Spending plan must be equality proofed

There seemed at first glance to be something for everyone in Gordon Brown's £315 million economic package announced yesterday. Brown revealed spending plans that covered a range of industrial, infrastructural and educational areas. The plan was titled a ``Framework for Prosperity'' and the Labour Chancellor outlined a package of spending and investment that covered a lot of ground.

A £129 million Investment Fund will reverse the previous freeze on road building in the Six Counties with a variety of new road improvement projects planned. It also includes funds for upgrading Fermanagh airport and education spending. £8 million is to be made available for education spending on integrated schools, £3 million for Irish language schools and £7 million on other schools. A further £11 million is to be made available in schemes to ``upgrade'' the worst housing estates in the Six Counties.

The other two core components of Brown's spending plans are under the funding areas he titles Enterprise, as well as Employment and Skills. A further £21 million has been set aside for a Tourism and Innovation Fund.

In terms of Enterprise Brown proposes that up to £100 million will be spent with firms in the Six Counties allowed to write off new capital expenditure against tax. Brown himself and Mo Mowlam will tour North America on a promotional tour next autumn while a venture capital fund is to be introduced for new companies setting up in the Six Counties.

£65 million is be made available for the Employment and Skills Fund. It aims to reduce long-term unemployment of the over 25s as well as allocating £9 million to help the disabled.

Equality agenda


The biggest surprise in terms of Brown's strategy was the level of spending allocated. Most observers had predicted a spending fund of only £150 million plus. The financial package itself was not that remarkable in that it followed the well trodden path of such development initiatives throughout the EU.

Brown summed this up himself saying that ``A modern economy needs good transport links, good schools, decent housing, reliable utilities and cutting edge communications networks''.

There is no doubt that there are welcome elements in Gordon Brown's plans particularly in the areas of education and long-term unemployment. Brown is the first British Chancellor to visit the Six Counties for 18 years and shows that finally the economic problems of the Six Counties are beginning to be recognised by the British Government

However there are a range of unanswered questions that need to be addressed before the Framework For Prosperity can be fully welcomed. The framework needs to be equality proofed. It needs to show that local areas and discriminated-against communities will have a substantial role in allocating and designing the funding schemes.

Finally the Framework needs also to have an all-Ireland dimension. The Six-County economy cannot be developed in isolation. There must be a vibrant all-Ireland perspective.

Unanswered questions


The are other important questions that have to be asked of the Framework for Prosperity. First in the case of the tax writes offs for Six-County businesses. It would seem fair that businesses qualifying for these tax write offs should be required to fulfill rigorous examination of their fair employment record. Any firm with a history of discrimination should not get funding.

Any new investment from North America should be asked to commit themselves to the McBride principles.

Part of the funding for the £315 million will come from privatising Belfast Port. The sale is expected to raise £90 million. Privatisation of state resources is a flawed policy and one would think that New Labour would have learned from having to clean up the mess left by the Tories privatisation programme.

It is also unclear if this funding is truly additional to the existing budgetary allocations for spending in the Six Counties. For example we have yet to see a commitment from the British Government to transfer spending from the military war economy to a peace dividend. The £315 million announced by Brown is an impressive sum but it is small beer compared to the billions spent yearly on maintaining the British military presence in Ireland.

Brown talked of Frameworks for Peace and Prosperity. They are meaningless without a parallel framework for National Democracy.


Smurfit's 35% wage increase


The six executive directors of the Jefferson Smurfit Group must be very happy people this week. They pocketed an average of £2 million each last year in basic salaries, long-term incentives, annual bonuses and pension contributions.

The six included four Smurfit family members including Michael, Dermot, Alan and Tony as well as chief operations officer Paddy Wright and finance director Ray Curran.

The £2m payout was a 35% increase on 1996 well ahead of what most other Irish workers will be paid under the Partnership 2000 agreement this year. The payout is also the highest payout to executive directors of an Irish public company in 1997.

It all goes to show that some people don't need to buy lottery tickets because they're guaranteed a win every year.

House builders must be regulated


Picture the scene. You go into a shop and price your good. You hand over a deposit agreeing to pay the balance later on delivery. The delivery date looms and as you ready yourself to take possession the vendor tells you that the price has risen by 28%. What do you do?

For one Dublin family this week the outcome to this scenario was in Dublin's High Court and the good in question was a new house whose price rose from £129,000 in October 1997 to £165,000 in February 1998.

The building contractors had claimed the reason for the increases was to cover cost of materials which had risen due to the changing value of the punt against sterling. The fact that house prices generally had risen significantly during this period was not an issue.

The High Court judge Justice McCracken ruled that though he had ``very considerable sympathy'' for the position of the Lakes family who had been attempting to buy a new house from Durkan New Homes Ltd the £2,000 deposit did not constitute a contract between the two parties.

The judgement must have come as a shock to thousands of home buyers across the 26 Counties who initiate house purchases believing that by paying a deposit an agreement has been made on the final price they will pay. The judgement empowers builders and developers while putting home buyers in a very difficult position.

Coming only two weeks after the Bacon report on spiralling house prices in the 26 Counties the judgement emphasises yet again the need for immediate action from the Dublin Government to regulate the state's housing sector. The free market is clearly failing.