Northern Ireland Budget (Anticipation and Adjustments) (No. 2) Bill

Maria Caulfield Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Tuesday 5th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

General disappointment has been expressed that, for the third year now, expenditure in Northern Ireland is being approved through this unusual process in the House, with little or no scrutiny or knowledge of how the allocations to Departments have been decided. We do not know what arguments were made for giving 3.8%—or whatever it was—to health and 1.1% to education, while other Departments suffered an overall reduction and others’ budgets were kept static. We have had no opportunity to ask civil servants what cases were made or whether they were valid. As my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) pointed out, it is not that there is no mechanism for such scrutiny; it is simply that a choice was made not to use the mechanism that is available through this House.

Of course, this should all have been done at Stormont. During the budget process, its committees ought to have brought civil servants in, asked them what bids were being made and what arguments were being employed, and then made a judgment on the merits of each case. However, we are not in that position—not because parties in Northern Ireland do not want the opportunity of scrutiny at Stormont, but simply because they have been prevented from carrying it out.

Using the terms of the arrangements for setting up a Government in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin has been able to prevent the coalition arrangement that was forced through in the Belfast agreement from being implemented. Because including the two main parties in the Executive is a compulsory imposition rather than a voluntary arrangement, if one of those parties throws a hissy fit and decides that it does not want to be in the Executive, everybody is kept out—not just from the Executive, but from Stormont and from all the roles and responsibilities that they were elected for and would normally be entitled to carry out.

The Secretary of State quite rightly says that this process should be done at Stormont, but she knows that it cannot be done there. Like the shadow Secretary of State, I do not place the blame totally at the door of the Secretary of State. She has to operate within the rules, and the rules state that if one party decides to veto, not a great deal can be done about it. For reasons that I will explain in a moment or two, no powers of persuasion will persuade Sinn Féin to go into Stormont at this particular time; they have made that quite clear. Sinn Féin have thrown up every barrier. Whatever magic wand the Secretary of State might wave, she is not going to persuade them otherwise. However, there is one way in which she could put pressure on them, which is by making it quite clear to them that, through their inaction, the very thing that they do not want to happen—that is, rule by London—will happen, unless they are prepared to accept their responsibilities in Northern Ireland.

We find it difficult to understand why there has not been a willingness to take Sinn Féin on in that way, but I suspect that it is because of the advice given by the Northern Ireland Office, known colloquially among Unionists in Northern Ireland as the nest of vipers. The position of the Northern Ireland Office seems to be, “Don’t annoy Sinn Féin and don’t annoy the Irish Government.” I suspect that a large part of the reason why we have not moved to greater scrutiny and greater decision making by Ministers here is the advice of the Northern Ireland Office: “Don’t rock the boat.” But if we don’t rock the boat, we are going to stay on the path that we are on at present, which does not provide scrutiny of the most important issue for politicians—the expenditure of resources for the benefit of the community.

Not only do we not have scrutiny of the overall budget allocation, we do not even have scrutiny of the efficiency of current spending. Looking through the various headings for expenditure last year, or through the proposed 70% expenditure for next year, we can see many areas where there is great concern about the way in which money is spent. I will pick out just a few. Take, for example, the Department for the Economy. We have been trying to increase connectivity in Northern Ireland, yet despite all the evidence that supporting access to air services to other parts of the world helps economic growth, we have found an unwillingness to spend money in that area. One of the reasons that the Department has given is, “We don’t have any direction from a Minister. It’s not a decision that the civil service can make.” My hon. Friend the Member for South Antrim (Paul Girvan) has lobbied hard on this issue because Belfast international airport is in his constituency and there could be huge opportunities there.

Petroleum licensing is another example. There are huge opportunities in Northern Ireland but we cannot even get consultation on licences that could create hundreds of jobs in mining and oil exploration in rural areas in the west of the Province, where high-paid jobs are hard to come by. Money for broadband has been reprofiled because, despite the fact that £150 million was made available, decisions have not been made about spending that money. Hopefully, with the start of the money that has been allocated this year, we will find that the programme will be accelerated over the next number of years.

We allocate money to Tourism Ireland, and many people query whether that money is used effectively. When people travel into Belfast international airport, what hits them in the face when they come off the plane? An advert to send tourists who arrive at that airport down to Dublin—and our money pays for it. Yet there is no scrutiny of whether that is an effective way of spending public money to promote Northern Ireland.

I could go on with lots of other examples, but that is the kind of vacuum we are left with because of the lack of scrutiny not just of the general allocations of money across Departments but of the specific allocations within Departments.

[Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)]

As members of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, we hear at first hand, nearly every week now, about how the lack of an Assembly and an Executive is affecting ordinary people, whether it is money not being spent on healthcare, schools where parents are having to bring in toilet rolls, or the Police of Service of Northern Ireland not knowing whether it can pay its staff at the end of the month. This is impacting the real lives of real people.

Northern Ireland Budget (Anticipation and Adjustments) (No. 2) Bill

Maria Caulfield Excerpts

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 5th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Karen Bradley]

I will of course be very happy to provide the hon. Gentleman with more information on that point. Everybody believed that the Human Rights Commission had legal standing. The HRC took the case believing it had legal standing, but it was only during the Supreme Court judgment that that point was clarified. I am very happy to share the information on that point with him.

Returning to the point raised by the hon. Member for Walthamstow about the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation and Exercise of Functions) Act 2018 and the amendment to section 4 that she pressed to a vote and that this House accepted late last year, clearly the Act cannot change the law in Northern Ireland. The guidance I have issued on what I expect the Northern Ireland Office to do is very clear, but it cannot in itself change the law. I do not have the power to do that through that Act of Parliament. However, I do keep under review the obligations we have on the matter.

I want to be very clear and to state very clearly that the UK Government remain committed to their obligations under international law, including the European convention on human rights. It is important to recognise that it is for the devolved Administrations across the whole UK to ensure that their domestic laws and actions are compliant. The observance and implementation of international obligations, and obligations under the European convention on human rights, so far as they are otherwise within the competence of the Assembly, are matters for the Northern Ireland Assembly.

If I can make one final important point, I support the principle of the amendment on same-sex marriage, which was not selected today, and I have been clear on the record that I want changes to the legislation relating to abortion in Northern Ireland. However, those are matters for a restored Executive. We want a restored Executive to progress legislation on that issue as one of the first things they do.

[Maria Caulfield]

Given that this is the second year that this place is bringing forward a Northern Ireland budget Bill—there is another Northern Ireland Bill tomorrow—and given that the debates we have had with the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) and on the veterans issues raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning), does the Secretary of State not think that passing all the stages of a Bill in one day does a disservice to the people of Northern Ireland? We need proper scrutiny of the Bill through the normal process that any other Bill would have.

[Karen Bradley]

What we are doing today is effectively the estimates process. The moneys we are voting on today have all been voted for and properly scrutinised in this House. We are confirming the departmental spending in 2018-19, so for this current financial year. That spending was done on a proper statutory basis, with the moneys having been properly voted through this place and properly scrutinised in this place in terms of the block grant given to the Northern Ireland Office. What would happen normally is that the Northern Ireland Assembly would hold an estimates day, which would probably be about the same length of time. At the end of it, it would vote on the estimates. We are therefore effectively doing the same thing, but we have to do it through primary legislation because we are unable to do it in any other way in the absence of the Assembly sitting.

I know that that is not satisfactory and I know it does not feel right to those of us who are used to the full scrutiny of Bills, but I gently say that we are probably giving the Bill about the same amount of time it would have had in the Assembly if it was sitting. This is a very technical Bill. It is about making sure we agree that the spending that has already happened has been done on the proper legislative statutory footing and that we agree that more spending can take place next year without going into any further details about the allocations, merely that we accept that 70% of prior year spending can be spent by the Department without the need for further legislation. I hope that clarifies the point further.