DfI Draft Budget 2025-26 Equality Impact Assessment

Overview

Draft 2025-26 Budget

The Department is seeking your comments on the equality implications of its Draft 2025-26 Resource and Capital Budget. The Department’s draft 2025-26 budget outcome, for both resource and capital is an improved position in comparison to previous years, however, the draft budget outcome does not provide funding for everything that the Department wants to do, and therefore prioritisation will be required. This EQIA focuses on the spending areas where the draft budget outcome may not allow the Department to deliver at the level it wanted to and seeks comments on the equality impacts of those.

The Department for Infrastructure is responsible for the maintenance, development and planning of critical infrastructure in Northern Ireland. The Department seeks to manage and protect over £37bn of public assets (excluding NI Water and Translink) that improve people’s quality of life, reduce our impact on the planet by living sustainability and decarbonising key services, and building prosperity by driving inclusive productivity. Those assets include over 26,000km of roads, 5,900 bridges, 10,000km of footways, approximately 300,000 streetlights, 426km of raised flood defences and flood walls, 26km of coastal defences and approximately 366km of below ground culverts. The Department has a vast and wideranging remit. Its responsibilities are grouped into three key delivery areas: Transport, Water and Planning.

Transport

The Department is responsible for the management, oversight and decarbonisation of surface transport in Northern Ireland. Along with Translink, we maintain road and rail networks to enable daily travel and transport of goods. We are responsible for the development of transport policy, and management of the road network asset.

Water

Access to a safe supply of drinking water and a good wastewater infrastructure is essential for the wellbeing of our people and our planet, to allow us to prosper and enable development and future economic and housing opportunities. The Department has a number of responsibilities in relation to water, wastewater and drainage policy in addition to being the sole shareholder in Northern Ireland Water.

Planning

The Department is responsible for the strategic direction and production of regional policy for land use planning. We develop planning legislation, provide oversight of the ‘two tier’ planning system and work with partners in local government and the wider community to create healthy living places. We also process a small number of regionally significant and called in planning applications.

Why your views matter

The Department is committed to seeking the views of those who are affected by the decisions that it will make in relation to both its resource and capital budget outcomes. We are keen to hear from individuals and organisations about their views on the equality implication of the decisions proposed and about any mitigations that the Department could put in place.

Responses received by 5 June 2025 will be used to inform the Department’s final opening resource and capital budget decisions for 2025-26 and further mitigation measures and reallocation of any additional funding available during 2025-26.