Bloody Sunday Inquiry (Report)

Oliver Colvile Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

Mr Deputy Speaker, may I thank you very much indeed for giving me the opportunity to speak in this debate? I am not going to pretend for one moment that I am a great expert on Northern Ireland, but I am beginning to get better at it as I continue on the Northern Ireland Committee.

Before I go any further, however, may I pay tribute in my role as vice-chairman of the all-party group on the armed forces, with special responsibility for the Royal Marines, and as the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport, to those Royal Marines and royal naval sailors who also ended up losing their lives during the troubles in Northern Ireland? They left behind families and wives who also needed, no doubt, to grieve, and it is important that we pay tribute to the service personnel who lost their lives during those times.

I shall try to keep my contribution brief. I had a great-grandfather who told me that he did not mind his congregation looking at their watches, it was when they started shaking them that he became quite concerned, so I shall try to ensure that nobody—I hope—shakes their watch during my speech.

I am pretty sure that Tony Blair did exactly the right thing in setting up the inquiry, and that Lord Saville has made an incredibly good job—a very thorough job—of the whole process. Most certainly, the people of Northern Ireland now have to try to move on, and I suspect that that means ensuring that they have a grieving process that they can work their way through, so that they can come out the other side. I hope very much that what happened during the inquiry has helped somewhat towards that. I suspect that the reason why it took a large amount of time and effort to ensure that the Saville inquiry was so thorough, and why it answered many of the questions that many people had, was that the previous inquiry, the Widgery inquiry, was such a botched job.

I shall concentrate on the process, because, although I do not know Northern Ireland particularly well, in my short time on the Northern Ireland Committee I have become quite concerned about how the process was gone through. The inquiry cost £190 million, a shed-load of money, and if we were not in difficult times and suffering as far as the public finances are concerned, that might not have been taken into consideration, but in places such as Plymouth, people will most certainly be very concerned about it. Others have spoken about that issue, however.

I am also concerned about the fact that when Lord Saville talked to the Committee during its investigation of his inquiry, he seemed to disregard the idea of having any budgetary control. He said that he needed to ensure that he did the job thoroughly and well, which he most certainly did, but he did not seem to grasp the issue of the public finances. I do not blame him, because that was not necessarily his job, but somewhere in the process a problem occurred, and we have to take cognisance of it and take action to ensure that something similar does not happen should we decide to undertake another public inquiry, whether it be on Northern Ireland, a train crash or a terrorist attack. We need to ensure that we learn from the process in a big way.

I was obviously not a Member when the inquiry was set up, so I come to the issue with a certain amount of hindsight, which is lucky for me, but the lesson that we have to learn is that the process has to be handled much better. I should like to ask a number of questions, and the Northern Ireland Committee might need to ask some more people to come along and have a conversation. Indeed, I may suggest to the Committee’s Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson), that we invite the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the right hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Mr Woodward), to explain the process that he ended up going through and how that process occurred.

Was it right, for instance, for the Northern Ireland Office to be responsible for the process? Should it not have been the Lord Chancellor’s department or the Department that was then responsible for justice? Perhaps they should have had a role. After all, they have to deal with judges and lawyers on a regular basis and find out whether they can do a financial deal. I am sure that many of the legal firms that were engaged in the process have done and will do a lot of work for the Government, so perhaps we need to make sure that they did not charge the full hourly rate.

We must then ensure that there is some form of budget and that the Public Accounts Committee has a regular report made to it about how everything is going so that there is much more of a spotlight on it. We had a conversation with someone from the Northern Ireland Office who said that they had invited Lord Saville to talk to them about the budgetary constraints and so on, and he was rather dismissive and said no, he was not going to do that because it could have impugned his independence. I was slightly concerned about that. We are talking about public money—money which, as taxpayers, we end up paying our taxes for. It is very important that there is greater accountability and transparency in this regard.

Furthermore, is it right and proper that a judge, who is part of the legal profession, should be responsible for recruiting these people and deciding who should be handling some of the legal issues? There has to be more transparency in that regard as well.

This has been a very useful debate, and I am delighted to have had the opportunity to take part in it. I am sure that there is more yet to be teased out in this whole process. I look forward to talking to those at the Northern Ireland Office to ensure that they have understood some of the lessons on having a greater ability to control how expenditure takes place and controlling the process so that it does not go on for 12 years and we do not spend some £190 million on it.