Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a funding package of £17 million for Northern Ireland households that have been affected by the increasing price of home heating oil due to the war in Iran.
Less than 4% of households in Great Britain use home heating oil, but over 60% use it in Northern Ireland.
Finance Minister John O’Dowd has said the allocation “falls far short of what is required.” He estimates that the current support offered by Downing Street will “amount to roughly £35 per household.”
“Given the limited funding from Westminster I think it’s only right and proper we target those on the lowest incomes,” O’Dowd said.
The money will go the Executive and its up to them to decide how it is allocated to NI households. O’Dowd said he will be engaging with other ministers, including Communities Minister Gordon Lyons, “to ensure support is delivered quickly and makes a difference to those most in need.”
Michelle O’Neill has said the £17m is a “real slap in the face to families that are struggling, who are already struggling to pay their oil bills.”
“We have to continue in making the case for an urgent support package to mitigate the work excess of what people are experiencing right now,” she said in the Assembly on Monday.
The SDLP have criticised the Executive’s handling of the energy price crisis. Party leader Claire Hanna said: “The Executive’s approach to this issue has done little to help struggling families. Their default response was to blame London and have a row with each other, instead of working through what a support scheme should look like. Both short and long-term opportunities to manage this crisis and address our over-reliance on home heating oil have been dodged.
“The support announced by the Prime Minister today won’t do enough but instead of coming up with proposals to intervene, we will now see Executive parties lining up to criticise the UK Government alone. The Finance Minister has been non-committal, vague about what funds exists, and Sinn Féin and the DUP have been more interested in tearing lumps out of each other,” she added.
TUV leader Jim Allister said the money should have been issued by Westminster directly, “rather than left to the dysfunctional Stormont Executive, where dither and delay is usually the order of the day.”
