Northern Ireland Bill (Allocation of Time)

Simply because experience, including of how parties have dealt with this issue, shows us that it will not be. If this is about creating certainty, stability and confidence in the devolution of justice and policing, why are we going for a model that is so injected and pre-programmed with uncertainty that we have provisions for no Minister in 2011 and for dissolution in 2012? We have been told in both this debate and the earlier one about the significance of the 18 November agreement between the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister. That letter told us there was no fall-back, and that there was a sunset clause which was agreed only until May 2012. Do we have an enduring settlement and arrangement if we have a provision that is purely transitional and leads to the potential dissolution—that is what we are legislating for—on 1 May 2012 with no fall-back? We could have the fall-down of a Department, but we have no political fall-back. Therefore, in 2011 we could have a Department with no Minister and, because the schedule does not say that when the Department dissolves the Minister ceases to hold office, in 2012 we will have a Minister but perhaps no Department. There will be a zombie Minister, nominally the Minister of justice; there will be a Minister in office, but with no office and no private office staff, or anything else. That is the nonsense that we are legislating for in this Bill. So there is not just the badness of what has been done in moving away from the agreement and inclusion, but the madness of legislating for failure in that regard. The First Minister and Deputy First Minister letter said there was no fall-back, but there is, of course, potentially a fall-back. We are told that this legislation is to discharge and reflect faithfully the agreement between the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister and all that was carefully negotiated between Sinn Fein and the DUP, but a fall-back is provided for. Paragraph 5(2)(b) of schedule 1 provides for the Secretary of State to introduce an Order in Council that would impose our old friend model 8, which the right hon. Member for Neath legislated through this House when he was Secretary of State. That model says there will be a justice Minister and a deputy justice Minister from the two largest political parties. I would be interested to hear from the Secretary of State or the Minister, either in an intervention or in a winding-up speech, whether they intend that provision as a fall-back, and if so, have they told Sinn Fein? Have Sinn Fein and the DUP agreed that there is such a fall-back? If Sinn Fein has agreed that that is a fall-back, the agreement of 18 November is already contradicted and confounded, and if it has not agreed that, it may well be upset and annoyed that this has been smuggled past it. That is one reason why we need more time to consider these matters in this House: some of us can spot things that Sinn Fein seems unable to spot, like the meaning of the words "at all times".