Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Bill

I thank the Secretary of State for that attempt to clarify. To be very clear to him, I am not making a meal of this. I do not introduce Bills and clauses into the House only to reverse them, pull them, change them and turn them upside down in subsequent Bills, as is happening now. People who make meals of things are chopping and changing legislation; they go one way and then another, and they then double back in some other provision. I am not suggesting that a devolved Minister of justice should be able to challenge the DPP’s decisions; but as the hon. Member for East Antrim (Sammy Wilson) pointed out earlier, there have been cases where people have wanted to question and to seek more information about what considerations were used by the DPP in deciding, for instance, not to prosecute supposedly in the public interest. The public have a genuine interest in wanting to know what their alleged interest was in that situation. The fact is that, in a devolved situation, a devolved Minister will find himself answering those questions. The Secretary of State introduced into the debate the fact that the DPP might decide to go for a non-jury trial, as opposed to a jury trial, because of national security considerations. The Bill does not say that national security considerations would motivate or justify that decision by the DPP, but the Secretary of State introduced that. Is that an example of what the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Lembit Öpik) was talking about earlier when he referred to the danger of mission creep? We have already had condition creep. Four conditions are set out in the Bill, but we now hear a fifth condition being talked about today. If it is not being legislated for today, it will be legislated for very soon, because that has been the history and the pattern in such legislation. The fact is that people in parties who are looking at either themselves or others holding a devolved ministry or taking part in an Assembly that has devolved powers will want to know where their powers begin and end.