Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Alex Davies-Jones and Stephen Farry

Committee stage
Tuesday 29th June 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Stephen Farry]

Q Gareth might be able to elaborate on this. Essentially, Mr Speaker, you are outlining three broad issues. One is the removal of the bar on Deputy Speakers with regard to a petition of concern. The second is the ability to establish Committees if there is a long period after an Assembly election in which Ministers are still in place on a caretaker basis. Perhaps we could ask Gareth to elaborate on the third point, which is around the potential lowering of the 14-day threshold in very limited circumstances. Maybe he could give us an idea of how that could be achieved in primary legislation—there are some enabling issue—and in Standing Orders. There may well be issues around those circumstances are defined.

Dr McGrath: Mr Farry will recall from many discussions of petitions of concern over many years that the devil in these matters is in the detail. It is almost impossible to envisage all the scenarios that could be captured in relation to the 14-day period. As Mr Speaker mentioned, a number of matters would be obvious to us, such as statutory rules, prayers of annulment and legislative consent motions, but there may be a plethora of other statutory motions, as I would call them, in primary legislation throughout the statute book. It is quite difficult to say, “If it isn’t 14 days, is it 10 days or seven days? What is it?” From that perspective, some sort of mechanism that could take into account when a statutory deadline will impact on the 14-day period would be helpful. It would be almost impossible for me to get into defining that in more detail.

[Alex Davies-Jones]

Q I thank the witnesses for joining us. Mr Speaker, are you concerned that the limits of the power of Ministers during the caretaker period are not set out?

Alex Maskey: What we would be concerned about is that under our rules, once we have an election, we would appoint the Speaker and Deputy Speakers before anyone else. Then we would appoint Ministers and Committees. First, we need agreement on a cross-community basis in order to elect our Speakers. Secondly, if we were not to have new Ministers, and outgoing Ministers were caretakers, you could have a situation where there would be little scrutiny or accountability of the work that they were doing, albeit that they would still be operating on a caretaker basis. That would be a concern for us.

We would also have an issue on the question of sufficient representation, which we would like better clarified. I do not want to have to navigate undefined or ill-defined conditions, such as “sufficient representation”. The NIO is suggesting it would want flexibility in that case, which I can fully understand, but we are drawing attention to the fact that that could give us the issue of trying to navigate something that is not very well defined.