My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, has eloquently set out the dangers of the approach that the Government are taking through the insertion of Clauses 6 and 7. I support Amendment 43 in his name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey. Our position that Clause 7 should not stand part of the Bill would go further in deleting the Secretary of State’s override powers completely. However, I understand entirely that, when we have a functioning Assembly, there certainly should be no question of the Secretary of State having the power to intervene.
The issue is very clear, as was illustrated yesterday in the debate on the abortion regulations. These clauses are another example of what one noble Lord described as the Government’s pick-and-mix approach to devolution and the Belfast agreement as amended by the St Andrews agreement. Some issues are picked out to be legislated for here in Westminster and other issues are not touched at all; we saw this between 2017 and 2020, when the Government’s attitude was that they could do nothing at all to move issues forward, legislate or step in.
However, now, they are doing so on other issues. We had it with yesterday’s regulations on abortion, which is a devolved matter for the Northern Ireland Assembly and was lifted out of it to be legislated for here. We had it on the protocol, where the Belfast agreement and the Northern Ireland Act were disgracefully amended by secondary legislation to ensure that, for the vote on the protocol—it was given to the Assembly and therefore, by definition, was devolved to it—the voting mechanism was changed. The very architecture of the Belfast agreement was changed at the Government’s whim without agreement among the parties.
Here is another example. As the noble Lords, Lord Moylan and Lord Empey, have said, this goes to the heart of the operation of the institutions in Northern Ireland. There is no doubt that people will inevitably feel that, going forward, if there are intractable or difficult issues, they will go with their competing demands to whoever is in power at Westminster and demand that it should act in their favour—although I suspect that unionists will be less keen to do that than nationalists, given the track record of success at getting Westminster to legislate over the wishes of the Assembly. I fear that it seems to be a rather one-sided approach. There is no justification on this issue in terms of the principle of devolution, which applies throughout the United Kingdom; the Sewel convention has been mentioned. It undermines the principle of devolution and the Belfast agreement as amended.
I throw this point in also; obviously the Minister can deal with it when he comes to reply. He said that the New Decade, New Approach document should be faithfully followed, that part of this legislation is about putting into practice and law the provisions of that agreement, and that it should be departed from very rarely—if at all—but can he point to anywhere in the NDNA agreement that says that the Secretary of State would have override powers or intervention powers? Where is that provision to be found?
Of course, the Secretary of State and the Government always implicitly have such powers but it seems to me that, when parties make an agreement in the context of an operational assembly and an agreement on how things should be agreed between them, that assembly is where the matter should lie. Yes, there will be difficulties in reaching agreements—the noble Lord, Lord Empey, pointed to one particularly good example about notepaper—but the point is that there have been serious issues on which there was disagreement initially but agreement was eventually reached between the First Minister and Deputy First Minister, or between the parties in the Executive, because it had to be.
I hear Ministers continually referring to their support for the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and how committed they are to it, yet their actions in recent months have been very concerning in terms of their approach to the institutions and powers of the Executive and the Assembly as set out in that agreement. They are effectively undermining it.
I believe that Clause 7 should not stand part of the Bill and I lend my support to Amendment 43. I also happen to agree with Amendment 40, moved by the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, in the sense that, if there is a situation where this clause does go through and the Secretary of State does have that power, he or she should be required to come and make a Statement to Parliament, as opposed to not having that obligation. Again, that would be an opportunity to hold people to account.