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Clause 3 makes two technical amendments to the post-devolution framework in Northern Ireland. The first such amendment is to provide for the current function of the Attorney-General of Northern Ireland in relation to providing guidance on the disclosure of juror information to be split between the Advocate-General for Northern Ireland and the devolved Attorney-General for Northern Ireland after devolution. The Advocate-General will retain responsibility for issuing guidance in respect of national security and terrorism-related cases, while the devolved Attorney-General will be responsible for all other cases. The division of responsibility reflects the split of the current Attorney-Generals functions that was agreed by Parliament in the Justice (Northern Ireland) Act 2002.
The second amendment, made by Clause 3(2), provides that the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland will be a corporation sole. Noble
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During the Committee debate in another place, issues were raised in relation to the lines of accountability of both the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney-General. These are not affected by the Bill, which does not alter the relationships between the Public Prosecution Service, the Attorney-General and the Assembly as already provided for by the Justice (Northern Ireland) Act 2002. However, I recognise that there are concerns regarding this issue and it may help if I set out the reasons why the Government believe that the existing arrangements, as provided for by Parliament in the 2002 Act, are right and proper given the particular circumstances of Northern Ireland.
Your Lordships will recall the significance of the criminal justice review of March 2000 which led to the 2002 legislation. This review was the most important and far-reaching survey of criminal justice in Northern Ireland in over 30 years and flowed from a specific commitment in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. The review and subsequent legislation enshrined the principle of prosecutorial independence in Northern Ireland. The review states that,
I can understand that some noble Lords may question whether a review that took place nine years ago remains relevant today given the progress that Northern Ireland has seen in that period. The approach taken by the review reflected the particular circumstances of Northern Ireland. However far the politics have come in Northern Ireland, it is clear that the circumstances there are still significantly different from those in England and Wales. The need for confidence from all sections of the community in all the justice system remains of crucial importance, particularly at the point when the Assembly takes on responsibility for that system for the first time since 1972. The Government firmly believe that this fact warrants a different approach being taken in Northern Ireland.
The 2002 Act, which gave legislative effect to the criminal justice review, was drafted to provide for the appropriate lines of accountability in the post-devolution world. The fact that the process of getting to that post-devolution world has taken longer than most of us anticipated at the time reinforces the need to ensure that these arrangements, designed to create community confidence in the prosecutorial system, are allowed to continue to bolster those levels of confidence to the point where responsibilities are devolved. The fact that the First and Deputy First Ministers have not proposed that those arrangements should be changed is an indication, in the Governments view, that the time has not yet come to change them. If, at some point in the future after we have devolved policing and justice, the Assembly concludes that Northern Ireland
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It is still important that the DPP can be held accountable by the Assembly. That is right and proper and is provided for in the 2002 Act. While the Assembly will not be able to inquire into individual casesthat would be trespassing too far on the principle of prosecutorial independenceits justice committee would be able to summon the DPP to give evidence on all matters relating to the financial and administrative running of the service. In addition, there is provision in the 2002 Act for the Assembly to provide an opportunity in its Standing Orders for the Attorney-General to speak and answer questions in the Assembly itself, as well as in Assembly committees, although he will not be able to vote. Given the consultative relationship between the Attorney-General and the DPP, this means that the Attorney can also answer questions relating to prosecution matters, including prosecution policy and systems, although he will not be able to answer questions relating to individual cases.
Another important recommendation of the criminal justice review was that the Attorney-General for Northern Ireland should not be a political figure. The 2002 Act provides for the appointment to be made by the First and Deputy First Ministers. They have already indicated the person whom they would like to appoint, to widespread approval. There has been some suggestionwe will have an opportunity in Committee to debate amendments to this effect tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Kingslandthat the Attorney should be appointed by the Lord Chief Justice rather than by the First and Deputy First Ministers and that the Attorney should have a more active prosecutorial role. The Government believe that this would be a departure from the principle of separation of powers, which is a fundamental tenet of the UKs constitution. The distinction between the prosecutorial system, which brings cases on behalf of the Crown, and the judiciary, which tries those cases impartially and independently, would be frustrated if we moved to a position where the head of the judiciary appointed the head of the prosecution service. In addition, given the Attorney-Generals role as a source of legal advice to the Executive, it is important that the post is filled by someone who has the confidence of both the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister. The arrangements set out in the 2002 Act, reflecting, as they do, the recommendations of the independent criminal justice review, are, in the Governments view, the right framework in which to place Northern Irelands devolved institutions on the right footing when they take on responsibility for policing and justice.
Clause 4 extends the scope of the order-making power in Section 86 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 to enable the possibility of executive functions being devolved, even if the legislative competence for the matter remains reserved. Ultimately, this will allow Parliament greater flexibility to ensure that responsibility
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The murderous attack over the weekend has brought into sharper focus the continuing threat that Northern Ireland faces from a small minority of people who are determined to disrupt the progress made in recent years. The shock and revulsion that have been abundantly clear in all parts of Northern Ireland demonstrate how far we have come in recent years. The greatest memorial to the weekends victims is to continue with the political process and to show that this minority will not be allowed to drag the people of Northern Ireland, who are united in their commitment to political progress, back to a time when violence dominated the politics of the Province. The progress made by the Northern Ireland Executive must be allowed to continue and this Bill represents the Governments support for that progress, giving effect, as it does, to the agreement of the First and Deputy First Ministers and the Assembly and Executive Review Committee.
Before I close my remarks, I shall address a concern that I know is shared by a number of noble Lords about the time allocated to consider this legislation in this House. That concern is recognised by the Government. However, it is not for the sake of the Government that we have sought to push this Bill through Parliament on a reduced timeframe; it has not been done for the simple sake of expediency. The Belfast agreement of 1998 set out the Governments support for the principle of the devolution of policing and justice. That support was augmented by the St Andrews agreement, which set out the Governments belief that the implementation of that agreement should be sufficient to build the community confidence necessary for the Assembly to request the transfer of policing and justice powers by May 2008. The Government gave a commitment that they would do all that they could to facilitate progress and to ensure that the necessary enabling legislation would be in place to ensure that, when the Assembly felt ready to request the transfer of responsibilities, that transfer could take place expeditiously. That commitment stands, which is why it is important that we do all that we can to ensure that we expedite the path of this Bill.
Of course, your Lordships will know that, in making this comment, I do not discount the vital importance of ensuring that Parliament has the opportunity to scrutinise carefully the legislation before it. I recognise that that opportunity has been curtailed in this case, although I hope that the briefings given by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and his officials have been of assistance to noble Lords and have helped that process of consideration, even given the reduced timeframe in which the process has taken place. However, the Government believe that it is correct that the people of Northern Ireland, through their Assembly, should be able to move forward with the devolution of policing and justice at a pace determined by them. While a final decision on when devolution should take place has not yet been reached,
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I know that all of us in this Chamber today have the interests of Northern Ireland at heart. We have spent much time over the years debating how best to provide for Northern Ireland and, more recently, celebrating the fact that devolution has been restored and that its elected representatives can, once more, take responsibility for the issues that matter to the people of Northern Ireland. This Bill gives effect to the wishes of the representatives of those people. It is for that reason that, notwithstanding the understandable frustration that many of your Lordships feel about the limited time available to consider the Bill, I am confident that no one here would want this House to become the stumbling block to progress in Northern Ireland. We have a duty to scrutinise the Bill carefully, but we also have a duty to do what is right in the interests of Northern Ireland. In that spirit, I commend this Bill to the House. I beg to move.
Lord Glentoran: My Lords, before I address the Bill, I should like to associate my party with the opening remarks of the noble Baroness the Lord President in relation to the awful happenings on Saturday. Although it is not much use, let the families and friends of the dead and seriously wounded know that our thoughts and hearts are with them today. There is a Statement later on that happening and anything political that comes from it, so I do not propose to dwell on it at this moment.
What I am about to say is not in any way concerned with the noble Baroness the Lord President and the noble and learned Baroness the Attorney-General. From our side, and certainly from my point of view, this has been the worst handled Northern Ireland Bill that in the 10 years that I have been doing this job I have ever been associated with. We are rushing a complex and hugely important Bill, which is vital to the constitution, and which invokes parts of something like six Northern Ireland Acts that need to be read and understood even to start to understand this Bill. The Bill had something like six hours, including the programme Motion debate, in the other place. If you read Hansard, there is only one conclusion that you can come to. I dare not use the language that I would use outside the House, but it was not a very good conclusion.
I thank the noble Baroness the Lord President and the noble and learned Baroness the Attorney-General for the huge assistance they gave to me, to my party and eventually to all your Lordships in getting out briefings and laying on meetings to help us understand what this Bill is about, what it is doing, why it is needed, where it is coming from and where it is hoping to go to. I do not understand why we had to rush it all through. It will not be rushed through once it leaves here but the Secretary of State is the Secretary of State and we have to live with him while he is there.
There are a number of areas of the Bill about which we are not happy. Thanks to the support of my noble friend Lord Kingsland, the Government now fully understand our worries. We just need to make sure
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The Northern Ireland Assembly, if it pursues one of these options and asks for devolution, will be inheriting a police force with a chief constable who is retiringor being moveda deputy chief constable who is heading for retirement and an overdraft or debt in the police budget of more than £50 million. Furthermore, the Government have required the police service to save £350 million over the next three years and that overtime is reduced by 51 per cent. Considering the security situation in Northern Ireland as of today and last week and indeed for some timeit was quite some time before the chief constable shouted for helpthat is not a good state in which to hand over something as important to a community as its policing. I want to know whether the Government plan to ensure that when it comes to devolving the police and criminal justice system, they are devolving a top-rate, on-top-of-the-job well-funded organisation.
We recognise that the Bill does not itself deliver the devolution of criminal justice and policing. The Bill merely creates an eighth model of how justice powers could be devolved if and when the Assembly feels able to agree. That is a matter, rightly, for the MLAs in Northern Ireland to decide. However, powers should be transferred from this Parliament only when three criteria have been met. First, all parties represented in the Executive should be committed to pursuing their objectives by exclusively peaceful and democratic means. Having heard and read some of the comments of Sinn Fein politicians near the top of the police board as well as Adams and company, I do not believe that they support the PSNI other than cynically because it suits them to use it to pursue their own political agenda, which is not the political agenda of all the people of Northern Ireland.
Secondly, all parties should fully support in word and deed the criminal justice system, including the police and courts. Thirdly, such a transfer of power should command support across the community, as expressed through Northern Irelands political representatives.
We have always made it clear that any devolution of policing and justice powers must preserve the operational independence of the chief constable and his officers. If power had been devolved and the chief constable had asked for support from the SRR, I wonder whether the Assembly would have been able to give it to him or would he still have the power even to ask for it?
In terms of how the Bill is presented, we are not happy that the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland is independent of a parent department
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We were also unhappy about the supervision and support of the DPP. There has been no criticism whatever from me or my party of how the DPP has operated in any way; it has been superb. However, we feel that it needs supervision. The DPP needs support and, at times, some management; in the rest of this kingdom, the DPPs have both support and management.
We have tabled a number of amendments, which will be considered later. However, we in my party have discussed this Bill at lengthfor a considerably longer time than it spent in another placeand we have done so with Ministers and the noble Baronesses on the Front Bench. We believe that in the situation that Northern Ireland finds itself in and where we are, we should let the Bill go through. We also support whatever is required to keep criminal justice and policing on the road.
Lord Smith of Clifton: My Lords, I thank the Lord President for introducing this Bill. I associate these Benches with the condolences that have been expressed over the killings of the two soldiers and the best wishes for the full recovery of others who were wounded at the Massereene barracks in Antrim on Saturday last.
These atrocities serve to support the arguments I shall adopt regarding the need to strengthen the position of the proposed Minister of Justice. The Bill before us today is the latest in a series of attempts by the Government and the Executive in Northern Ireland to get the mechanics right when devolving policing and justice matters to the Assembly. It provides yet another model for a department of policing and justice to add to those introduced by the Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2006 and the Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Act 2007.
As has been said, the Bill does not give details of what powers will be devolved to the Assembly, nor does it tell us when this is likely to happen. In that regard, therefore, the Government cannot claim that this is emergency legislation that should be rushed through this House and the other place in a matter of days. The Lord Presidents explanation is less than satisfactory. When the Bill was debated in the House of Commons, there was a great deal of anger that it had been rushed through so quickly. It may be urgent, but surely not so urgent that adequate time cannot be provided between the discussions on the Bill in both Houses. This is a complex piece of legislation, as the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, emphasised when he referred to previous Northern Ireland Acts that subsequently were amended many times. We, too, are grateful to officials for providing a copy of the consolidated legislation, and for their assistance with our queries on
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The Liberal Democrats are a devolutionist party. For many years, we have supported and promoted the principle of devolving policing and justice powers to the Assembly. We want a local Minister to take responsibility for local aspects of the criminal justice system. That would be a major step in the normalisation process in Northern Ireland and could be regarded as the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the peace process. Several measures have already been put in place to provide greater transparency and accountability in operational matters; now they need to be entrenched in an Executive Minister who has been elected by local people.
However, we must not underestimate the challenges that face Northern Ireland in the areas of policing and justice. The noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, mentioned some of them, including, crucially, the financial matters that must be clarified, particularly in relation to the number of police officers, given the current threat by dissident Republicansa threat described by the chief constable as being at the highest level for a decade. The atrocities at the Massereene barracks at the weekend fully validate Sir Hugh Orde's grave assessment of the current security situation. We must also address the increasing financial pressures on the prison estate, with a growing prison population and tougher sentences, and the matter of legal aid. Nevertheless, we believe that these issues should be decided at a local level by a local Minister. In so far as the Bill helps the Assembly to achieve that aim, we support it.
Our difficulty, of which the noble Baroness is well aware and to which she has alluded, lies with Schedule 1 to the Bill, and in particular with the provision dealing with the removal of a Minister from office. The schedule proposes that a Minister of Justice can be removed simply by a cross-community vote in the Assembly. The Secretary of State may argue that this is the procedure for the removal of any other Assembly Minister. However, that would be to ignore the political implications of this part of the Bill.
We have warned Ministers previously not to look upon policing in Northern Ireland as being in any way comparable to other ministries there. Northern Ireland policing has a different dimension. There are special arrangements, including human rights compliance and structures for oversight and accountability. The fact that we are debating yet another model for a Ministry of Justice in Northern Ireland, in addition to the various other models that are on the statute book, emphasises that this is not just any other Ministry.
The model in effect implies that, for something as important as policing in Northern Ireland, there must be special arrangements. We must create an entirely new department, outside the 10 departments that already exist in the Assembly, to accommodate such weighty functions. The model suggests that, although we have looked at how such a Ministry should be structured, we have not yet got it right. This is too important to be
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Policing and justice functions are different in Northern Ireland. Indeed, they are so different that the parties that currently compose the Executive believe that they should look outside themselves to find a person who can fulfil the role of Minister of Justice. It is not the function of the Bill or of this House to appoint the first Minister of Justice. That responsibility lies with politicians in the Assembly. However, it has been rumouredindeed this was discussed in the other placethat the First and Deputy First Minister are looking to the Alliance Party to fill such a role. To place an Alliance Minister in a position where he or she can be so easily removed from this office is completely unacceptable. There is no equivalence between a Minister who has to retain only the confidence of his party nominating officer and a Minister elected by the Assembly as a whole, as the Justice Minister will be. The words of the First Minister, Peter Robinson, speaking in the other place last week, were welcome, but unless his intentions are enshrined in legislation they cannot provide, unfortunately, the necessary comfort that is required. We do not doubt his sincerity when he stated, as the Lord President has already quoted:
Neither the First nor the Deputy First Minister will wish to do anything other than give full support to a Justice Minister.[Official Report, Commons, 4/3/09; col. 940.]
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