Lord Murphy of Torfaen
Main Page: Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord. I will write to him on matters pertaining to the Dillon appeal and the Supreme Court. Many things are in my gift, but that is not one, in terms of timing. On when the legislation will come forward, noble Lords will be aware of how busy the legislative agenda in this House is right now, and with forthcoming legislation. I assure noble Lords that we are making every effort, although the timing is not in my gift. We will bring forward primary legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows and I promise that appropriate representations are being made.
On what will be included in the primary legislation, we want to make sure that it is genuinely effective and has the confidence of the families, so of course we will work to try to address as many issues as we can. I look forward to engaging with the noble Lord on every specific case, if he would like to have those conversations.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on this significant achievement. It puts into practice what we said we would do before the general election: repeal the legislation. Some of the problems we faced with the current legislation were that every single political party in Northern Ireland disagreed with it. So can she assure me and your Lordships’ House that there will be proper consultation with every political party and with the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister—as well as with the Irish Government, where appropriate—to ensure that we have the widest possible consensus on what is so very necessary? But I give many congratulations to her and the Government on this.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I thank my noble friend both for his question and for his generous mentoring of me since we came into government. I am in awe of the work he did when he was Secretary of State and I am very grateful for how generous he has been with his time. He knows better than I quite how difficult and challenging it can be to secure consensus on matters pertaining to Northern Ireland—there is nothing more emotive than the issues we are discussing. But we will have proper engagement with all political parties to try to build a way forward. We are very clear that one reason why the current legacy Act has failed to receive cross-community support—and failed to secure the trust of communities in Northern Ireland and of the victims and survivors—is that none of the political parties was in agreement. Although these conversations will be very challenging, I look forward to working with noble Lords across this House to try to build a level of consensus, as the Secretary of State promised in the other place yesterday.