Northern Ireland Executive

Gavin Robinson Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd April 2019 Commons Chamber

[John Penrose]

I am sure everybody here would appreciate that the senior civil servants in the Northern Ireland civil service are faced with a very, very difficult position. They are being required to keep the wheels of good government turning. The Northern Ireland (Executive Formation and Exercise of Functions) Act 2018 equips them to do that, but clearly they have to be extremely careful not to take new policy decisions which should rightly and constitutionally be taken by elected politicians in Stormont. That would clearly be wrong and outwith the powers in the 2018 Act.

That perhaps answers the question asked by the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire North (Gavin Newlands) about the stresses on the Administration. The answer is simply that: people are being asked to operate up to the limits of what they can decently and constitutionally do. It requires a great deal of care and civil service professionalism to ensure they go up to those limits but no further. I do not think we can reasonably ask them to continue doing that for any great deal of time longer, not least because, as people have been rightly pointing out, the list of problems left unsolved because they require a political decision is getting longer every day.

[Gavin Robinson (Belfast East) (DUP)]

Just to re-emphasise the point that my hon. Friend the Member for South Antrim (Paul Girvan) made, I understand the caution in the Minister’s response and the balance that senior civil servants have to reach in the public interest. There is a matrix in the Act for how those decisions should be made, but the truth is that some permanent secretaries and Departments are more willing to use the powers afforded to them under the Act than others. There needs to be a fair appreciation of that and an encouragement to the head of the civil service to say that for as long as the Act pertains, for as long as we do not have active devolved institutions, and for as long as there is a democratic deficit and decisions can be made, they should be made. I encourage him to meet us to go through that in finer detail, because some permanent secretaries are using it to its full force. Others are not and they should be encouraged to do so.

[John Penrose]

I share the frustration on both sides about this issue. We need to be extremely careful. It may be clear to one person on one side of the House, or to another person on the other side, that a particular Department in the Northern Ireland civil service is acting to the full extent of its powers or perhaps drawing back a little further from using those full powers, but the point is that at some stage, that becomes a political judgment rather than a professional civil service judgment. When it becomes a political judgment, the answer at that point, of course—as many people on both sides of the debate have rightly said so far this evening—is for there to be an Executive at Stormont and for the devolved Assembly to come back into play. Ultimately, until that happens, the judgment of the civil servants has to be just that—within the scope of the Act. It is very hard for politicians to say that this civil servant is doing a good job and that civil servant is doing a bad job unless we get the politicians in place in Stormont who have the natural legal locus and the democratic mandate to do so.