Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)

RT HON SHAUN WOODWARD MP, MR NICK PERRY AND MS HILARY JACKSON

30 JANUARY 2008

  Q20  Chairman: You are dead right!

  Mr Woodward: I have to say I entirely share your view and therefore I can only repeat again that it is because I share your view that I am working with officials to see whether or not it may be possible to ensure that there is a more effective way of being able to ensure that we are able to bring those involved in this before the courts and actually put them away.

  Q21  Kate Hoey: With the greatest respect, Secretary of State, I am glad you said you were not complacent because, quite honestly, your opening remarks on this were complacent and gave that impression. The reality is that this is a kind of litmus test for ordinary, decent, law-abiding citizens of Northern Ireland of whether the law is being effectively carried through. It seems that you are saying almost that HMRC has a particular view. You are the Secretary of State. You have heard how strongly people feel about this. If you need stronger measures and you need the law changed, is it not your job to come forward as quickly as possible with those requirements?

  Mr Woodward: That is why I said in my opening remarks, and I am very happy to underline it again, I am looking at whether or not we may be able to bring forward a specific offence which would make it easier to prosecute people. I think there is a view among some at HMRC that actually the figures of prosecutions are satisfactory to serve the public interest. I think that is an important discussion that we are having with the HMRC at the moment, because it is perfectly clear to me and has been perfectly clear to me that this is not a satisfactory rate of prosecutions, but again, one word of caution: it is not going to be easy to make dramatic progress on all of this. This is something that we have to do incrementally. We all know the dangers of trying to over-sell this, so I do not want anyone to walk out of here this afternoon thinking that I have made a guarantee to introduce an offence that is going to dramatically change the position.

  Q22  Kate Hoey: Why?

  Mr Woodward: Because I do not want to mislead people. There have been too many people who have thought that all you have to do is announce an offence and you end the problem. If we could simply do that, we would have no knives on the street and no guns on the street. It does not work like that, as you well know. One other word of caution here: this is not the only criminal practice that worries people in Northern Ireland, so let us not turn and fetishise this into being, as you described it, your own phrase, the litmus test.

  Q23  Kate Hoey: A litmus test.

  Mr Woodward: This is an indication of an area where we need to make progress but an area that I know this Committee is going to want to come on to. Just as there are injustices here, there are injustices in other parts of the system. When you see, as some people have characterised, a prison system that puts away many, many people for not paying fines on the scale they do in Northern Ireland, there are other injustices to remedy as well.

  Chairman: There are. We are grateful for what you said but your motto at the moment seems to be festina lente, "make haste slowly". Just substitute it for festina, "make haste".

  Q24  Lady Hermon: Secretary of State, it is not very long ago since you formally and officially opened the Woodlands Juvenile Justice Centre in my constituency in North Down. You will be well aware, I am sure, from the media coverage that there was a very serious incident involving a young offender who injured three members of staff. Could you kindly give us an update on the state and condition of the three members of staff, whom we all wish well, and also the young offender himself?

  Mr Woodward: The first thing I would say to you is that the members of staff, I believe, are now at home, having received treatment. This is a very serious event to have happened. You and I share a view about the new centre which we opened together. It is an outstanding facility. It does not give me any pleasure to tell you that the staffing arrangements over the weekend when the incident took place were not unusual. It did not take place because unfortunately we were low on staff that weekend. We were not. There were normal staffing arrangements in place but the event nonetheless happened. What is taking place now inside the centre is an investigation into why the incident took place and as soon as we have the findings of that we will take the steps to remedy it if there are lessons to be learned. I do not know whether or not this was an isolated incident which occurred due to a series of aberrational circumstances or whether or not there are truly lessons to be learned. My mind is open on that and I do not want to prejudge the outcome of an internal investigation, except to say that we take it very seriously, and obviously we are concerned about the staff.

  Q25  Lady Hermon: Obviously concerned about the staff. I am very pleased to hear that. What additional support and perhaps training have been offered to the staff since the incident?

  Mr Woodward: I cannot tell you about that. I am very happy to write to you about any additional training. I should think realistically though at this stage what we are looking for is making sure that the staff are home and are making a good recovery, that actually the work with those who are detained there is not interrupted by this—and I have no reason to believe that it has been—and making sure that the staff receive sufficient areas of support and confidence, and again that is happening. Whether or not this will lead to different training patterns, again, I think we have to wait until an investigation has been undertaken and completed because we have to make a distinction between whether this was an aberrational set of circumstances or whether or not truly there are lessons to be learned and, if there are lessons to be learned, they will be.

  Lady Hermon: But there is clearly not a deficiency in staff numbers.

  Chairman: Can we move to more general matters.

  Q26  Lady Hermon: Sir Patrick has indicated, and other Committee members have also indicated, that in fact the Committee has just completed its inquiry into the prison estate in Northern Ireland and, Secretary of State, you have already alluded to the great injustice that is actually perpetrated against a large number of people who are kept on remand for a very lengthy period of time in prisons in Northern Ireland and also the very high percentage of prisoners who are actually fine defaulters. How is the Northern Ireland Office proposing to deal with both of these issues?

  Mr Woodward: I think first of all you have to become properly aware of the problem and, in the context of only having been there for six months, it is certainly an issue which I am now more than confident to say I think this is a very real problem that I believe as Secretary of State we need to address. For as long as I am there, we will now really begin to tackle this area. A parallel that I would draw was when I became aware of the problem with waiting lists in Northern Ireland. People were waiting for six years in the Health Service and when I left after 12 months they were waiting 12 months. We will tackle this area. I cannot promise to deliver great results overnight although that is a very tempting thing to do. Somebody the other day said to me it is almost Dickensian to think that we have prisons with these volumes of numbers who are effectively debtors. I can see why it is hard to disagree with that judgement in some ways. It does seem to me to be ludicrous that we are spending millions of pounds locking people up for what might only be a period of three or four days for fine defaulting on sums of less than £600 by and large and in many cases less than £200. It is a difficult issue to tackle. Again, we have an institutionalised problem and we have to do this by achieving a consensus. I can promise you that it begins with a will from me to want to address this and, whatever cynicism there may be by some, I do have a track record in the Health Service of having dramatically changed waiting times and I am prepared to sit down over the coming months and look at this problem and realistically see how we can address it. The problem of remand is, I think, a much harder problem to tackle but it does begin with a will to want to address it. We have seen an improvement; we have seen a small reduction this year and that is progress. The work again that Minister of State Paul Goggins is doing on this with the Justice system is extremely important but I think there is no substitute for us giving a very clear lead on this issue. It is unacceptable that we have these incredibly long delays in the justice system in Northern Ireland, and I think it is unacceptable and I think it is a huge waste of resources to see people being locked up on the scale that they are in Northern Ireland for defaulting on fines. There are many other remedies available, from community service to other measures that can be taken, some of which we are now looking at but we need to accentuate that and we need to make progress on it and we need to make progress on it with haste.

  Chairman: Absolutely, yes. That is very important.

  Q27  Lady Hermon: Secretary of State, you did mention the phrase "institutionalised" problem". Which institution is to blame? Is it the Prosecution Service, is it the PSNI, is it the prison regime, is it the legislation, is it the Northern Ireland Office for not bringing forward legislation when we have known about the problem for such a long time?

  Mr Woodward: I do not think we will actually make a huge amount of progress by singling out any one of those institutions. I think it is a collective problem, and I think it is a collective problem which, if we actually approach with a view to finding a collective solution, we will make progress on.

  Q28  Mr Grogan: I have just one question on organised crime gangs and so on. In our report on organised crime we said that we saw a continued role for non-jury trials in certain circumstances. What would be the view of the Northern Ireland Office?

  Mr Woodward: The view of the Northern Ireland Office on non-jury trials has already been made clear. Northern Ireland presents a very special set of circumstances precisely because of its very difficult troubled past. I would love to tell you that I could see a future next week when we could dispense with any of those sorts of arrangement. Regrettably, that is not on the immediate horizon but the progress that we are making towards that is huge. If one takes the whole principle of non-jury trials and compares numbers of those now with those of 10 or 15 years ago, the difference is truly dramatic. We are making progress and I only wish we were making the same kind of progress in dealing with some of the other issues that we have discussed this afternoon as we are with that.

  Q29  Mr Grogan: But you would see circumstances—what sort of circumstances?

  Mr Woodward: Again, let me be really frank about this. One of the things I hope is that this is a decision we will not be making. One of the things about the future shape of the judicial system and the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland is that it frankly ought to be being decided by those politicians who were elected in Northern Ireland. What I would like to do is to hand over a criminal justice system in as good a state as it can be for the period we have reached in Northern Ireland, given the background and the troubles Northern Ireland has had. These are decisions that should be reached by politicians there and I hope that what we will pass over will be a system that people can work with and evolve and appropriately make local for people who live and work in Northern Ireland.

  Q30  Lady Hermon: Secretary of State, the Northern Ireland Office has responsibility for the criminal justice system until devolution of those powers. At the present time there is the availability of non-jury trials where there is intimidation of witnesses or where there is the possibility of jury tampering. Is it your belief that in fact non-jury trials, given the mention of the Paul Quinn incident and a key witness there and also the Robert McCartney case, which of course has not also been fully dealt with, are those appropriate for non-jury trials?

  Mr Woodward: What Nick is saying of course is it is a matter for the DPP, and it is, and you are inviting me to have a view on it. Ultimately, it is a matter for the DPP but what I want to see, whether it is about Paul Quinn or any other area, is the people responsible for the murder of Paul Quinn or the attempted murders of police officers coming before the courts and serving time. I want it to be part of a judicial system which the public across the piece, both sides of the communities, can respect and believe is fair. I want to be careful here about just taking advantage of my position before this Committee this afternoon to say what I would like to see. What I want to see is the people who did these crimes put away. We have to recognise the special circumstances of Northern Ireland, so I think it will depend upon when those convictions hopefully can be secured and I think we have to recognise that we are moving into a different frame in Northern Ireland. We are not yet there on some of these things but of course, the really interesting thing on this, as the Chief Constable has said, is the volume of co-operation that they are now getting from the community. It is not the same as saying that we have a level of co-operation which is going to see every one of these witnesses going into the witness box. We have to nurse people into that position. We have to deal with that climate of intimidation but we should not, in our concern about that, fail to recognise the progress that is being made, and there is real progress being made.

  Chairman: I want to move on now to looking at the past. Before we deal with some of the really tricky issues, there is one legacy issue that Stephen Hepburn wants to ask about.

  Q31  Mr Hepburn: It is the future of the redundant military sites. Can you give us your view on whether they should go for full market value and the money go to the Treasury or do think it should be passed over to local communities as some sort of community asset?

  Mr Woodward: Let us again just put the facts on the table. We have the five sites that were gifted in 2002, and then we subsequently have an ambiguous phraseology in the 2003 joint declaration about further sites which "might" be gifted. As you know, the Government has been absolutely steadfast in its commitment on the first five and those have been transferred. Note to everybody: in advance of people asking for more sites to be gifted, it would be quite good to see, for example, resolution on what is going to be done with the Maze achieved. This is something to which I hope very much there is a satisfactory resolution quite soon because if it had been able to have been used as a national stadium in the run-up to the Olympics, it would have been a fantastic symbol to the rest of the world for the future of Northern Ireland. It is a great shame that it has spent eight months being caught up in an internal debate between the political parties. That is a matter for the political parties but it is quite hard for me, in trying to bring pressure to bear on other members of the Cabinet, whether it is in the Treasury or the MoD, when talking about possibilities of any help being given on other future military sites if they see the kind of internal wrangling that is taking place over the Maze. As you know, there are two particular sites in Omagh that have attracted interest. I am meeting Pat Doherty—Sir Patrick wrote to me about this—next week. I think this is a really ingenious proposal for the site. As you know, DSD have been in negotiation with the MoD about this for around 24 months now without yet achieving a satisfactory resolution themselves. I am in discussion with my colleagues in the MoD and the Treasury about this. Again, I raise no expectations as to what the outcome may be because there is no agreement to gift further sites beyond those of 2002. However, there is equally a commitment by the Government to do all it can to help in Northern Ireland and I will continue and endeavour to do my best but, as I say, it would certainly help me if we could get an early resolution on the Maze.

  Q32  Kate Hoey: I think it is important that the Secretary of State is challenged a little bit on that. I do not want to go into the whole Maze project but I think it is important that perhaps the Secretary of State should be aware that if this had been handled differently from the beginning and the people of Northern Ireland, in the sense of the real supporters of sport in Northern Ireland, had actually been involved and to try and almost use it, as you are using it now, as a form of blackmail really, that you are almost implying that if they do not get the Maze sorted out, we are taking our ball away. The reality is the money should be there for sport in Northern Ireland and for the sports governing bodies and for the people of Northern Ireland through their elected representatives and their parties and the Finance Secretary in Northern Ireland to decide how they are going to go forward on that.

  Mr Woodward: Kate, I think that is a bit of a travesty of what I said. There is no blackmail here at all. What I am simply saying to you is that it would help my case when discussing this with colleagues if we could actually see progress in terms of the sites we had gifted, particularly the Maze, because of the Olympics and the opportunity it represents. It would be particularly helpful to me, and that is a very different phraseology from the one that you just caricatured of what I said.

  Q33  Sammy Wilson: Secretary of State, you did single out the Maze. Girdwood Barracks, for example, has not been decided on yet. Why particularly use the Maze?

  Mr Woodward: Because the Maze is being used by politicians in Northern Ireland for reasons we all understand as something of a political football and it is constantly appearing in the headlines. As I say, there is a fantastic opportunity to be taken here.

  Q34  Kate Hoey: Yes, but it may not be the right site for a national sports stadium, as this Committee in fact commented on.

  Mr Woodward: This, of course, is a matter for politicians in Northern Ireland. I am simply saying that it would help me in making a case to others if it were possible to actually demonstrate that this would not be the subject of wrangling but actually is a subject for purpose.

  Chairman: It would help us a little if you would refresh your memory by looking at our report on to tourism, where we did in fact make a recommendation on this. Maybe you could just look at that.

  Q35  Stephen Pound: Good afternoon, Secretary of State. Before I ask my question can I just quickly say, in your preamble you mentioned attacks on Orange lodges. Firstly, I am not a frequent visitor to Orange lodges but I have read the reports. Do you feel, from your position, from your vantage point, that there is an element of co-ordination in these attacks, or is this the sort of mindless vandalism that we tend to see throughout the rest of the United Kingdom?

  Mr Woodward: It is certainly very tempting to conclude, as some have done, that there may be a level of co-ordination. The First Minister and others had a meeting with the Chief Constable just before Christmas, and indeed I had a meeting myself with both parties and indeed members of the Orange Orders as well to discuss this. The Chief Constable does not believe there is a co-ordinated campaign taking place. There is no question that, with 67 attacks since April of last year, this is a significant and dramatic increase in the number of attacks in previous years, which were in the low double figures. So this is a serious issue. I fear that what we are seeing here is more copy-cat than co-ordination. There is absolutely no reason to believe—and I quote here the Chief Constable—that this is the work of any kind of concerted paramilitary campaign. Nonetheless, for those who are victims of this crime, it is appalling, and it is cowardly as well because of course they do it in places where they are least likely to be caught. They do it in the middle of the countryside in the middle of the night. The Chief Constable is taking action on it, has increased resources, has increased the numbers of patrols. It is very difficult. We remain in contact with those who are most concerned about this but, again, one of the things I think is important has been to note the condemnation that has come across the political spectrum and one of the fiercest proponents in terms of criticism is the Deputy First Minister, who made it unequivocally clear how strongly he condemns the attacks on the halls and how much he wants to see the perpetrators of this caught and brought to justice, as I do.

  Q36  Stephen Pound: Thank you for that. Moving forward to the past, the independent Consultative Group on the Past was set up in June last year with your predecessor as the progenitor, if not the godfather. How do you feel the infant is doing?

  Mr Woodward: This is a Herculean task. There is no question, and you will have taken evidence and spoken to the Chief Constable as a very good example of this, about just what an understandable but nonetheless burden it represents on police time dealing with the past, the numbers of officers the Chief Constable has to deploy to deal with the past. Having said that, I believe it is absolutely right that we deal with the past. We cannot possibly move forward into a new and secure shared future in Northern Ireland without recognising that the past is something we are all going to have to come to terms with. I do not believe this is about drawing a line under the past. It is about coming to a place whereby we can live with the past without it gripping us and not being able to go forward. I think the Commission therefore was an inspired idea, and I think it was inspired because it was necessary and it was important that it was not the British Government or the Irish Government coming forward with a proposal. It had to be independent but, in being independent and in seeking people's views and in holding public inquiries, you will inevitably court all sorts of sensationalist responses from people. So when they have a public inquiry and people come forward and say they think there should be an amnesty, I absolutely understand why people, some of them in this room, immediately come forward and say to the British Government "Can we absolutely have a guarantee that you will not have an amnesty?" It is understandable that people are going to put forward these ideas, and that is the value of having an independent group at this stage. It is valuable precisely because they can actually go and see whether or not there is a consensus. It may be there is no consensus. It may be that it is too early yet to find a way to settle on some of these issues which, very understandably, tear people apart. We still have nobody effectively having been held to account for the Omagh bomb, the worst atrocity in the whole of the troubles. You can understand how this tears communities in half but equally we can understand how living with communities being torn in half ten years ago meant that we could make no progress. So people did make progress because clearly we had achieved a moment when it was possible to go forward. The work of the committee, and I think it is being brilliantly led, is very difficult. I do not know whether they will come to us at the end of this year or the summer of this year and say there is a consensus. It is perfectly clear to everybody in this room that there is a group of issues for which it is going to be very difficult to find any consensus, but maybe the first question we need to ask is whether or not there is a consensus yet on whether or not people want the past to be addressed. It may be there is not, and if there is not a consensus even on the issue of, "Do you want the past to be addressed so we are not just gripped by the past?", we will have to recognise that the work of the Consultative Group will be much more difficult and take much longer than we anticipated.

  Q37  Stephen Pound: Secretary of State, you talked about the impact on the PSNI. Could you, just for the record, give us some indication of the level of funding provided by the NIO for this specific purpose of Historic Enquiries?

  Mr Woodward: £34 million was the amount of money that we set aside for the Historic Enquiries Team. They have spent a proportion of that and they are currently dealing with cases which, as you know, are in chronological order by and large up to the mid 1970s. We believe that in itself will be enough, but let us put this in the context of a policing budget of a billion pounds. Let us put that in the context of a very difficult past. Let us put that in the context that there are some 4,000 families related to people who lost their lives in the Troubles, many of whom have no basic information about the circumstances of the murder that took place. One of the things that I think was extraordinary about the work of the Historic Enquiries Team, which I believe is appropriately funded, was when it revealed to me the work it did with the family of a young British soldier who was killed in the 1970s. It was only last year that the family learned the circumstances and learned about the fact that when the young man was shot in the streets of Belfast—he died two days later in hospital—it was Catholic passers-by who tried to save his life, who took him to the hospital. They had no idea about that and yet the family had nursed for 30 years a hatred of the Catholic community in Belfast. The material was sitting in a box. The material was put together by the team and they shared it with the family. It has changed that family's view of the past considerably. I would be very surprised if the work of the Consultative Group on the past in any way moved away from the work that needs to be undertaken by the Historic Enquiries Team. I think much of that is rightly about giving people information they do not have and it is very basic. I think the bigger issues, the kinds of issues that have attracted huge media attention in the last few weeks, are undoubtedly issues that will be hugely divisive. I do not know whether they can find a consensus on that. It is not for me to judge. It is not for me to provide a running commentary, but, perhaps like everybody else, I hope it will be possible to find a consensus but I certainly do not underestimate the task involved in that.

  Q38  Stephen Pound: Do you anticipate that there will be a drawdown from the PSNI budget to service Eames/Bradley?

  Mr Woodward: To service the Historic Enquiries Team?

  Q39  Stephen Pound: Sorry—that separate strand.

  Mr Woodward: Given that we have given them a separate £34 million budget to fund it, it would be remarkable if at this stage, having spent less than 50% of it, they now needed to draw down on it, and, given that we have managed to secure for the Policing Service in Northern Ireland an extremely good settlement for the future, I would be very surprised if they felt they needed to do that.



 
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