Northern Ireland (Regional Rates and Energy) Bill

Lord Hay of Ballyore Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 27th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hay of Ballyore (DUP)]

My Lords, I welcome the three Bills coming to the House today. Obviously, you can talk about almost anything on those Bills.

I will touch on an issue raised by several Members: Judge Hart’s inquiry into institutional abuse in Northern Ireland. We all sympathise with the need to find a way to resolve this issue. However, I have a question not only for the Minister but for Members of this House. Do they agree that the institutions that carried out the abuse should also be held to account and should have to look at providing some funding to resolve this issue? It is unfair that wholly taxpayers’ money is going to resolve this issue for victims. I sympathise with what Members have said, but the issue needs to be raised with the institutions that first created the abuse of the many victims out there today. Ministers, the Government and Members who raised this need to think about this.

The noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, raised the border in Northern Ireland, which was discussed recently in this House. I never thought there were so many experts in this House on how we might resolve the border issue. I also said that the border issue has been used in some aspect as a political stick to beat the Prime Minister with. I think I am right in saying that; we have not come into some debates in this Chamber because of the way some Members of this House have abused this whole issue of the border. We can get a resolution to the border: it is not about hard border or soft border but about getting a reasonable settlement on the border. I probably live closer to the border than any other Member of this House. I know its importance and know about the goods traffic and the pedestrians that come across that border on a daily basis. All that is important, and certainly none of us on the island of Ireland want a hard border.

As I said, I welcome the three Bills; certainly, with no Executive in place, they are required to give much-needed certainty for the Northern Ireland Civil Service in safeguarding public services for the people of Northern Ireland. The Bills provide a secure legal footing for the Northern Ireland Civil Service. This debate is really about how departments spent their money last year. By looking at the Bills, we can see that some spent more than was allocated to them and some spent significantly less. The debate looks back at the past—at what was allocated, what has been spent and what additional money has been given to some departments. For example, the Department of Health got more. Where did that money come from? It came from the underspend of other departments. The debate also looks forward because a budget for Northern Ireland was set by the Secretary of State a couple of weeks ago. Now, each department in Northern Ireland knows its expenditure and the limit it has for next year. Departments can spend with confidence, knowing that the money is available to them and the limits within which they must spend it.

My noble friend Lord Browne touched on the Secretary of State’s announcement in the budget a few weeks ago of the first tranche of £410 million of our confidence and supply arrangements with the Government, which I welcome. I know that some people in the media and elsewhere said that this money would never come to Northern Ireland. It has now been delivered. Others said it would not come if there was no Executive in place. Of course, that has been proven wrong as well. As my noble friend Lord Browne rightly said, this money will be spent right across the community in Northern Ireland. I remember the announcement on our agreement with the Government quite well. Some Members of this House almost believed that this money would go to only one side of the community. In fact, some Members said that this money was actually coming to the DUP. This money will now be spent right across Northern Ireland, in every community—on schools, on hospitals, on roads, on mental health and in deprived communities. This money is over and above what we normally get in the Northern Ireland block grant.

I want to touch briefly on an issue that I met the Minister about recently. The Belfast city deal was announced by the Chancellor in last year’s Budget. I very much welcome and support it. It is an opportunity for Belfast to grow for the future. I also want to thank the Minister, who met a consortium from Londonderry —an area I have lived in for many years and represent in the Northern Ireland Assembly—led by the local authority and the mayor. It was seeking a city deal for Londonderry and the wider north-west community. I know that more work needs to be done on that issue, in getting buy-in from other local authorities in the north-west, but I believe that work is progressing. As others will know, city deals have worked extremely well across the United Kingdom, where they have been implemented and managed with expertise. They have been a huge success for inward investment, job creation and economic development. So, we welcome the Belfast city deal announced by the Government but I am now batting for a city deal for my region and my city, to build on job creation and economic development there for the future.

I want to say something quickly on the political process at the moment and where we are. My noble friend Lord Morrow and other Members touched on the fact that we are very keen to restore the Assembly sooner rather than later. We have no preconditions. We have no red lines. As the former First Minister Peter Robinson said recently, we cannot squander the years that have got us to where we are now in Northern Ireland. Those are years to which people committed themselves. The only way these issues will be resolved is by people getting around the table. We are keen to get around that table, but we also need to remind Sinn Féin, especially, that whatever agreement we reach needs to be balanced and one that both communities can buy into and take ownership of. If it is not that type of agreement, it will not work. Sinn Féin has been told this over and over again. It cannot be an agreement where one side takes all and says, “Thank you very much, but we’ll be back for more in maybe six months or a year’s time”. We are at a point in Northern Ireland—we see it here today with the Government having to introduce these Bills to the House—where we need a settlement that all the people of Northern Ireland can buy into. I think we can get there by being reasonable about all this and trying to reach an accommodation. That is where we are coming from as a party. We have no preconditions; we have no red lines. We want to get around the table and resolve the remaining issues that are a stumbling block to getting the Executive and the Assembly up and running.