope that it is not. I can speak only for myself, but it is something that I would think about only in extremis if there were no other route open. You would have to look at everything that you are required to do and test it against the guidelines. It would be a great concern to me if that were the case.

It is worth drawing attention to the unique situation in which we found ourselves this year, in which a Minister talked publicly about the impossibility of being able to live within the budget that was available to them. That creates a very difficult starting point to the year. We all know that, in previous years, that has been ameliorated by significant in-year moneys that have come, but you cannot be sure that such moneys will come. You might say that clearly articulating that at the beginning of the year allows an accounting officer more time to come up with ideas of where money could be saved. There is certainly some truth in that. It also may reflect just how big the disconnect is between the budget available and the set of tasks that you set out to deliver. In some Departments, 80% or more of their budget goes on pay.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Some people in other jurisdictions would describe the use of ministerial directions as almost career-ending. What is your view?

Mr Gibson: That is a very unfortunate way in which to think of them; otherwise, I am not sure that it would be a good idea for them to exist at all.

Mr Gildernew: North Korea.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): It is closer to home than there. They are not used as frequently as they are here, which has raised questions.

Quite a peculiar situation that came before the Committee was the use of a ministerial direction by the Department of Finance that was recommended by the accounting officer. What is your view of that situation?

Mr Gibson: It is a challenging one. We had a conversation about it at our PSS regular. Mike Farrar spoke very eloquently about the reasons why he felt that it was important to do so. Normally, the advice would be that you do not provide that sort of commentary when providing the material.

However, I also have to be empathetic to what that must feel like in the health service, where you know that your immediate value-for-money consideration in a single-year Budget absolutely pertains to that Budget for that year and there is also the question about the delivery of the service. We had a good chat about that. When that sort of thing comes up or is raised here, we chat it through at PSS and have a think about the appropriate response.

Typically, the advice is that that is not what you would expect to see directly from an accounting officer. However, I have also sat beside that colleague, and I know exactly what it feels like to be able to reset and realign the health service. It will be impossible to do so without pay.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Aside from the example of that particular accounting officer, would you suggest that such an approach is good practice?

Mr Gibson: No, it is not. However, we have a single-year Budget approach, and that is the way in which it is set out. If you had a multi-year Budget, with amounts that roll over, you would make different decisions. All accounting officers would. Thinking about what a value-for-money decision today might be would be done through a different lens if you could plan your money over three or four years. We have very lively conversations with Treasury about recognising that it is very hard to deliver public services while having to stick to landing on a one-year Budget without carryover or an ability to flex. You could come to a different value-for-money conclusion if you were profiling it over a number of years. Investment today might save you a lot of money tomorrow, but that is not how annual Budgets work.

To answer the question directly: no, that is not normally something that we, as accounting officers, consider to be good practice.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Is it correct that we have had four ministerial direction? Is there another one coming, or is that included in the four? There are five, technically, which is of concern. All of them will be about overspending. What are the consequences of those directions for the public finances of Northern Ireland?

Mr Gibson: As we all know, public finances are about redistributing tax income to deliver public services. If this were a national economy, ultimately, the concern would be about whether you have the money to distribute. We have a cash control — Stuart's team looks after that — so we have to have cash to be able to distribute it.

There are some tolerances and ways in which we can manage that, but, again, we always have a concern about whether there will be cash with which to do so. If ministerial directions got out of control, there would be a point at which we would not have the cash to be able to pay. That is one of the ultimate sanctions.

Of course, an accounting officer gets individual scrutiny through their scrutiny Committee and this Committee on behalf of the Assembly to ensure that they are doing what they should be doing during the year. I am lapsing into my old job as an economist here, but, ultimately, you then have to think of different ways of bringing the cost trajectory down or the revenue up. In our case, that includes negotiating with Treasury.

Unique throughout my time has been the consistent view across Departments that they are increasingly unable to deliver what they have been asked to within their budget. Even some of our devolved colleagues who receive significantly higher funding above relative need are saying that it is becoming increasingly difficult. It is not a surprise to me that our Departments are finding it increasingly hard to come in within their limits. That does not absolve accounting officers of the responsibility of making sure that our Ministers are presented with all the choices and options as to how they can come in within the envelope that they were given.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Public finances are under pressure in a number of jurisdictions, but we have a significant and growing trend of using ministerial directions. We have a unique set of circumstances: we have a four-party mandatory coalition, in which each party has its own agenda. Why would one Minister do that but a Minister from a different party not do it when it would get them off the hook on, for instance, the public-sector pay issue? Do we expect all Departments to be in that situation in order to get out of the problems that they face?

Mr Gibson: There is kind of a twin-track approach from the Department of Finance's perspective at least. My Minister set out in his options in the draft Budget that he presented. He set out very clearly the expectation that accounting officers and Departments should set out and build in pay as first priority and look at their envelope thereafter. That would be a change of approach to a pay-first approach, by which you look at your staffing complement. It requires us to have much better workforce strategic planning models in order to understand exactly what our staffing complement is and will be. That would be a different approach.

It is one way of looking at it as a pattern and saying, "How do we make pay affordable?". One way that you can do that is by putting out different approaches or guidelines — it is wrong to speak of guidelines in a Budget document — but you can set out a Budget that you look to the Executive to agree that sets out a different way and a different possibility as to how to approach pay, which is not to seek it later in the year but to have it as part of your initial Budget planning envelope. That is one way to ensure that.

The second way, which is a live issue at the moment, is to continue to make the case that you believe that, as a region, our ability to function is hampered by the fact that we are placed exactly at our level of "recognised need", as it is called. Wales and Scotland, for example, are comfortably above their level, and Wales is coming down slowly to that level. The argument for that approach is that it would allow you the investment space to make transformational change so that you are ready to come down to the level of need. Going straight to your level of need creates some of the problems that we see today in the deliverability of services.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): We are well versed on the challenge, Neil, and we recognise the significant pressures that society, public services and public-sector workers are under, but we have to deal with the reality. Unless something has changed, the position is that the Secretary of State has clearly said to the Executive that there will be no more money. You say that pressure needs to be applied to the Treasury — I do not doubt that; we hear that time and time again — but in the event of all Departments overspending as a result of ministerial directions being put into effect, and no extra money coming from Westminster, what are the implications for public finances of Northern Ireland?

Mr Gibson: If you took it to that extreme, there would come a point at which you would run out of money. That would be the ultimate penalty.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): If the Government do not give any more money —.

Mr Gibson: You would be unable to access cash, and that would mean that you could not pay people, in your scenario. It is important, as this is on the record —.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Just explain that, because it is an important clarification and people need to understand it. Say the Secretary of State says that there is no more money, no more money comes from the Treasury in London, and the Departments here have all overspent. Are the Executive playing Russian roulette?

Mr Gibson: I will say two things to that. First, it would need to be as extreme as you have laid out. You would need everyone to overspend at quite a cavalier rate to get anywhere near that possibility. [Inaudible.]

Mr Gibson: It is not the case at the minute. We are not expecting —.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): It is coming to the start of February, so we have a wee bit to go before the end of the financial year. How many Departments are overspending today?

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): Two.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): How many ministerial directions are there?

Mr Gibson: There are four, I think. That could be wrong.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): And there is another ministerial direction coming. Is that from a different Department?

Mr Gibson: Yes.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): That is three Departments.

Mr Gibson: As you know, a ministerial direction will not give permission to overspend; it gives you the direction for that. The direction may set out, as an example, on pay, the consequences of such a decision. A ministerial direction should require the accounting officer to say, "What are the alternatives in my locker that I can produce to my Minister?".

I am asked regularly at PSSs and board meetings to provide budget overviews, charts and analysis and support my Minister in doing bilaterals with other Departments. I am very confident in saying that the challenge with the Budget situation is being taken seriously. I am quite sure that the scrutiny Committees of those overspending Departments are already seeing the sorts of decisions that are being taken and the difficult and challenging decisions that have already been taken by those Departments to close the gap.

In the extremis example that you set out, there could come a point where you end up with that. However, as I say, accounting officers certainly would not take that lightly. You would have scrutiny at your own Committee. You would have scrutiny here. You would have your assessment at the end of the year that would be very clear. As you say, it does not really crystallise until the very end of the year. I certainly do not want to give any impression that there is a lack of concern about that among the accounting officer group. If a direction is in place, the key requirement for me is, "What are the alternatives? What can you present to your Minister as a set of options?". There is a point where that becomes a very short list. If nearly all your pressures are pay, there are limitations.

An important point that should not be lost is that you will keep getting overspends if you do not make bigger structural changes. There is a need to really transform by looking at what staffing complements are needed to deliver services, what role technology can play, what role the citizen can play, and how they engage with and consume public services. It is a problem that will need more than good accounting-officer behaviour to fix.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): We need reform, but that is a wider point. I am talking about the here and now and the consequences of the decisions that have been made in the here and now. I have a concern about the trend that we are seeing. I know that it is not a position that you or any other accounting officer likes to be in. I want to be very clear: Departments are taking actions yet are not clear about what would happen in the event of the Treasury's not giving extra money. That is a strange situation to be in. I hope that we do not have to revisit the conversation because things have worsened. Thank you, Neil.

Mr Burrows: I should have declared an interest: a family member — my wife — works for the SIB. It was remiss of me not to mention that.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): That is OK, Jon. Thank you.

We have been exhaustive. I really appreciate your being with us. Quite a lot of questions were fired at you, and it was a long session. We appreciate that. The Committee recognises, without question, the complexity of the issues that were discussed today. We have been quite clear about that. The ongoing delays to the MOR on the major capital projects follow-up report, alongside the wider systemic issues raised, demonstrate why timely, transparent and high-quality responses are so important to effective scrutiny.

One of the criticisms of this place is that it has not been great at providing scrutiny. As Chair, I can assure you that that is something that this Committee will not be accused of.

Members will now consider the evidence that has been very kindly provided by you all, including what it means for guidance, consistency of approach and future follow-up. We will then decide what further action or engagement may be needed. I appreciate your taking those questions at the end on ministerial directions. I know that things are not easy. We look forward to any future engagement with you.

Neil, Sharon and Scott, will you provide us with whatever update you have on ISNI? Given that you said that this is the vehicle for reform and change, we would appreciate it if you would stress, as much as humanly possible, that we want to see progress on this urgently.

Stuart, is there anything that you would like to add, or are you content?

Mr Stevenson: I will just make a very small point about the immediate impacts that you were talking about. The statement of funding policy is a key Treasury document. There is a long-standing convention that any overspends in any financial year will result in reductions of the devolved authority's allocations in the next financial year. The potential overspends being discussed would likely hit us in the next financial year in the form of reductions to our allocations. That has a significant impact on us, Chair, in the here and now.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): the next financial year

—

Mr Stevenson: Absolutely.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): —

you were in the previous year?

Mr Stevenson: Absolutely.

Mr Gibson: Yes. If you had an overspend that was not into the kind of scenario that you painted of everybody overspending to a quantum that you could not even fund —. That is the wrong phrase; I nearly said "normal"; that is definitely not the right phrase. If you had an overspend of the quantum that we are talking about, the standard procedure is that that must come off your starting line for next year.

Given what we have talked about, you can see the challenge that that presents in terms of starting the next financial year so many hundreds of millions down. That is the position as set out in that document, and it is the position that the Treasury continues to hold in our discussions with it. The standard approach is that your overspend will come off next year. Were we in the scenario that you discussed, you would have a different problem. We are not in that one, however; we are in the one that Stuart describes, in which you would be looking at a starting point next year, significantly constrained on the Budget that you have.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): That is a worrying situation. Departments have not had enough money this year and will be starting with even less next year, which brings more pressure. In fact, we will have more pressure. It is a real mess.

Mr Gibson: It is a worry for all accounting officers, because it constrains the whole envelope for the next year, which all of us rely on to get our share if we are to deliver. It is a collective problem and worry for the system when we see a potential overspend. That is why it is incumbent at the next board, etc, that we are talking about those regularly and looking at transformation bids and all the things that we have talked about on previous occasions about what we can do. It is in all our interests.

I know that there is scrutiny of individual Departments, with their own Committees and their own accounting officer responsibility. However, there is a collective leadership question here, because it will materially impact every other accounting officer and Minister in the following year because there is less money to spend.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): OK. Stuart, do you have anything else to add? I want to let Colm in.

Mr Stevenson: No, that was my only point, Chair.

Mr Gildernew: I have raised this before, but work has been done on the 1·24 uplift in recognition of the under-provision. There is talk that there is significant evidence accruing that it should be closer to 1·28. Is there any assessment of the impact that having been underfunded has on current Budgets?

Mr Gibson: I do not want to give you a lengthy answer. There is evidence of periods when the region has been above that level of need, but that tended to come in pots of money from different deals. That is not very strategic, nor does it make it easy to plan strategically. We have rarely dipped below 1·24, except for the year when there was no Executive.

However, some of what we have discussed today is the outworkings of operating, if you like, at the bare minimum. Other regions — well, it only applies to Scotland — have recognised that coming down to a level takes time to change. For want of a better phrase, the North's "bumpy ride", potentially is working its way out in some of the things that you see now, with Ministers saying, "I simply cannot operate with this level of budget", because there was no smooth or feather-bed landing. You are seeing now the consequences.

Our argument to our Treasury colleagues is that that type of harm can be damaging. It can have long-term implications and could affect next year's Budget, which will only compound the problem of trying to get us into a long-term, sustainable position. It is an acceptance of what need is, recognising — I have said this before — that your long-term vision should not be to have a higher level of need; you want to make the right choices and investment so that, ultimately, you drive it down. You do not want to be trying to articulate why things are the way they are. That is a clear example of what happens when you are, if you like, bumping along the bottom of your funding needs, rather than coming down in a strategic and measured way towards it.

The Chairperson (Mr McCrossan): OK. Thank you, Neil, Sharon, Scott and Stuart. It has been a good session, and we appreciate you answering our questions. We look forward to any further correspondence from you. Thanks very much.

Mr Gibson: Thank you, Chair and members.