Northern Ireland Economy

Debate between David Simpson and Mark Durkan

Wednesday 11th May 2016 Westminster Hall

[David Simpson]

I wondered how long it would be before someone brought up Brexit.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

A source close to you.

[David Simpson]

A source very close to me, yes. My hon. Friend the Member for East Antrim is right: despite all the nonsense that has been talked, the manufacturing sector certainly will continue if we leave the European Union.

According to reports this week, Northern Ireland’s growth is dependent on the retail and service sectors, as they

“continue to report the fastest rates of job creation.”

I have certainly witnessed that in each of the three towns in my constituency. Growth is slow, but small retail businesses—I am not referring to charity shops—are starting to move back on to the high street, which is a good thing.

We may be the smallest region in the UK, but we are powerful on the world stage. Some 30% of the famous London red buses are manufactured in Ballymena by a local firm, Wrightbus. That is of course a big contract in London.

Northern Ireland (Welfare Reform) Bill (Allocation of Time)

Debate between David Simpson and Mark Durkan

Monday 23rd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan]

It is not what my argument amounts to. If the Assembly is saying in the legislative consent motion tabled by Sinn Féin and the DUP that it wants the legislation to come here, we should do our legislative business in proper order. The hon. Gentleman is suggesting that there should not be any debate at all, and that we are lucky to have the right even to table amendments.

Let us look at what the legislative consent motion says. Members of other parties might like to know what they are being asked to support. If they are being told, “Take this on foot of the legislative consent motion”—if they are being told that the legislative consent motion is holy writ—they should bear in mind the fact that it says:

“That this Assembly consents to the Northern Ireland (Welfare Reform) Bill 2015 being taken forward by the Westminster Parliament”—

that is a reference to the Bill with which we are dealing today—and

“approves the welfare clauses of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill as initially introduced at Westminster”.

Many of us in this House did not approve those clauses as initially introduced. Many of us, in a number of parties, voted against aspects of the Welfare Reform and Work Bill. Is the idea that we must now, on foot of the legislative consent motion, turn ourselves inside out—members of the Labour party, the SDLP, the SNP and Plaid Cymru, and the Green party Member—and say, “We opposed the Bill when it was debated in this House, but we no longer oppose it? We now approve the welfare clauses that were in the Welfare Reform and Work Bill as initially introduced at Westminster.” Well, my position on those clauses has not changed, the position of my hon. Friends in the SDLP has not changed, and I should be very surprised if the position of members of the other parties had changed.

The legislative consent motion goes on to approve

“the draft Welfare Reform (Northern Ireland) Order 2015; and the Executive’s proposals to enhance payments flowing from the agreement announced on 17 November 2015.”

Members might want to take a careful look at just what is in the legislative consent motion, and note that they are being asked to contradict their position in relation to the Welfare Reform and Work Bill as initially introduced here.

Some of us are trying to use the Committee stage to table due amendments which would be relevant to the Bill. The Secretary of State again tried to confuse things by referring to the amount of scrutiny that had been given to the Bill that was before the Assembly, which has now been largely transposed into a draft Order in Council running to 126 pages. What we are being asked to consider today is not that draft Order in Council, but the Northern Ireland (Welfare Reform) Bill, all 58 lines of it. Meanwhile, we are being asked to nod through 237 lines of a timetable motion so that we will not have the right to table amendments and put them to the vote. If the Secretary of State really meant what she said about time for debate on crucial amendments and new clauses, she would not be resisting this amendment; she would be agreeing to it so that paragraph (6) would be amended and the Chair could put other matters to the vote if that is what Members and the House so wished. This is about good parliamentary procedure.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

Is the hon. Gentleman saying he would have been happy enough for the situation to continue as it was, with massive fines being paid back to the Government? Surely that is not his argument.

[Mark Durkan]

Mr Deputy Speaker, I am not sure how far you are treating some of these arguments as relating to the matters of substance as opposed to procedure, but the Secretary of State talked long on those points, as did others.

Let us be clear: a couple of different arguments have been used as to why everybody should just pass this through today as a matter of urgency. One has been that if we do not scramble this through fast, the institutions are in danger of collapse. Who was bringing the institutions to the brink of collapse? It was the very people who are being celebrated as heroes. The SDLP never threatened to bring the institutions down; we never once on any of these issues in the last number of years have used the word “crisis” or threatened the existence of the institutions. We have never said we would make this a make-or-break issue and the institutions would crash if we did not get our way. Sinn Féin and the DUP have variably and respectively, and sometimes collectively, said that at different times over the past couple of years, but it was never the position of the SDLP. We have adhered to our position on welfare reform without at any stage threatening the institutions. The position of Sinn Féin and the DUP came to threaten the institutions—because, after all, who else can threaten the institutions or bring them to the point of collapse but those two parties?

The second argument in relation to the exigency is the money argument. We heard it repeated again in the last intervention. Let us remember: the money argument arose because the Treasury chose to respond to the Assembly’s failure to pass the legislation by imposing what it at one stage called fines and also called penalties—indeed, DUP Finance Ministers used those words as well—but later we were told, “No, you can’t call them fines or penalties; they are savings forgone.” The fact is that it was a Treasury tactic: “Unless you pass this legislation—this karaoke Bill—through the Assembly on the same terms as we had it in Westminster, we will fine the block grant.”

Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill

Debate between David Simpson and Mark Durkan

Monday 18th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mark Durkan]

First of all, I am not creating a class of good HET reports or bad HET reports. I am not saying that the Secretary of State must commission reports in relation to every single death on the basis of HET reports. My aim is to make good a deficiency in the work of the HET to date: its work counts solely as the private property of families, unless the families themselves choose to publish it. There is no formality in this House, for instance, whereby the Government may make an apology to a family on the back of an HET report. The Government up till now have treated that apology as a private matter, not a matter for the parliamentary record. An apology was duly given by the Ministry of Defence after a family had shared with it an HET report, but we had to go to the bother of an Adjournment debate, which I called, to get that apology voiced on the record. That shows that there is a problem in how HET reports are treated.

This is not just a point that we in the SDLP have come up with. Others have addressed it as well. There are victims groups who say that this is one of the deficiencies in relation to the HET. There is a question mark not only over the quality of the HET’s work, but over what the rest of us are doing with the HET’s work and whether the rest of us are interested in it. In the Haass talks the parties are meant to be addressing what is to be done about the past and what is being done, and it is important to acknowledge that some good work that has been done may not have been valued enough and is not well enough advertised or circulated. The measure is an attempt to improve that.

[David Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP)]

When we talk about a level playing field with other parties, and all parties being included in the collusion issue, does the hon. Gentleman agree that there should be a further investigation into the Garda Siochana and the allegations made about collusion there? We talk about apologies. Is it not time that we got a proper apology from the Irish Government and their part in the troubles many years ago?

[Mark Durkan]

I have no resistance to any inquiries about any allegations of collusion that there might be against Garda Siochana or anybody else. In relation to the point that is often made by the DUP about the possible involvement of members of the Irish Government in arming the Provisional IRA initially, I have no problem with an investigation of that or anything else. I point out that members of the Irish Government were sacked at the time and former Ministers stood trial alongside others, so it is not as though the issue passed without moment at the time.

The Berry papers brought those issues out again, in much the same way as the Pat Finucane Centre was able to find in the national archives in Kew many documents that provide a strong back-light on the murderous machinations of the Glenanne gang. In Irish Government records, including the Berry papers, which were perused by significant elements of the media some years ago, there is also significant back-lighting of what happened in and around the arms trial.

I want to return to the point of new clause 1. It is not to prescribe that there shall be one sweeping narrative in relation to all issues in the past, or to refuse any, but to say that where there have been various investigations or reports, whether by a public inquiry, the HET, the police ombudsman, or any other investigative means—the Ballymurphy families, for example, are talking about having something like the Hillsborough independent panel look at their case—if there were common strands to be brought out in relation to different cases, the Secretary of State could commission a report that would do that.

Asylum Support (Children and Young People)

Debate between David Simpson and Mark Durkan

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Westminster Hall

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

I commend the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) for initiating the debate. I commend not only the work reflected in her remarks today, but the work of the cross-party panel, which conducted such a compelling inquiry. The hon. Lady has also reflected many of the points and concerns that she has raised in a very cogent early-day motion, which I have also supported.

The Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), who has responsibility for children, told the main Chamber on Monday, in the debate on the Children and Families Bill, that every child is our responsibility.

The report by the cross-party panel is a call to action and a call for change if we really do subscribe to the ethic that every child is our child, because it shows that, as a result of how the regime for asylum support is operating, children are being held in destitution. Their parents are being frustrated from discharging their most basic responsibility and from fulfilling the most cogent aspiration of any parent—to provide due and proper care and nurture for their children.

[David Simpson]

The hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) mentioned briefly a young lady who had been trafficked. Did the evidence given to the panel contain much about young people being trafficked for sexual exploitation?

[Mark Durkan]

The evidence was there in terms of the risk that children were facing. We have a regime that does not work to the imperative of the protection of children and their rights. It is a system that, in many ways, possibly by ensuring the degree of destitution for parents and children, puts parents—mothers—at risk of ending up in undue transactional circumstances, including prostitution. It creates many degrees and levels of risk for children, which we should, of course, be at pains to prevent.

We have heard from the hon. Members for Brent Central, for Ealing, Southall (Mr Sharma) and for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) that the system is unfair and cruel and creates inequity. I know that the Minister is a reasonable, sensible and sensitive person. He will see the inequity to which other hon. Members have referred, but if his officials cannot be moved by the inequity, will they not at least be moved by the inefficiency that has been brought out so strongly by the hon. Members and which is demonstrated so strongly in the panel’s report?

There seems to be a naive assumption that a cashless system, as in section 4, is somehow a costless system, but, as we can see in the report and as we have heard from the hon. Member for Brent Central and other hon. Members today, that system is not costless. It is an inefficient as well as a cruel system, because it denies people not just adequate means but the choice to make proper and cost-efficient provision for themselves. A cash system, with a fair application of section 95, would be much better.

There seems to be a mantra on the part of those making decisions in Government that there should be “No more for section 4,” but the mantra should actually be “No more of section 4”. It simply does not work in any way that is fair. It results in severe destitution for many people and intense risk exposure for very vulnerable families. It is the point about vulnerability that seems to be missing.

It seems to me that the system has a tendency to see suspects rather than the vulnerable. Its treating of families and children as suspect rather than vulnerable seems to be the root cause of the problem. We should move against section 4. It is supposed to provide a measure of short-term support to deal with short-term exigencies, but, as we know from parliamentary answers given only this month, more than half the people on section 4 support have been on it for more than two years. Some, as the hon. Member for Scunthorpe said, have been on it for much longer than that, so let us not pretend that section 4 does what the Government initially said it was intended to do. Let us recognise, as the report brings out, the serious problems with section 4 and move against it.

Of course, the lack of choice over disposable means is not the only problem with section 4. There is also—pardon the pun—the tethered living that comes with section 4, with people being denied any choice in relation to accommodation and being forced into UKBA accommodation. As well as that being restricted and unsuitable living, it can lead to intrusive situations—officials can just arrive and appear in the properties where people are living. That can lead to situations that are totally inappropriate in the context of family life. Families should not have to deal with that.

The hon. Member for Brent Central referred to the recent report “When maternity doesn’t matter”, by the Refugee Council and Maternity Action. I attended the event on Monday evening and listened to the accounts of the experiences of some people who have faced dispersal. Refugees, as well as facing the worst effects of displacement from their own country, their own families and the circumstances that they are fleeing, find themselves at risk of ongoing displacement here, whether that is through the policy of dispersal or through some of the other changes that can be visited on people, as was brought out very strongly by the hon. Lady.