Northern Ireland (Executive Formation and Exercise of Functions) Bill — House of Lords, 2018-10-30
Topic: International Affairs
Paul Anthony Elliott Bew (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, before I speak to the amendment I should like to say that the noble Lord, Lord Hain, is right in his belief that he has my support on the earlier amendment and I am happy to give it. Amendment 5 is about a less emotive matter, but it still addresses a serious question. Noble Lords will have heard, particularly in the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Empey, but also in an allusion just now by the noble Lord, Lord Hay, about the morale at the top of the Northern Ireland Civil Service. It is in a very bad way. Part of the context has already been described by the noble Lord, Lord Empey: the incredible bullying by spads. Of course you hear about bullying by spads in Whitehall but believe me, as someone who knows both worlds, this is a qualitatively different level of bullying. The consequence has been that the Civil Service has lost some of its élan and, to be blunt, self-confidence Related to that is the fact that at the beginning of the Brexit crisis the Irish Government, under Enda Kenny, the then Taoiseach, had allowed practical discussions about the border and other questions to go on with Northern Ireland civil servants, but that was then stopped under a new Irish Taoiseach. In fact, the Northern Ireland Civil Service has not had the sort of practical impact on Brexit discussions—even with our own Government, in a weird kind of knock-on effect—that it might be expected to have. When you read that three or four weeks ago Michel Barnier was asking for figures on the trade flows on the island of Ireland—east-west and north-south—your jaw drops because you know that the senior officials at the Northern Ireland Office all know these things just like that but apparently we have been conducting a negotiation with the rather important issue of exactly what is going on in this trade relationship not even known. Perhaps it is not that surprising; there are things at stake in this negotiation other than the actual practicalities of the trade relationships from north to south and east to west, but still they seemed to have disappeared from the scene I think, by the way, that this issue has constitutional significance. The NICS has a strong sense of the way in which the Good Friday agreement was established, particularly the notion that if you are going to adhere to the agreement then north-south regulatory arrangements, however they develop, depend on the co-operation and support of the Northern Ireland Assembly. That point is critical: if you are going to defend the Good Friday agreement, you also have to be careful about what is projected in terms of regulatory arrangements north and south, and the Assembly has an effective veto We have lost a lot through a lack of morale. It means that when this legislation came down the pipe, officials could be heard rather nervously saying, "I don’t want that authority", even though, to be absolutely blunt, the Queen’s Government must go on and these decisions are necessary to prevent extreme cases of waste, if nothing else. So it must happen and the Government are right to take the powers. However, in the context in which we are now living, it is right to offer the officials, who strongly suspect that they will be subject to judicial review and all manner of clamour locally about decisions that people do not like, some sort of advisory panel—which might include Assembly Members—as a kind of cushion against some of the pressures that will come their way. It is hard in the current public climate in Northern Ireland to ask a single Permanent Secretary of a given department to, as it were, take on the burden of these decisions on their own because all hell will break loose, even over decisions that we consider the simplest, and the most obvious and clear-cut. There will calls for judicial review and major public controversies. So there is a case for having some kind of advisory panel so that officials would, in effect, be able to say, "I took the advice of the advisory panel". That is the case for this amendment, given the current public climate. When the morale of the NICS was somewhat stronger I would not have made it, but let us be clear that everyone knows—the noble Lord, Lord Empey, explained why today—that its morale at the top levels could not now be lower. That is why this is the specific moment at which to advocate this point I have one final point. In a slight aside, the Minister talked about the legislation as having been designed to progress public appointments that have lapsed or are not happening. One of those categories is QCs, and I wonder whether the Government have anything to say to clarify their general position on quite rightly wanting to speed up public appointments This is essentially a probing amendment and I am strongly in favour of the Bill in general terms. Whatever happens today, though, the Government should be very mindful of the exposed state now of those who head up, as Permanent Secretaries, the individual Northern Irish ministries.