Northern Ireland Act 2000 (Modification) (No 2) Order 2005

I am grateful for the contributions. To be honest, I cannot go beyond what I said on Monday—it is on record that I shall follow it through in terms of how we deal in this House with Orders in Council. Some of the issues have probably been delayed because of the general election, but I make no apology for that. I do not seek to say that this House should replicate the other place; in fact, I am dead against it. We have distinct functions in a way. It is for its departmental Select Committee to choose how to operate. It looks at the orders in a slightly different way from how we do. Nevertheless, sometimes primary legislation is unamendable, and I want particularly to have a look at that area. On people being paid, the political class, as the noble Lord refers to them, in Northern Ireland are paid their salaries, which are about £30,000 a year. It is true that they do not do nothing but, for sure, they are not legislating. They are certainly not scrutinising me. I should not be there anyway, because if they do their job, they would scrutinise other Ministers. If they choose not to give value for money, by not bothering to lift a phone or a pen when there is consultation, that is up to them.   Generally, on consultations, it feels, throughout Whitehall, as though we do them every hour of every day—plenty of consultation is taking place—and people are always told that their contribution will be published unless they specifically raise issues relating to matters that are not public. That applies to every department; it is not a special point for Northern Ireland legislation. If people choose otherwise, we make the consultations and the summaries of what people have said available. If we are not flooded by contributions from the Members of the Assembly, and if I remember, I might draw it to their attention when I meet them, but I shall not meet them as an Assembly. They will not have it on the cheap: they will not have scrutiny from Westminster Ministers, with them not taking responsibility. We are happy to talk to them and to look for a consensus to see whether we can have more involvement while direct rule is in place, but we cannot have a sham of them operating as an Assembly with full scrutiny under direct rule. We are not accountable to them; we are accountable here. We want their own Members, their local Ministers, to be accountable to them. That is what we seek. That is why this is very much a second-best operation. As I said to noble Lords on Monday, we shall pursue the issue and hope to return, after the long Recess, with a process so that there can be meaningful involvement in some of the draft orders before they are tabled—in other words, the process before they are promulgated—so that colleagues can go over the issues with officials and put forward suggestions. If any changes come from that, it will not be too late to put them in before we finally publish what are, essentially, draft orders. That is a possibility on which we are working, and I hope to be able to say something more positive on that in the very near future.