Alliance Party Hits Out After Welfare Reform Bill Fails

The Alliance Party has slammed the decision to block the final stage of the Welfare Reform Bill at Stormont on Tuesday.

The party's leader, David Ford, said the decision of Sinn Féin, SDLP and the Green Party will have "serious implications" for Departments' budgets and accused the politicians of "not facing reality".

Mr Ford said: "Instead of acting in the interests of protecting the most vulnerable people, they will end up harming the very people that they claim they are trying to protect.

"We now face the prospect of having welfare cuts imposed over our heads by the Tories but without the flexibilities that we had secured. At the same time, key services like health and policing will lose their ability to protect the public.

"We will also have to deal with an almost impossible task to manage our budgets – with the prospect of further cuts being made to Departments that were already struggling to deal with previous cuts.

"Without agreement on welfare, there is real doubt that the rest of the Stormont House deal can be implemented. This includes the measures to deal with the past which are needed by victims, and the voluntary redundancy scheme which Departments were relying on in order to balance their budgets this year."

Mr Ford said the decision to block the bill has "seriously jeopardised the continuation of devolution in Northern Ireland".

He continued: "Stormont has been lurching from one crisis to the next over the past few years. It has never been clearer that the institutions need to be rebooted.

"This current impasse has been made worse by the unreformed petition of concern system and the lack of a voluntary coalition Executive. Until we see the implementation of radical changes, I fear that we will never be able to get out of the current cycle where crisis follows crisis."

(CD/JP)