Northern Ireland (Executive Formation) Bill — House of Commons, 2019-07-08
Topic: Social Welfare
Emma Little Pengelly (Democratic Unionist Party, Right): I thank the hon. Member for that contribution. I do not see what happens in Sinn Féin constituency offices, but I can only imagine that the issues of health, education, poverty and the need for basic public services are the same right across the community. It does not matter if you are Protestant, Catholic, nationalist, Unionist, new incomer or ethnic minority—the needs are the same. Everybody is suffering from Sinn Féin’s decision to continue to refuse to allow the Northern Ireland Assembly to be restored. I hope that they are hearing the message loud and clear: come to the table, come to a sensible and fair agreement, and get Stormont back up and working for the people of Northern Ireland There are a couple of other issues I want to touch on. I do not want to speak for too long, so I will go through them very quickly. There are some key pressure points. All political parties have heard representations in relation to the social security mitigation package. We put in place a number of mitigations in terms of welfare reform. The Northern Ireland Assembly agreed that the NIA budget would pay for that. If a decision is not made, upwards of 40,000 people will have bills coming through their doors or much-needed help withdrawn. The package requires legislation, and so, under the terms of the Bill, cannot be implemented by the permanent secretaries. If the legislation is not passed by September, 40,000-plus people will be considerably worse off. This is a real issue that will impact on real people in need I was very much involved in setting up the Historical Institutional Abuse inquiry. I sat on the project board, along with Sinn Féin, when we worked on the legislation. I sat on the project board with Sinn Féin whenever we looked at implementation. We looked at inquiries across the world and one of the things we decided to do was put a date in the legislation for the inquiry to report. We did that because we did not want the inquiry to roll forward for years and years. We built in flexibility so that the chair of the inquiry could come back and request more time, but we knew, right from the passing of the initial legislation, the date the inquiry was due to report. I sat on the project board with Sinn Féin while we liaised throughout the duration of that inquiry. I think it was about two weeks before the report was due—the chairman of the inquiry had made it clear to all members of the project board, including Sinn Féin, that the report was on time—when Sinn Féin chose to collapse the Assembly There were two big outstanding issues: the budget for Northern Ireland and the HIA report. Before Sinn Féin collapsed the Assembly, I made the case to Sinn Féin. I said to the then Finance Minister, "Look, there are these two issues. You can choose to collapse the Assembly, we can’t stop you from doing that, but what is the necessity about time? We can take these two weeks and pass a budget to support public services. We can wait for the HIA inquiry to report." It decided not to We have now moved on. This is not about the politics; we want and need those victims to get support. This issue requires legislation and that is being held up because there is no Northern Ireland Assembly.