This is the eighth or ninth time since devolution collapsed in Northern Ireland in January 2017 that we have had so-called emergency legislation, and the Bill is arguably the most important, wide-ranging piece of all that emergency legislation. As the Minister heard, there will of course be support for it, because it is necessary to facilitate the further good governance of public services in Northern Ireland, but it is a profoundly unsatisfactory process, both in general and in particular today—the way in which we are going about delivering legislation for Northern Ireland, and the way in which this piece of legislation has been brought forward.
In the first instance, I would say that the notion that the Bill is a piece of emergency legislation is in itself questionable. Of course it deals with some important matters, notably the appointment of people to the Policing Board and other boards in Northern Ireland, but Members
ought to know that the Policing Board has been without its political members since March 2017. It has now been without its independent members for almost six months. If that is such an emergency, the Government seem slightly slow to respond. Equally, I would say that we all understand how the Buick ruling has undermined the status of civil servants and their security when taking important decisions, but that too was some months ago now, and I believe that that could have been dealt with in rather shorter order.
However, the really important point is not the question of the emergency, but the nature of the substance of the issues that we are dealing with today, because as several Members have suggested, the proposed changes are profound. It is everything short, if you like, of direct rule, but it gets as close to direct rule as we could have without calling it as much.
The guidance has been mentioned several times today. I think it was remiss of the Secretary of State to say that that guidance had been placed in the Library of the House, because it had not. It had been published online on the NIO website, alongside the legislation, but it was not referred to specifically in either the legislation or the notes to the legislation, so hon. Members such as myself who would have liked to be able to read that, as far as I am aware were unable to do so, unless we knew that it was on the website, which was not true in my case at least. I know that some people on the Front Bench and elsewhere, and perhaps the Chair of the Select Committee, and certainly some of the other political parties who were consulted, will have been given the guidance, but we were not given the guidance.