Business

Fresh support for hotels could be approved this week

A loophole leaving hotels out of the Omicron hospitality scheme could be closed this week.
A loophole leaving hotels out of the Omicron hospitality scheme could be closed this week. A loophole leaving hotels out of the Omicron hospitality scheme could be closed this week.

NEW financial support for Hotels could be approved this week, the Finance Minister has said.

Conor Murphy says he intends to put a paper before the Executive on Thursday that would add hotel operators to the Omicron support fund, which opened last week for hospitality firms.

Hotels have to date been omitted from the scheme.

The finance minister revealed the plan in response to questions over the funds made available to support businesses hit by the winter Covid-19 surge.

MLAs heard on Monday that Stormont’s departments had handed back £140.5 million unspent from their budgets. The biggest surrender came from the Department for the Economy (DfE), which handed back £50.3m, including almost £30m allocated for the Economic Recovery Action Plan (ERAP).

DfE also handed back £16.7m in unspent capital funding.

The Assembly heard that despite the size of the funding pot available, which had been significantly bolstered by significant Barnett funding from London, just over £100 million had been left unallocated following the January monitoring round.

It includes £70.5m in resource DEL, which covers the day-to-day funding for Stormont’s departments, and £35.9m of capital funding.

Conor Murphy indicated he had met all the recent bids for funding from fellow ministers, with tens of millions left to spare.

The monitoring procedure is used in the middle of budget cycles to allocate fresh funding from the Treasury and re-distribute money departments have been unable to spend in time.

Fiscal rules allow Stormont to carry around £105m in resource DEL into the next financial year. But the limit for rolling over capital funds is just £27.5m.

It means just over £8m could now be surrendered to the Treasury.

In response, Conor Murphy said: “I have extremely disappointed we received such significant levels of departmental reduced requirements at this late stage from Executive colleagues, which had been notified earlier, could have been utilized in other areas.”

But the finance minister defended his own response to business support schemes, stating that his department had initiated the latest hospitality scheme, which offers grants of up to £20,000.

He said it was up to the ministers responsible to bring forward proposals on other grant support schemes.

“If ministers have policy responsibility for sectors that need assistance, they need to bring forward a case to me so that I can make a recommendation to the executive,” said Mr Murphy.

“I am still content to do that if people bring those cases forward.”