Stormont

Nigel Mills Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to contribute to the debate, and to follow the excellent speeches that have been made so far. I will not detain the House by repeating all the good words that have been spoken about how important it is for an enduring settlement to be achieved, although it is clearly very important for Northern Ireland to find a stable political process that can deliver for its people. I think we would quite like to avoid the annual round of crisis talks, and to get this matter sorted out for the long term.

On a more flippant note, I must say that I am surprised that we have got this far in the debate without anyone mentioning rugby or football, given the weekend’s events. May I be the first to congratulate the Northern Ireland football team on qualifying for the European championships? [Interruption.] I know that I should not have mentioned rugby—it is all going to go wrong—but that is an example of Ireland’s working together, and it could be a template for how we can move forward.

Let me now turn to a rather more parochial English activity. The Secretary of State has repeatedly said that the solution to the crisis cannot be yet more money from Westminster and the taxpayers, that the parties in Northern Ireland must find a solution within their existing budgets, and that there is no way of buying them out of the problem. I welcome that, because I think it must be the right solution. Every time we back down over here and offer more money, we create a problem, because in a few years’ time there will be another dispute that the parties cannot resolve between them, and they will think that there is some way in which we can fix it for them.

I urge the Government to be very cautious about taking the power to carry out welfare reform, because I think that that will mean a cop-out by politicians in Northern Ireland. They will not have had to find the money; they will not have had to fix their own budgets; they will not have had to choose their own welfare system. If we do this for them, they will be able to run around saying, “We never agreed to it. All those evil people in Westminster forced this terrible scheme on us. We would never have done anything like this.” They need to make a choice between welfare spending and other budget priorities, and that is what we should be saying to them.

We need the Minister to explain the Government’s time frame. How far can we go with no effective government of Northern Ireland without forcing an Assembly election? Can we really limp on until the end of March and the start of the election period? Is there any real prospect of a deal before the Irish and Northern Irish elections, or will there be another six months of to-ing and fro-ing and hokey-cokey, with Ministers being appointed and then resigning on the following day? Is there, realistically, a solution without the holding of elections in Northern Ireland a great deal sooner than next May?

I said that we should be very cautious about taking over the welfare reforms, but I think that there must come a point at which, if there can never be a deal in Northern Ireland, we cannot just sit back here and watch government fall apart and public spending descend into chaos. At some point we must say, reluctantly, that there really is no other way, although I think that that would be a rather poor outcome. I ask again, however, “What is the timetable?” Is the end of October, which we just heard mentioned, the hard deadline for a deal, or can we allow this to drift on until Christmas and try to deal with it in the new year?

At some stage we must be clear and say, “Here is the time frame: sort this out, or we shall have to do it for you, no matter how bad that is”, but we must also be clear about the fact that it is a last resort, and not the outcome that we want to see.