Northern Ireland Bill (Allocation of Time)

That is not what I want to achieve; I want to achieve devolution that happens once and for all and for good, particularly if we are, in the Secretary of State’s words, trying to talk about enduring arrangements. That is what we want to get to. I make no secret of the fact—this is shown in my party’s amendments—that what we want for a Minister of justice and policing, as with all other Ministers, is appointment by inclusion, by the d’Hondt system. If people realise just how limited the rules and powers of this Minister are going to be, they may not be as vexed. The reality is that the Minister’s main job will be getting the budget rather than setting it, because that is the job of the Chief Constable and the Policing Board, and taking the lead in preparing and providing legislation as well. The point about 2012 is that we will have this stalemate of a Department dissolved. What will happen to its functions? Will they, as the hon. Member for East Londonderry (Mr. Campbell) suggests, then come to this House? I know that some hon. Members have tabled amendments saying that in the event of no Minister being appointed in 2011 or the Department dissolving in 2012, things revert to some sort of direct rule, some sort of appointment by the Prime Minister, or they go to the Secretary of State and so on. I do not know whether that is what he is suggesting when he says that they will revert to this House. That may be his understanding, but I do not know whether it is part of an understanding that his party has shared with Sinn Fein and that the leader of his party has shared with the Deputy First Minister—perhaps that will be elaborated on later in the debate. The potential fall-back provided for in paragraph 5(2)(b) of schedule 1 is not much of a fall-back, because it does not guarantee that a Department and a Minister will be appointed. The fall-back brings us only to a situation in which there can be a Minister and a Deputy Minister elected by cross-community votes, and so we are back again to the need for agreement and the potential veto over who will be the Justice and Policing Minister—it is the triple lock yet again. No matter what way we look at all these things and the fall-backs, it is again a case of, "There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza." We keep coming back to the same point—the veto that will be there. Even the fall-back of 2012 turns out to be an optical illusion too, because we are confronted with the DUP veto at all times in that situation. That is why we need to pay attention to the various amendments that are proposed on these issues. Other issues are obviously provided for in this Bill, but on judicial appointments we regret the removal of the role in the procedure for the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister—not that they were going to have a significant say, because their only power was to be to ask, on occasion, the Judicial Appointments Commission to think again about a recommendation. That was all; they could ask it to have a second thought on a recommendation, but they were going to have no other powers of interference or influence on judicial appointments. This was provided for in the criminal justice review, and we regret anything that takes us away from that review. Similarly, because the issue of a corporation sole for the Director of Public Prosecutions was provided for in the criminal justice review, we are a lot more relaxed about it than the Opposition Front-Bench team is, and we see merit in the arrangement. The detail would be hugely important—and we would all want to test it—but the principle would certainly not be an issue for ourselves. We have addressed some of these issues in our amendments as well. When the burden of our remarks has been on the main politics of justice and policing, and the ministry, we certainly would not wish to neglect on Second Reading important issues of principle in relation to judicial appointments, and provisions that flow from the agreement. My party has also tabled amendments that deal with some other aspects of the Bill. Those are more by way of probing amendments where provisions are made for powers to switch from the Assembly to this Parliament or from here to authorities in Northern Ireland. We are not sure what is intended in such provisions and what they are meant to cover, so we tabled amendments so that we and other hon. Members can probe that.