British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly

Oliver Colvile Excerpts

Thursday 21st June 2012 Commons Chamber

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

Does my hon. Friend agree that this is not just about trade, because a series of issues associated with our relationship with Europe, fishing and other such matters, are very important?

[Esther McVey]

I do agree with that, and I shall now discuss my recommendations. What we were looking for was: the aggregation platform to give SMEs access to the capital markets; an increase in the number of private placement investors in the UK market through an industry-led initiative; encouragement for more retail investment in corporate bonds issued by UK companies; and more private equity and support for all businesses, which we are in fact doing here in the UK with all the latest seed investment funds. So I think it is important for Ireland and the UK that we continue with our co-operation and continue learning from each other, because we are so interdependent and both countries need that for our continued growth and prosperity.

--- Later in debate ---

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

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me to speak in this debate. May I confess at the beginning that I am not only a member of BIPA, but a member of the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs, serving under the excellent chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson)? I congratulate him on obtaining this debate from the Backbench Business Committee.

I am not going to pretend for a moment that I am a great expert on Ireland or Northern Ireland. Indeed, it is only in the past two years that I have got to know the place at all, during the course of a trip. When I was first in southern Ireland, I was struck by seeing the horses run down the pavements too; I had not seen that in central London in my lifetime.

We have to remember that our relationship with Ireland is not just a close trading one; we have a common approach to how we look at law. Both the English and the Irish take a common law approach to law, whereas in continental Europe it is much more to do with civil law. So we have a series of interests that we need to make sure we work on together.

As others have said, there is the question of trade and how closely Britain and Ireland work together. As I understand it, we have more trade with the Republic of Ireland than with all the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China. We should ensure that we work closely with southern Ireland because we have common trade interests, such as employment regulation. Last year, our exports to southern Ireland were worth about £15.9 billion, whereas our imports from southern Ireland were worth about £12.5 billion, so we made a profit—a rare commodity—from the relationship. That is incredibly good news.

On Monday, I was delighted to attend the reception for Derry city of culture, because we in Plymouth are considering trying to become the city of culture in, I believe, 2014. We hope to learn lessons from Derry.

We should be looking firmly and hard at how we can work with the southern Irish Government on our common interest in marine science. The hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) stated the case for that commonality of interest in marine matters. I hope we will continue to campaign to bring UK and Irish fishing waters back under national control, because that will be an important part of how we look after fish stocks.

Immigration has also been an issue. Yesterday, the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee had a long conversation with representatives of the UK Border Agency. Because there is no recognisable border between our country and Ireland, immigration has to be handled with care, and we have to make sure that happens.

I am delighted to have attended one or two BIPA meetings at which we have worked closely together on various matters. Close working by the two countries is a brilliant idea, because it puts us in the position where we can ensure that the British and the Irish points of view are expressed in no uncertain terms, so that the European Union understands that we will act in our national interests and will not simply do what the French or the Germans tell us to do. I am also keen for us to work closely with the Irish to sort out their economic problems, because I am convinced we will thereby be able to get out of the mess of our public finances.

Oral Answers to Questions

Oliver Colvile Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Commons Chamber

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

Q9. May I add my personal tributes to our fallen? On Monday, Clare’s law came into being. Would my right hon. Friend be willing to meet me and Sergeant Carney-Haworth to learn at first hand how his team’s groundbreaking initiative in Devonport, Operation Encompass, is helping to make sure that children in my Sutton and Devonport constituency grow up in an area where there is no longer any domestic violence?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to raise this constituency issue and to do so this week, when tomorrow we have international women’s day. The move that has been made on Clare’s law is important; it is a breakthrough to give women this information if they seek it. I want us to follow that by looking into a specific offence of stalking. I want us to continue to support the rape crisis centres, as we are under this Government, and to make sure that we act on domestic violence right across the board.

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.