Northern Ireland Budget Bill

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading
Tuesday 7th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I totally support everything the noble Baroness said about the need for more financial support for policing. Our police force in Northern Ireland has very different pressures from those in the rest of the United Kingdom.

We are here again, late at night, discussing Northern Ireland with more or less the same people we see at every debate. I sometimes think that if only the Conservative Party—sorry, the Conservative and Unionist Party—and the Labour Party had spent much more time over many years taking a genuine interest in Northern Ireland, getting properly organised there and standing for election, we might be in a very different position. The Labour Party does not even allow candidates to stand in Northern Ireland; yet, from all over, it keeps telling people in Northern Ireland what they should or should not be doing. That is important to stress.

I am disappointed in the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hain, who I count as a friend from long years of knowing him. It says to me that he no longer supports the Belfast/Good Friday agreement; the amendment is clearly completely against the spirit and words of the agreement in relation to cross-community support. I point out gently, as has been pointed out already by the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, that I did not see much pressure coming from the Labour Party during the three years that Sinn Féin was not in the Assembly. I did not see Motions to change the Belfast agreement or take the salaries away from those who would not take their seats. I support what the Minister has done to reduce the salaries of the elected MLAs; that was perfectly sensible, as I think the parties themselves recognise, but what the noble Lord, Lord Hain, is suggesting goes much further than that. Elected members of Sinn Féin, who say they have a mandate not to take their seats in the other place, still get huge amounts of money. They fly back and forth at the taxpayers’ expense. They do not get salaries but they get huge office expenses, which they use for campaigning, as has already been said. I wonder whether the noble Lord, Lord Hain, would similarly support stopping Sinn Féin’s money, since they refuse to take their seats.

They say they have a mandate—well, the DUP has a mandate. Whether your Lordships like it or not, the DUP has a mandate to stay out of the Assembly and the Executive until such time as the protocol has been sorted. It is simple. The Government have known for a very long time that it is devolution or the protocol. You cannot have both. The Minister probably realises that. What we do tonight we are doing because we have the protocol and we do not have an Executive to put a budget through. I of course support the fact that we are doing this, and I support quite a lot of the elements of the budget. I believe that this is an opportunity for His Majesty’s Government to look at some radical changes to what is happening in Northern Ireland.

As has been said before, even if the Executive were back tomorrow, the huge problems that exist are very unlikely to be solved in the way that we would like to see, because of the way the Executive work, the way the Finance Minister can decide how the money will be spent and the fact that there has to be agreement. The fact that the previous Finance Minister did not get a budget agreed by any of the parties is symbolic. As the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, has said, we cannot go on like this forever, with the way things are going with the European Union. We will get a decision tomorrow in the Supreme Court. Even if the court refuses to rule out the protocol, it will probably say things that, hopefully, will show again that the Government have broken the Act of Union; they have admitted that in the courts in Northern Ireland. They have subjugated the Act of Union; that is where we are today.

I hope the Minister will say how long he thinks we can go on in this situation. In my view, there will not be an Executive or Assembly until the protocol goes. That is what people are beginning to realise. It is definitely not going to happen until we see real sovereignty being taken back, and Northern Ireland back as an integral part of the United Kingdom. As Sir William Cash said very expressively and well last night on a television programme in Northern Ireland, how could any Government anywhere in the world give away—basically—a part of their own country, ceding power as we have done to the institutions of the European Union?

We will have to come up with some other solutions that do not mean coming back every month with a Bill to do something else. At the moment, it seems that Ministers decide what they will and will not allow to happen, but we want to see that in a much more systematic way. Perhaps it is time that we returned to the system of legislating, as we did in the past, by Orders in Council. At the moment we have these erratic emergency Bills coming through to which the Government very rarely accept changes, but, despite past criticism of the limited time given to Orders in Council in both Houses of Parliament, and of the fact that an order was unamendable, it would be far preferable in terms of good government to return to that system, as well as making much better use of your Lordships’ time here. Legislating in that way would allow Northern Ireland’s separate body of law to be updated when necessary, instead of many years later than needed.

It is worth recalling what used to happen before Stormont reappeared spasmodically. There were an average of 20 Orders in Council every year until 2006-07. In the last 15 years there have been only six, yet there have been numerous Northern Ireland Bills. Those six orders were exceptional measures to introduce the welfare reform that involved universal credit—Stormont Ministers were not willing to be seen to legislate in that area so they asked Westminster to do the needful—and another one reformed the sexual offences law. I cannot help but think that this buck-passing is what happens with the current legacy Bill. I think we have all forgotten, because it is convenient to forget, that the five local political parties oppose the legacy Bill but previously they sent it to Westminster because they could not agree on any way forward for themselves.

We have to face up to the fact that this House and the other House have become the legislature for Northern Ireland. It is time that the noble Lord, Lord Caine, started to convince Ministers and the Prime Minister that we cannot go on like this, and that there is a need to put in an extra couple of Ministers for Northern Ireland and beef up local government. Over many years, people have argued against devolution and said that integration was the way forward. People sometimes say that the train has gone too far to be pulled back, but we might need to look at whether what we are doing now is going to be sustainable in future. Sufficient integration on a transitory basis until the Assembly is back needs sensible government consideration.

Money is getting through now—practically everyone who was entitled to it now has the energy money—but we need radical change in how we deal with our finances in Northern Ireland. Some bad financial decisions have been taken in Northern Ireland over the past two or three years. Sometimes, because one side gets something, the other side then has to get something, and the two things come together but it is not actually the best way to spend money for people in Northern Ireland.

We should use this opportunity—although I am sure no one will want to say it is an opportunity—to look seriously at what we are doing at this moment and how we can make the changes now that will mean, should the protocol go and the Executive come back, there is a better footing to make things better in Northern Ireland generally for all its people.