N. Ireland receives £270 mfor AI and cybersecurity

With an eye on cyber research and AI, chancellor John Healey announced in the recent autumn budget that an extra £270m (322m euros) will be delivered to the Stormont (Parliament) Executive in Northern Ireland.
As well as extra money flowing to the region under a formula used by the UK Treasury to allocate money to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Healey also announced direct Treasury investment of £7.5m for a Queen’s University led hub specialising in research and development in the cyber and AI industries.
The budget also allocated £1m direct funding for a Northern Island investment summit. The UK government said the summit will focus on strengthening east-west trade between Northern Ireland and rest of Britain.
It said it will also highlight the region’s ‘potential’ under post-Brexit rules that means it is the “only place in the world with dual access to the UK internal market and EU market”.
Under what is known as the Barnett formula, Northern Ireland receives funding for devolved matters under its responsibility if the UK government increases central investment in those areas in England.
In his first budget since being appointed, Healey’s headline move was to prove a £100 cost-of-living payment to about 20 million households in qualifying council tax bands. It will be for ministers at Stormont to consider whether they introduce a similar scheme using the money that flows from the introduction of the policy in England.
The £270m Barnett allocation for Northern Ireland is spread across the current spending review period, which ends in 2029. Of the total, £131m will be available to Stormont in the current financial year.
Other budget measures affecting Northern Ireland include the extension of a temporary zero per cent Vat rate on domestic electricity bills for a further three months, to July 2027. This support has been delivered via an alternative mechanism in Northern Ireland, namely a £63 one-off payment, due to complications related to post-Brexit rules on Vat that apply in the region.
The Treasury said it will provide funding for the Stormont Executive to provide comparable support with household electricity bills. However, it added that the Vat relief measure was expected to apply in Northern Ireland from next April.
Healey’s budget introduced a British industrial competitiveness scheme to reduce costs for electricity-intensive manufacturing industries in Britain. The Treasury said the Northern Ireland Executive will receive funding to deliver a comparable scheme.
As part of investment in defence skills, the UK government is to establish new defence technical excellence colleges in Scotland and Wales. The Treasury said it would work with Stormont ministers on a “region wide defence skills and apprenticeships programme.”
Glyn Roberts, chief executive of Retail NI, said at first glance, it was difficult to see how the budget would address the immediate challenges facing the local economy and high streets.
“We welcome the chancellor’s announcement that around 70,000 small retail, hospitality and leisure businesses in England will be taken out of paying business rates altogether.
“The Barnett consequential funding that the Northern Ireland Executive receives as a result of this announcement must be used to deliver meaningful rates relief for small businesses here,” he said.
“Why should our members and other local small businesses, who already face the highest business rates burden in the UK, be denied the same support as their counterparts in England?”
Meanwhile, the Irish arm of social media giant TikTok reduced its workforce in Ireland by 600, new accounts show. In March last year, the Chinese video-sharing platform informed the government that it was planning to make up to 300 of its Dublin-based staff redundant. The newly released account shows that numbers employed last year actually fell from 2,708 to 2,108.
(The writer is our foreign correspondent based in the UK)
andyjalil@aol.com