| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
26 Mar 2003 : Column 378—continued
Mr. Trimble: The Minister said that members should as a whole be representative. Does that mean that there is no requirement for representativeness in the case of individual sub-groups?
Jane Kennedy: The groups will be representative of the area covered by that sub-group, but there will be political balance, in that there will be representatives of the political parties on the sub-group.
Mr. Trimble: The Minister is going further than the provision that she is discussing, which says that the membership of the sub-groups, taken as a whole, is to be representative. Will she confirm that she is saying that the membership of the sub-group is to be representative of the area that it comes from?
Jane Kennedy: The concepts are not difficult, but the detail can be. The members of the sub-group—singular—taken together, would be representative of the community in the relevant police district. Indeed, the hon. Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson), who is not in his place, raised this issue in the Select Committee. In addition, the schedule provides that the council should also notify the board as to whether applicants are interested in being considered for appointments to only one sub-group, or whether there is a degree of flexibility.
There is a slight difference in the rules for appointing and rotating sub-group chairmen and vice-chairmen. As with DPPs, those will be appointed by the council,
which will be required to ensure, so far as is practicable, that the offices of chairman and vice-chairman—or chairwoman and vice-chairwoman—in each sub-group are at all times held by members of different political parties, and that the office of chairman is held in turn by each of the four largest parties represented on Belfast city council.In addition to those provisions, which also apply to DPPs, the council will be required to ensure that no one party holds more than one sub-group chairmanship at any point in time. So it is clear that Belfast city council and the district policing partnership will need to do a good deal of work to ensure that the arrangements are right and representative.
Lady Hermon: Will the Minister address the question of proposed new schedule 3A and political members of the sub-groups, which was raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble)? She will well remember the warning that Chris Patten gave against the balkanisation of policing, on the morning in September 1999 when he published his report. My concern relates to the provision's stating that
- "the political members of all the sub-groups, taken together"
Jane Kennedy: The right hon. Gentleman says that there is no such mechanism, but to respond to the hon. Lady's question, I should point out that there is indeed a safeguard, in that the chairmanship of the sub-group—
Mr. Trimble: It is not in here.
Jane Kennedy: Well, Belfast city council and the DPP will be required to make that work, and so far as is reasonably practical, and so long as councillors are willing to participate in DPPs, it should be within the bounds of possibility to make that happen. Although it is clear that that will be possible, it will not be the easiest chairmanship in the world. However, there should be representatives within each of the sub-groups of the main parties, and that should be guaranteed at least through the role that the chairman and vice-chairman will play.
Mr. Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry): The Minister will undoubtedly be aware that last night, a Social Democratic and Labour party councillor who is a member of a district policing partnership in Strabane, County Tyrone, suffered an attack on the property of her daughter. Given that the likelihood of such incidents will increase in the immediate future, what plans do the Government have to give redress if SDLP members unfortunately pull out as a result of such intimidation?
6 pm
Jane Kennedy: Clearly, such intimidation is anathema to people involved in democratic politics. I do not accept that there will necessarily be an increase in intimidation. That it is happening at all is deplorable, but I expect that the people who participate in the DPPs and in the sub-groups will no longer fear intimidation when the proposals that we are discussing take effect. That is because the people associated with those perpetrating the intimidation will no longer be pushing for it to happen.
Mr. Mallon : I assure the House that the SDLP representatives will not be pulled out because of intimidation. We have not done that for the past 30 years. We are not going to start now.
Jane Kennedy: I very much welcome that reassurance. There is no question but that those SDLP representatives who have participated in the new policing arrangements have faced much greater risk to themselves than have others. We owe them a great deal for enabling the new start to policing in Northern Ireland, and for their commitment to this new beginning, which the proposals under discussion merely serve to embed.
Rev. Ian Paisley: The Minister also wears a security hat in Northern Ireland. She will be aware that this is an intense and serious matter in localities. She will also recall that a recruit to the new police service was attacked in my constituency. Such hostility is being encouraged by a literature campaign being conducted in places of employment, where we never had trouble before. That campaign says that people should treat former members of the RUC the way they treated them before, even though those former officers are now in other jobs. Another campaign states that the new police service should be treated as though it was the old RUC. If that is going to be allowed to percolate through the areas in question, there could be serious trouble.
Everyone in public life in Northern Ireland does the job that they have been elected to do—I do not include those who advocate violence—but all of us are threatened with intimidation.
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. The hon. Gentleman is getting carried away, well beyond an intervention.
Jane Kennedy: I acknowledge the point that the hon. Gentleman makes, but in the earlier debate the question arose as to what was meant by the phrase "acts of completion". How do we define that, and what do we intend should happen before we would enable the clauses to take effect? That is at the heart of the issue, and my hon. Friend the Member for Newry and Armagh (Mr Mallon) put his finger on it when he made his contribution to the earlier debate.
When Sinn Fein embraces the new beginning to policing that is under way—and I say "when" and not "if"—and when it participates in the policing arrangements that we are discussing in detail now, the environment in which policing is carried out in Northern Ireland will be transformed. No longer will it be acceptable for those who espouse republican
traditions to attack members of the police service, because that service will be directly accountable—through the policing structures, the DPPs and the Policing Board—to those who espouse the republican tradition.At present, the Policing Board works on a cross-community basis. Any new arrangements arising out of what the House is discussing today could take effect only in exactly similar circumstances. So my hon. Friend the Member for Newry and Armagh is absolutely right—once we have done this business today, it really will be up to those who espouse the republican tradition to rise to the challenge being presented to them.
Mr. Trimble: The Minister rightly says that one of the great successes of the past year or so has been the way in which the Policing Board has operated on a genuine cross-community basis. Why, then, are the Government introducing provisions that will in practice ensure that for at least half of Belfast there will be no requirement for the sub-groups to have cross-community composition?
Jane Kennedy: There will be representatives of other parties in the sub-groups. As I explained, that will be built into the structure of the sub-groups through the roles of the chairman and the vice-chairman. I hear what the right hon. Gentleman says in the sense that potentially a majority of one particular community will be represented in some sub-groups. However, when hon. Members see how the parties involved and the independent members of the sub-groups and the district policing partnerships are genuinely and wholeheartedly engaged in a proper dialogue with the district policing commanders, holding them to account on behalf of their communities in order to deliver to them the best possible policing services, their anxieties about the way in which the sub-groups work will diminish. The system will be tested over time.
Mr. Carmichael: Can the Minister assist me in trying to follow the logic of her argument? Presumably the point of having sub-groups is to ensure better representation of the communities. To take west Belfast as a working example, in accordance with what seems to be the consensus, there will be cross-community involvement in that sub-group only if there is some sort of artificial mechanism to ensure that it is not truly representative. I do not understand how the Minister can have both.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |