Letter from the Chairman to the Secretary
of State
Thank you for your letter of 6 December concerning
the Government response to the Committee's Third Report of last
Session.
The House has charged the Committee with examining
the expenditure of the Northern Ireland Office, a responsibility
the Committee takes seriously. In the current financial year,
Northern Ireland Office voted moneys, at just over £8 billion
- slightly more than the Home Office figure - represent a substantial
block of public expenditure. Yet the House at present receives
only the most rudimentary background information on the seven
eighths of this expenditure which is the transfer to the Northern
Ireland Consolidated Fund. Indeed, the briefest perusal of the
Northern Ireland Office Departmental Report highlights this point.
It is a responsibility of the Secretary of State
to secure Northern Ireland's share of public expenditure. The
information currently provided is certainly insufficient to enable
either the Committee or the House to reach an informed judgement
as to the adequacy with which this has been discharged. The Committee's
two linked recommendations in its Third Report were simply intended
to ensure that some detailed information on past and proposed
levels of public expenditure in Northern Ireland, similar to that
provided in previous years, was available to the House before
it was asked to agree the relevant Vote.
In essence, you (and those who advise you) had only
a simple question to consider - whether the request of the Committee
for further information was acceptable or unacceptable. However,
it is clear from Kirsten McFarlane's letter to the Clerk that
by 30 May, over half way through the two month period during which
Select Committee reports are normally replied to by the Government,
neither the Department of Finance and Personnel, nor the Northern
Ireland Office, had come to a view on that basic question. In
other words, no progress had been made even on deciding whether
to produce the information requested, let alone on actually preparing
it. The Committee finds it difficult to see how, such a leisurely
approach having been taken to considering what advice to offer,
a document (which would also, in the circumstances, have been
of value to the Assembly) could have been produced in time, even
if devolved government had not been restored. Your decision on
the merits of the recommendations therefore appears to have been
pre-empted by a delay in providing you with advice on the key
issue.
As is customary, the Committee will be publishing
the correspondence that constitutes the response to the Third
Report, together with the subsequent exchanges, in a report in
due course. It will, of course, also include any reply to this
letter in the published exchanges.
18 December 2000
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