£1 billion
That's how much the Environment Minister Edwin Poots thinks the Executive will face in cuts, according to a letter he has sent to the 26 local councils explaining why the Executive wants them to pay the full costs of the Review of Public Administration.
Since the Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition took charge, the focus has been on how many cuts the Executive will face to its block grant - the cash it has to fund services like health and education. However on Inside Politics today we are probing another area where the policies adopted in London could have a direct impact on people here - through the welfare benefits paid to hundreds of thousands of claimants.
The welfare system in Northern Ireland is governed according to the so called parity principle, whereby people here get the same benefits as their counterparts in England. That means that if the new Welfare Secretary Ian Duncan Smith starts changing the rules applied to those who get, say, Incapacity Benefit, they would also apply close to home. Claims here for Incapacity Benefit or Income Support are well above the UK average. In the last financial year more than £4 billion in benefits was paid out to 580,000 claimants.
If Mr Duncan Smith pushes through radical changes, how comfortable would that be for his local counterpart, the new Social Development Minister Alex Attwood? Could other parties suggest we should depart from the parity principle? If they did what would be the financial consequences for the block grant? And what might be the practical repercussions given that our welfare benefits are paid using the London Department of Work and Pensions computer systems?
Those are the kind of topics I am hoping to discuss with Alex Atwood and the local Conservative Ian Parsley, who works for Mr Duncan Smith's Centre for Social justice think tank. Our regular commentator Fionuala O'Connor and the newspaper columnist Alex Kane join me to consider general political developments.
I'm 
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