To ask the Minister of Health whether an assessment has been made of potential savings that could be made within his Department through multi-year budgeting, including the areas the savings would be realised in.

Multi-year budgets by themselves don't drive savings but long-term planning will enable us to plan better, set more strategic targets and hence achieve better outcomes. With this in mind I hope that the Executive will soon be in a position to set multi-year budgets for the period 2026-27 onwards.

My department is in the initial planning stage of developing a 5-year plan which will align with the Budget Sustainability planning that the Executive has committed to, however we currently are not in a position to identify where any additional savings would come from.

The 2025-26 draft budget allocation means that our focus on delivering short-term savings remains and Trusts are currently working to identify the extent to which these can contribute to protecting services in the year ahead.