Northern Ireland Budget Bill

Michael Fallon Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Wednesday 30th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sir Michael Fallon (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

I shall be extremely brief, Mr Deputy Speaker, because I am very conscious that some of our colleagues from Northern Ireland also wish to speak and we have a time limit.

I want thoroughly to endorse the contributions of the right hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson) and the hon. Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd) as to the difficulties the House is placed in now by this process, whereby we are not able to scrutinise properly the expenditure of the Northern Ireland Departments. When we had the equivalent legislation 18 months ago, I tabled amendments seeking to curtail the expenditure on the prosecution of our military veterans. In the 18 months since I withdrew those amendments, we have seen those prosecutions continue and, indeed, accelerate, in quite an arbitrary way and, as usual, in a very unfair way, in that members of the armed forces are being put first in the firing line.

I am therefore extremely pleased by the progress that has been made by the new Government since July. The consultation has finished and we have had the commitment in the Queen’s Speech to legislation, a commitment repeated again by the Prime Minister today. I urge my right hon. and hon. Friends to continue to make progress on that, to see whether it is possible to construct some presumption against prosecution in cases that were too long ago, in cases that have already been investigated and in cases where there is no new evidence. I would add a fourth criterion: where a member of the armed forces genuinely believed he was doing his duty. None the less, I welcome the progress that has been made and I very much hope the Minister will reassure me that we will soon proceed to early legislation, because, as I said when I spoke in the House 18 months ago, this issue is not going to go away, however difficult and complex it is. From my time in the Ministry of Defence, I understand the difficulties that the Northern Ireland Office is faced with in trying to resolve it, but this issue will not go away and I hope the Minister will reassure me that progress really will be made at the beginning of the next Parliament.

[Several hon. Members rose—]