To ask the Minister of Finance for an update on the establishment of new Civil Service regional hubs.

Mr C Murphy

With your permission, Mr Deputy Speaker, I will answer questions 8 and 9 together. The hubs in Ballykelly, Downpatrick, Ballymena and Craigavon are complete and will become operational when appropriate. Progress is advancing well at the Connect2 hubs in Bangor and Omagh. Planning has started for additional hubs in the Antrim/Newtownabbey area, Derry, mid-Ulster, Enniskillen and Newry, all of which are planned to be delivered over the next two years.

Mr McGlone

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire as sin. Minister, will you give some details about the hubs in mid-Ulster, which is, as you will know, is one of the fastest-growing economic areas in the North? When might the scheme start in mid-Ulster?

Mr C Murphy

When we looked at the council areas that had been provided in the first run of the scheme, there was a recognition that mid-Ulster was a notable gap. We want to ensure that there is the ability to access the hubs across all the council areas. The initial programme was mapped on to the data of where people were travelling into Belfast from in order to make sure that the areas that had the highest numbers of people travelling into Belfast were dealt with. We have worked our way through that. We have a good working relationship with local government, and I am sure that we are engaging with Mid Ulster District Council to identify a suitable location so that we can work in partnership with the council to make sure that a hub fits into its economic development strategies. The purpose of the hubs was to put them in town centres to make sure that they had an added benefit and were not sitting in an industrial estate but were bringing people into the town centres. They coincided with councils' development plans, so they harmonised with those. We will continue to engage. I am not certain about the time frame for that, but the sooner we get that level of engagement, the sooner we can identify sites. We have been pressing ahead with the hubs, and there are a number that are ready to open once we get the back-to-work announcement from the task force in the Department of Health. I think that they will be a success, and there is significant interest in them. They will generate additional interest from people in those areas and create more opportunities in the longer term for people to apply for Civil Service jobs when travelling in and out of Belfast five days a week is not part of that job.

Mr C Murphy

Politics is becoming very local this week for some reason [Laughter.]

I am not sure why Rathgael House was chosen or whether another option was available in Bangor; I am happy to check that. As I said, the broad template is to look for an available property, discuss with the local council to make sure that it fits in and for it to be as much in the town centre as possible. Rathgael House is slightly out of the town centre. A property should be as central in a town as possible to allow people the flexibility to work a number of days a week from their own area and, perhaps, to provide a space for local government officials to meet central government officials so that we can break down some of the barriers between the strands of administration here. I am happy to see whether another property was available in Bangor town centre, but availability of government-owned property is one of the key criteria. That is possibly why Rathgael House was chosen.

Ms Brogan

I will continue with the local politics trend and ask you for an update on the Civil Service hub in Omagh.

Mr C Murphy

I said in my original answer that the Connect2 hubs in Bangor and in Omagh were advancing well. The Omagh hub may not be up to the same level as the first few that we have done, but it is moving with some progress, and there has been useful engagement with Fermanagh and Omagh District Council to make sure that we get the right place. I know that there is a lot of property in Omagh that is government-owned and that a lot of it is surplus to requirements now. We want to get a place that is the right fit to make sure that it coincides with the development plans for Omagh town centre and makes a contribution to all of that. I have been informed that progress is going well there, and I hope to see more movement on the hub in the near future.

Mr Storey

In the Minister's original answer, he talked about the hubs becoming operational "when appropriate". Can he elaborate on what that means? Does "when appropriate" mean "when we have in place a proper return-to-work policy", so that spaces that have been identified are no longer continually vacant?

Mr C Murphy

The Member is correct. We are waiting for the advice. At the moment, the official advice is that people should work from home if possible. As a Department, we cannot countermand that advice. I have asked the task force if it is looking at the issue, and it will discuss with the Department of Health what the latest advice might be.

The pandemic has not gone away. A lot of people are still contracting COVID-19 and unfortunately there are still people dying from it. So we have to have a cautious approach to emerging from this, although there is a great sense that we are, at last, seeing a lot of light at the end of the tunnel. We are awaiting that advice and making sure that we adhere to it. We have been developing policies on what a return to work looks like because the workplace, undoubtedly, will have changed. There is much more opportunity for people to have a flexible approach to work, and we need to recognise and accommodate that. IT solutions have advanced rapidly during the pandemic, which allows us to do that, and that is good for the Civil Service generally because it makes the option of working in it more open to people from rural and peripheral areas and to women to make sure that our Civil Service is more reflective of the society that it serves. We are waiting on that advice, and, as soon as we get it, we will press ahead as quickly as we can.