Justice and Security (Northern Ireland) Bill

We all agree on what we want the Bill to do, but there is a question over what it actually does. The hon. Members in the DUP should share our concern if the Minister’s assurances are not backed up by the legislation. The Government might have the best intentions in the world today, but if a Secretary of State in the future chose to interpret the legislation as I believe it can be interpreted, and as the hon. Gentleman correctly explained, we have a problem. It takes us to the point made by the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon) about the triple lock process. At the time, the Minister reassured us that devolution of policing and justice would be subject to that triple lock. He emphatically sought to reaffirm that today, but for the reasons that I have outlined—I do not need to repeat them—we are concerned that the triple lock process is compromised to an extent because of the way in which the legislation is phrased. I have no other motive for raising this except to highlight a concern that could come back and bite us. As I said, we support the aim of devolving policing and justice functions to the Assembly, but we are concerned about the apparent ability of the Secretary of State to take the decision to devolve such powers even if the Assembly does not want them or if it is not stable enough to exercise them responsibly. I do not for a moment suggest that the current Secretary of State for Northern Ireland would do that, but we are not framing legislation for the present; we are framing it for the indefinite future. Northern Ireland business is notoriously good at taking much longer than we expect. I ask the Minister to clarify that and to explain the use of the phrase ““no reasonable prospect”” in proposed new subsection (7A). Should a Secretary of State really be devolving such important powers to an Assembly if there is no reasonable prospect of that Assembly taking the decision itself to ask for such powers? Those are our concerns about that part of the new clause. New clause 4 is interesting because it raises other questions. We need to ask the Government for a number of clarifications and for them to give many more specific reassurances. The third report of the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs for the 2005-06 Session gave a number of examples of east-west organised crime, such as cigarette smuggling to Scotland and, most worryingly, the use of Northern Ireland as a back door into the United Kingdom by people traffickers. It would be useful to have a co-ordinated approach to organised crime in the UK. However, the Government should reassure the House that the police in Northern Ireland will not lose their ability to fight a lot of the organised crime that goes on within Northern Ireland and which is Northern Ireland-specific in terms of the links with paramilitary organisations. There could be an unintended consequence that leads to that kind of restriction. The police and the Assets Recovery Agency have done a huge amount of work on that problem, with a good degree of success. It would not be helpful to Northern Ireland, or to the fight against organised crime, for any expertise to be lost or diluted. I hope that the Minister will make a commitment to work closely with the south of Ireland on the joint challenge of securing our sea and land borders.