I fully accept the point, and I hope that the Secretary of State and the Minister have heard it. It would be useful if they could address it.
It is unfortunate that, every time something is referred to as a role of the Executive it ends up becoming an appointment by the First and Deputy First Minister. With all that can be said about their acting jointly, people know that the habit has been that distinct and
separate appointments have been made. There is not the trust in the appointments system. It is very like what Macaulay said about Disraeli and Gladstone. One of them is a charlatan and knows it; the other is a charlatan and doesn’t know it. So people do not have full confidence in the appointments system when something wider is required.
The “Fresh Start” agreement specifies that a number of things will be done by the Executive. The work towards an end of paramilitarism and a lot of other commitments in the “Fresh Start” agreement are put in the name of the Executive. I will be addressing the limitations of that in subsequent amendments and new clauses. We are meant to have an approach that is about all the parties, and all the parties may not be on the Executive. If this is about an all-party approach, we should be creating mechanisms that involve all the parties and we should not pretend that these issues will become the sole responsibility or property of the Executive. Nor should we pretend that the due responsibility of the Executive is discharged simply by the First and Deputy First Minister making appointments. I do not believe that any of that is adequate.
The fact that we needed to be back in Stormont House for talks on the negotiations after the crisis showed it was not sufficient that things were done between the First and Deputy First Minister. We had a crisis and needed all-party talks to bring us back from the brink. The First and Deputy First Minister’s positions and parties had brought us to the brink. Now we seem to be ending up with mechanisms that mean that everything will be done by the First and Deputy First Minister in future. So none of the lessons has been learned. None of the mistakes in the scoping of past negotiations, the scoping of the agenda or the politics of how these things are managed has been learned from.
I know that the amendment has been tabled by the Ulster Unionist party in respect of the role being conferred on the Policing Board. As the party which argued most in the Stormont House negotiations that the key roles in the Historical Investigations Unit should be appointed by the Policing Board, I do not agree with the amendment. After all, the HIU has a role which will involve constabulary powers. If there is a policing element to it, the evidence can be gathered, investigated and referred for prosecution. The role of the reporting commission is quite different. Nobody saw that there would be huge tension—apart from dealing with some of the cases that have already been looked at by the Historical Enquiries Team—between the role of the Chief Constable and the PSNI, and the role of the HIU.
There could, arguably, be difficulties between the reporting commission and the Chief Constable. For example, last year in the aftermath of the two murders, when the Chief Constable made a assessment that shared publicly the police’s working theories in relation to that murder, something of a political crisis was created and a panel was set up to look at those issues, including to say whether it accepted what the Chief Constable had said. It would be odd if the reporting commission, which was in part appointed by the Policing Board, had to look at issues that had been the subject of comment by the Chief Constable. That might be a dilemma for the Policing Board and might raise tensions. I do not believe that the Policing Board appointment answers the question.