Northern Ireland (Regional Rates and Energy) (No. 2) Bill

Lord Empey Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 12th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, when the business Motion was being discussed last week, I made the point that the method of dealing with Northern Ireland legislation in this place is entirely unsatisfactory. I support the views expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie, to that effect. We know that budgets are annual events and we know that the setting of a regional rate is an annual event. Therefore, there are no surprises, and it is not as though the legislative business that we have had to deal with in the last few weeks has been so pressing that we could not have made time for these Bills to be dealt with in a proper way.

The other significant point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, was on the absence of any meaningful scrutiny. This is concerning, because for years—literally years—now, nobody has been looking at any of these things, other than the examinations conducted from time to time by the Auditor-General in Northern Ireland. Given that enormous amounts of money are going from this Parliament to Stormont, nobody there is accountable to anybody here, and there is nobody there for them to be accountable to. It is probably a new version of “accountable but not responsible”. Therefore, we have developed this limbo land, where the Government trundle on but without the checks and balances that are the hallmarks of a democracy. I appeal to the Minister, as I appealed to the Leader of the House last week, to prevail upon his colleagues that legislation dealing with Northern Ireland should at least be dealt with in a respectable way and at a respectable time, when we can scrutinise it to the best of our abilities, in the hope that it will find its proper place back in the devolved institutions.

The noble Lord, Lord Bruce, spoke about the estimates for the Executive Office for the next financial year. As they have for some considerable time, those estimates contain the phrase,

“actions associated with the preparation and implementation of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry Report and Findings”.

That report came out three years ago. I am aware that there has been a consultation, which has now closed. We have had a report and now a consultation, and so it goes on. These people were abused 40 or 50 years ago in some cases, and due to the political limbo that has been created—let us not blame whoever it is—they are being abused all over again, because they are not getting any help at all.

I know that, apart from the state having a responsibility, some of the churches and orders whose members were responsible for some of this abuse also have a responsibility, and their insurers clearly do as well. I appeal to the Minister to ensure that in the financial year about to begin, there is, at the very least, provision in that budget for interim payments to be made. These people are getting on in years and they are suffering again. There is unanimous support in the political parties for this matter to be resolved—not a single elected Member objects to this—yet we are still confronted by the fact that nothing has happened and these people have received nothing. It is inhuman and entirely unsatisfactory, and I appeal to the Minister to ensure that some progress is made in the financial year about to begin.

I agree with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Browne, about bringing together the rates Bill and the RHI matter. They are two entirely separate matters, and they should not be in the same piece of legislation. I do not know how the Public Bill Office allowed it, and they should be separated; there is no reason for them to be linked.

Another issue in the estimates is that the Permanent Secretary in the Department of Health announced that he was going to start work on the development of a cancer strategy. This is something that Northern Ireland sorely lacks, and I welcome it, but as he said, there is no reason to believe, unless a Minister or somebody else is responsible at the end of the process, that decisions can be taken. I have repeatedly given statistics to this House on waiting lists—they are growing and growing and growing. In every category they are worse each quarter than they were the quarter before. They would not be tolerated in any other region of the United Kingdom. We are now up to 289,000 outpatients waiting for a consultant’s appointment. Of those, 95,000 have been waiting for over 12 months. For some procedures that are not life-threatening, people were told last week that they may have to wait 10 years. Where are we going with this? There is nobody there in a position to implement the many reports that have been produced and deal with things as they have been developing.

Another matter the Minister might address is that we are now getting into the habit of turning capital into resource, whereby we are taking money out of the capital budget to put into the revenue budget. The Treasury used to go mad if anybody proposed doing that, but now it seems to be the done thing—it is commonplace. On top of that, we are borrowing through the RRI initiative, and the interest payments in this budget are now up to £51 million a year. That is becoming a burden in itself. Something is radically wrong when we are in the position of having to move money from a capital budget into a revenue budget when we have huge infrastructure issues to resolve, such as our road system and many others. We are also confronted with large sums of money being allocated to the legacy proposals—£150 million is supposed to be ready to support the historical inquiries unit, which is a catastrophe, and that would not cover even half its life. Yet we are short of nurses: this week we are flying people from England into some of our hospitals in Belfast because there are no nurses to look after the wards. Think of the cost of that. We have got our priorities entirely wrong and I hope we can get some accountability and scrutiny into this place.

I appreciate that at least the RHI committee stage will be taking place next week, which will give us an opportunity to go into more detail because it is a complicated subject. It was a catastrophic failure of administration and incompetence, against the background—as the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, said—of people being given guarantees by the Government. I do not quite know how we get out of this. It is a big problem, and it requires scrutiny.

We are dealing with such a complicated matter, with two Bills and all their stages being taken in one evening. I do not know about those who may have looked at it, but it is exceptionally complicated, and not something you can deal with on the hoof. It requires a committee to examine it in detail and resolve it, because there are big issues of principle involved. In all of this, there will be casualties if we do not watch how we handle this. I welcome that we will have a further opportunity to go into this in more detail next week, but I appeal to the Minister to prevail upon his colleagues to treat legislation regarding Northern Ireland with some parliamentary respect, so that at least in the interim, when we are waiting—we hope—for devolution to be resolved, people can feel that somebody is looking after their interests.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Alderdice]

The noble Lord must have brought them with him himself, because certainly nobody over here would even have known what they were, never mind be displaying them. The truth is that the interests of the people on this side of the water have moved on for a whole series of reasons, and we have to take this extremely seriously, because when people are frustrated, disadvantaged and do not have the opportunity of making a difference—and many people over here feel they have no chance of making a difference to the difficulties in Northern Ireland—then they move on in their minds and in their feelings. This is a very real danger in Northern Ireland.

We have no devolution and we understand the reasons for that. It would be perfectly possible, however—as the noble Lords, Lord Trimble and Lord Empey, and I have pointed out repeatedly in this place—for the Government to permit the Assembly to sit and debate these issues, and that would inform the conversations that we have on this side of the water in two ways. First, it would mean that there was some holding to public account, if not to legal account, of the Northern Ireland Civil Service. When I was growing up, I had a relatively implicit trust in both the competence and the integrity of the Northern Ireland Civil Service. That has been shattered and blown apart repeatedly over the last number of years, as a combination of incompetence and a lack of integrity has been demonstrated over and over again. If there were Northern Ireland politicians from right across the parties demonstrating in debate their concern for these issues, that would hold Northern Ireland civil servants to account in a way that has not been the case for a long time.

Secondly, if Northern Ireland representatives in Belfast were having to hold the discussion and the arguments in public, even if they were not able to make decisions, people from Northern Ireland would start holding them to account for the fact that many of these adverse decisions were made by those very representatives. When they are not meeting and there is no debate, it is far too easy to pass it across the water to somebody else. I do not, for the life of me, see why the Government are not prepared to allow that degree of accountability, even though it does not have legal force. It would also say to many people in Northern Ireland that those who are being paid to be Members of the Legislative Assembly should be doing not just constituency business in their offices but constituents’ business on the Hill.

[Lord Empey]

Is the noble Lord aware that there was no greater opportunity than to use the MLAs in the run-up to this budget? Instead, there were two or three very brief and perfunctory meetings, of little import, between the civil servants and representatives of the parties. Surely it would have been a golden opportunity to let them go through the process, even if it were for guidance, if for no other reason.

[Lord Alderdice]

The noble Lord knows that I agree entirely with him. I simply cannot see that there is any sound reason at all for the Government to hold back on this. My noble friend Lord Bruce of Bennachie has insisted, quite rightly, that there is now deep concern that large amounts of money are being allocated and spent in Northern Ireland without proper accountability and with increasing concerns that they are not being properly dealt with, spent and accounted for. It is not possible for us in this place, in the absence of direct rule, to hold to account, and even if we had direct rule, it would not be a satisfactory holding to account. Why? It is because neither in this place nor in the other place is there a representation of the nationalist community.

Now, one might well say that some of that is the nationalist community’s own choice; that is not the point. The point is that there is not satisfactory representation and therefore the degree of accountability is not one that is going to be acceptable to large proportions of the population. Many of the arguments will not be satisfactorily adverted and adduced. I do not want to see direct rule, but I also do not want to see a continued drift and I have to say that, not just on this issue but on the issue that has just been debated and voted down at the other end of this building, the Government have shown an absolutely clear habit of kicking the can down the road and not making the decisions, even when it is manifestly clear that it is long past the time when the decisions should be made.

So we come to these Bills. Why do they go through some kind of emergency procedure? Was it some great shock or surprise that these Bills were going to have to be brought forward? Of course it was not, but it looks like every piece of Northern Ireland legislation is now going through an emergency process, even when it is known six months in advance that the matter must be dealt with in this place. This is not an acceptable way of going about things. Why do we have democratic processes? We have them because it is the way that we find to disagree with each other, as much as to agree, but to do so democratically and without violence. If people are left with no way of affecting process inside the democratic process then they will be encouraged to look beyond it, and that is not something that we should preside over.

It is not enough for Governments to suggest that strand 1 of the Good Friday agreement is the key strand and is not being implemented because of political disagreements in Northern Ireland. Strand 3 of the Good Friday agreement, the British-Irish Inter- governmental Conference, did not meet at a top level for 10 years and neither of the Governments asked the other, or insisted on having it. So when people talk about the Good Friday agreement not being implemented, it is not being implemented by the two Governments who are still in operation, in some fashion or other, and that has led to a deterioration in their relationship and in the whole process that we were supposed to be trying to make work. I say it not to the noble Lord, because I suspect he has some sympathy, coming as he does from north of the border himself, but it is really important to be clear to the Government: they are not governing in a satisfactory way, neither in this place, nor in terms of insisting on devolution, nor in the relationship between the British and Irish Governments.

I ask the Minister one specific thing in respect of RHI: I ask not that we have a debate next week and put material through, but will we have a serious debate in this place when the report of the RHI inquiry comes out, when we will have a serious piece of business to address which will make public, in this place and elsewise, the kind of exceptional inefficiency and perhaps even corruption that has gone on in Northern Ireland? Will he undertake that we will have that debate and that we will not be told that it is a devolved matter and not something that we should be debating in this place?