Police (Northern Ireland) Act 2000 (Renewal of Temporary Provisions) Order 2007

I will do my best to answer the questions I have been asked, as well as addressing some of the myths and unfortunate—how shall I put it?—foresuppositions based on the figures. I genuinely mean that I will try to address every point. It is 20 March. The deadline is 26 March, and the one thing I will not do is change that. I cannot be certain what hour of the day the deadline is—I presume it is the whole 24 hours from midnight, when the clock starts ticking. I do not intend to comment on or allude to anything here today that could be used in one way or another, and I do not think I would be expected to. Therefore, I will not be able to comment on who said what, who feels what or whatever. We are in a very sensitive period. We all understand that. There are a lot of figures, I accept that. I do not accept that discrimination is necessarily a bad thing, if there is a policy purpose at the end of it which one seeks to drive to. Twelve competitions have been launched since the new Patten provisions were introduced. Each competition recruits 440 police officers. The lowest number of applications received in a competition—not the number of those who got through the system, but of applications—was 4,410, while the highest was 7,861. The grand total is 70,000-odd thousand. Each time there are only 440 entrants. As can be seen, the lowest figure was 4,410; that was for competition number four. The highest was for competition number 11. Competition number 12 in September 2006 gave the highest percentage so far of applicants from a Catholic background: 41 per cent. I was very conscious of what I was saying earlier when I talked about Catholic and non-Catholic. I realise that I am not talking about 50:50 Catholic and Protestant, but about Catholics and others—which, as the noble Baroness pointed out, includes ethnic minorities. I fully accept that, at 440 a go, with 70,000-odd applications in the past few years, there will by definition be an awful lot—thousands—of disappointed people. Some of them will have got through the threshold of being eligible for recruitment, and they will still have been disappointed. The police force itself is somewhere under 8,000 strong; I think it is 7,557, although I do not know if that is the figure for today or for the date when this note was written for me. The scale of numbers of people wanting to join the police force is so great that there will inevitably be disappointment for people, whether they are male, female, Catholic, Protestant or from an ethnic minority. Starting from that premise, there will be huge numbers of people who do not get in, for whatever reason. I suspect that that may be the case. There will be a limit on the numbers of police in Northern Ireland for a career structure. We have not hidden at all the fact that this arrangement is discriminatory. Everyone understands that; I am not arguing otherwise. But there is a policy objective to be achieved at the end of it. It was thought in the Patten report that the scheme’s single most striking feature—and I was quoting from the report at the time when I spoke on that—was the issue of the numbers of Catholic and non-Catholic police officers. The arrangement has received the support of the Equality Commission and the Human Rights Commission, but we do not deny that it is discriminatory. I will answer all his other points, but at one point I think that the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, referred to discrimination by my political party. I was not sure what the discrimination was. If it was the fact that we do not fight elections, that is tough, but there is no discrimination on membership anywhere in the United Kingdom.