Yes, I fully accept that, and the clause says that Standing Orders will lay down provision on how the undertaking is made. That is why it was nonsensical of the Minister to argue that we should not set things down in the Assembly’s Standing Orders, when that is precisely what the clause will do. The hon. Member for East Antrim seems to assume that the Assembly Commissioner for Standards would deal with the complaint, so perhaps he sees merit in our amendment that would ensure that someone could receive, consider and assess a complaint. Certainly, the more that those standards are explicit either in the Bill or in Standing Orders, the better; that is fine.
Of course the Assembly Commissioner for Standards does, among other things, address standards of public life. That is one reason why we have tabled amendment 15, to make it clear that the precepts and commitments in the undertaking would in effect be read alongside the Nolan principles, as part of the general standards of public life in Northern Ireland, so that MPs and councillors would be held to that standard. Let us remember that the commissioner deals with those issues separately and that we do not want to create inconsistencies where parties face allegations that their members said one thing at a council meeting and did something else as
MLAs and MPs. We would then get into all sorts of confusion about who is amenable to what standards. Let us create consistency and clarity of standards.
In previous debates, Members have raised issues about what councillors from my party have done in different instances, and we have raised instances about what other people have said or done, or who they have consorted with in other situations. This is about trying to get us all beyond that and trying to ensure that everyone in all parties knows what standards are required of them and then adheres to those standards. That is why we have tabled that series of amendments to make good serious deficiencies.
The other rich argument that came from the Minister was that he said that there should be no question of our trying to deal with breaches either of the undertaking or the pledge. In one instance, he said that, after all, the Assembly has the power to censure Ministers; but of course any attempt to censure Ministers on any grounds in the Assembly so far has ended up being vetoed under the petition of concern. He therefore points us to an alternative that is something of a dead end.
If we are serious about trying to resolve these issues and about trying to ensure that no untoward incident triggers the sort of crisis that had the institutions teetering on the brink, as they were in the later part of last year, we need to do better than the Bill, and the Minister needs to do better than come up with humbug, shallow arguments about the degree of consensus about the “Fresh Start” agreement, when it is already clear, even from what has been said from these Benches, that everyone knows that that is very limited.