Northern Ireland (Stormont Agreement and Implementation Plan) Bill

Ben Wallace Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Mr Ben Wallace)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound), who in every debate is optimistic and positive, and it is especially welcome that in what is, effectively, another stage of the Stormont House agreement and the fresh start agreement, we find ourselves in this Second Reading with the full support of Her Majesty’s Opposition. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) and all those on the Opposition Front Bench for their continued support for making sure that we move Northern Ireland onwards to normalisation and ensure any bumps in the road that we have experienced are sorted out to allow the Northern Ireland political settlement to bed in and move forward so that the people there can take hold of the opportunities on offer.

With the leave of the House, I would like to respond to some of the points raised in the debate. I reiterate the importance of this Bill in the implementation of November’s fresh start agreement as a whole, as well as of the specific provisions, including those that give effect to the independent reporting commission and increase fiscal transparency in the Executive’s budget-setting process.

Paramilitary activity has been a blight on Northern Ireland society and is an issue which the UK Government, the Irish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive will tackle together. The measures in this Bill will create an independent body that will report on the progress made towards ending paramilitary activity connected with Northern Ireland once and for all.

The draft budget measure achieves what was set out in the fresh start agreement, and it will ensure that the Executive cannot consider spending plans that exceed the block grant allocated from the Treasury.

Let me respond to some points raised by hon. Members. I join others in sending condolences to the family of Mark Calway, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson) understands that we are here to support him and the family of Mark Calway in their loss. We are also incredibly grateful for the forensic support—if I can put it that way—that his Committee gives to Northern Ireland politics and Government policy. We know that pragmatic, forensic examination of our policies, and those of other people, will help build that trust in Northern Ireland.

I say to the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock) that as a former Member of the Scottish Parliament I know the internal workings of devolution, and some measures in the Bill that the SNP supports would not necessarily have been right for it in Scotland. However, I know that the SNP supports such measures for the reasons that the hon. Lady eloquently articulated, which are to try to move Northern Ireland forward and achieve a settlement that will allow people to put the troubles behind them.

I pay tribute to the DUP. The right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) articulated his tribute to the former First Minister, without whose actions we would not be discussing this Bill today, or indeed the previous Bill. I am grateful for the support that the DUP has given to the Government throughout this process, to try to resolve some of the issues that led to that impasse last year.

I am also grateful for the positive attitude and speeches by DUP Members, and the support that they have provided to allow an LCM to be put in place swiftly. Such determination by the Executive and the First Minister to deal with those issues in Stormont means that I am incredibly optimistic about Northern Ireland and how it will progress, and I hope that the bumps that appeared in the road when I was first appointed to this post are put behind us so that we move forward, deal with the paramilitary past, and hopefully stop such things in the future. We must also grasp with both hands the opportunities and economic challenges that are presented.

I hear the issues about legacy raised by the hon. Member for Belfast South (Dr McDonnell), and we all want to solve them. In the past few weeks and months my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, the Minister for the Armed Forces and I met the Lord Chief Justice, and the Minister of Justice, the Deputy First Minister and the First Minister of Northern Ireland. Everyone is united in trying to get to a position where we can deal with the legacy of the past and move forward, and the Treasury has agreed to a package of funding—£150 million —to do that. However, we cannot just impose that £150 million on an unreformed system. We are all trying to work together to produce a long-term solution, not a short-term solution.

The phrase “national security” is often bandied about as if somehow it is being used as an unreasonable block on progress. Throughout the troubles, informers, neighbours, workmates, and ordinary members of the public helped the security forces against people who intimidated their own communities. It was not just informers; it was everybody. It was people who did not agree with violence. They might not have been Unionists; they might have been nationalists. Not only do those people deserve our protection, but we have a duty to protect them. Without their information and helpful tip-offs, without the confidentiality hotline being used, and without people in the heart of those communities saying, “We don’t stand for violence and we want an end to paramilitary bullying”, we would not have reached the end of the troubles. When people bandy around the phrase “national security” as some throwaway line, we should remember that at the heart of this is the need to protect those people and provide the duty of protection that we owe them. Without them, more blood would have been shed on the streets of Northern Ireland, and we should not forget the role that they played.

[Mark Durkan]

Does the Minister agree that when investigating the past, the police ombudsman has always respected such matters fully? It has never breached or compromised anybody’s interest in that regard, so surely others could be trusted to adhere to the same standard?

[Mr Wallace]

Everyone is entrusted with the powers that they are granted. National security does not just cover the actions of the PSNI; it covers the actions of the security services and of a range of people involved in trying to ensure that our society is safe and secure. We should remember that national security is not taken lightly. It is open to scrutiny by our Intelligence and Security Committee in this House, by the ombudsman and by the courts. The coroner and the judges often make the final decisions on many of these issues and they see the full facts, so it is important to remember that national security is about protecting life and people.

The hon. Member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone (Tom Elliott) is absolutely right about the financial provisions. To enable a stable and secure budget to go forward, it is incredibly important to allow everyone in the Assembly to have a role in producing a budget and delivering services for better governance and better services for the people in Northern Ireland. The extension from seven to 14 days for the appointment of Ministers is absolutely a good example of making Government work better. We are delighted that as a Government we can ensure that that is put in place.

Let me reply to the hon. Member for South Antrim (Danny Kinahan) on the definition of paramilitary and paramilitary activity. In our view, that should be left to the commission to decide. It would be hard in a piece of primary legislation to prescribe—and it is the Government’s view that it is not for us to do so—how the four commissioners and the commission should look at paramilitary activity.

I hear the comments made by the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Mr Donaldson) about paramilitaries leaving the stage. When I hear that comment, I often think I would not like to be in the green room at that time. There is no place for paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, and there never has been. We must make sure that there never is in the future.

I welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s support for the Bill and his observations. Of course, the independent reporting commission will also cover paramilitary activity in the south, in Ireland, and that is incredibly important. I know that the people of Ireland will take note of that. The Garda, who have been incredibly supportive over the years in ensuring that cross-border activity is countered, know that all this will be effective between the north and the south, which is something that we will focus on.

The right hon. Gentleman made a powerful point, and it is important that we should be clear about it. It was INLA, IPLO, the IRA, the UVF, the Red Hand Commando and the UDA that killed innocent people on the streets of Northern Ireland and on the mainland of the United Kingdom. No amount of innuendos, or selective leaks and salacious allegations, can change that fact. It does not wash away their guilt by trying to move it on. The narrative that has been growing is very dangerous for the history of Northern Ireland, because the reality is that it was those groups that chose to go out on nights and kill people. It was those groups that planted the bombs. We will not let the alternative narrative be planted that somehow somebody else caused it and that they were therefore not guilty of what they did. We hear that, loud and clear.

[Mark Durkan]

On that basis, given that these organisations need to be rightly blamed and indicted for what they did, does the Minister now regret that the British Government for so long maintained the UDA’s status as a legal organisation and consistently refused to proscribe it?

[Mr Wallace]

If memory serves, the UDA was proscribed in 1992. I was not in this House and I was not privy to the work of Government. In fact, in 1992 I was walking around west Belfast. As for the idea that I can condemn or support the ruling, all I know is that when I was serving in Northern Ireland, I was grateful that the UDA was proscribed. I was grateful that the UVF was proscribed, and the Red Hand Commando. Any paramilitary organisation should be proscribed. Not only should any organisation that uses fear, terror and bullying be proscribed, but the people who take part should be convicted.

To the hon. Member for South Down (Ms Ritchie) I say that we in this House should not forget the SDLP’s long-standing opposition to paramilitary intimidation. Very often, the SDLP bore the brunt of that intimidation. All the parties in this House have experienced at first hand intimidation by paramilitaries, either within the communities that they represented or in the neighbouring communities that sought to keep them out. I pay tribute to that long-standing commitment to peace and the democratic process. We do not forget that, but I say again that we should not take the issues of national security lightly.

On the legacy issues, as I have said earlier, all of us are trying our best. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State regularly has meetings with the victims community to make sure they feel we are doing our best. We are going to get there. We are going to try to resolve this, and that will happen—we hope—as soon as we can all get agreement.

[Vernon Coaker]

May I just press the Minister once more on this issue? He mentions dealing with the legacy of the past. I asked the Secretary of State, but I want to be clear about this because a number of questions have arisen throughout this interesting and good debate. Will the Minister and the Secretary of State look again at releasing some of the funding that the Treasury and the Government have put aside for dealing with legacy issues to fund the PSNI and the coroner service to deal with some of these issues which were supposed to be dealt with by other institutions? Because of the inability to come to an agreement, the PSNI and the coroner service have been left to deal with them but not been given the resources to tackle them. Will the Minister re-examine that?

[Mr Wallace]

Absolutely, we will support any measures that deal with the legacy, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has said. We cannot just release the money; we need all the actors on the stage to produce the solution. We need the victims, the PSNI, the courts, the Lord Chief Justice and the Executive to support the solution. If we were just to release money but nobody else was supporting the schemes or the coroners’ courts changes, for example, we would not necessarily solve the issue. We will look with all seriousness and all support at any proposals to solve the legacy issues.

The good news is that we have the Treasury’s agreement for the sum in principle, which is half the battle, as anybody who has ever been in government will know—£150 million is there. That means that the gap between getting the money and delivering it is simply a matter of getting an agreement between all the significant stakeholders in Northern Ireland. We are all determined to do that and it is one of our priorities. We are all trying to get there and we will work with all parties in Northern Ireland to try to do it.

[Ms Ritchie]

I referred to the split of moneys between the National Crime Agency and the PSNI. Would it be possible for the Minister to follow that up in writing to me?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Wallace]

I thank the hon. Lady for reminding me of something: £28 million has been allocated for tackling paramilitary activity. As far as I understand it, how that is divided is an operational decision about who needs it and where it should go. That sum has been allocated, and we think it is a step in the right direction in tackling paramilitary activity. If there is any more to tell her, I will certainly write to her.

In closing, I wish to remind the House that this Bill has the support of the Northern Ireland Executive. It will deliver on the UK Government’s commitment to the fresh start agreement and it plays a significant part in our efforts to support a stable and workable devolution settlement in Northern Ireland. I urge the House to support the Bill.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.