My Lords, here we are. I have been either asking or answering questions on the Barnett formula for something like 32 years. It started off as a formula, and then you add a floor, and now you have a Barnett squeeze. Some of your Lordships may remember that Lord Joel Barnett, himself, who invented this, towards the end of his life completely denounced it and said that it was not suitable any more. Indeed, it probably is not. We lived with it for the last 20 or 30 years because there was no real alternative, but the world has changed since then, certainly in terms of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The noble Lord, Lord Morrow, put a convincing case for a very serious look at the situation at the moment. I can tell him and Members of your Lordships’ House that, when I was the Secretary of State for Wales, I did not persuade my colleagues in the Treasury that there was a need for a change. I tried, but when you are a territorial Secretary of State, you are always battling with the Treasury, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. You are in the same team. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. But the key to the success of what happened in Wales, with the Holtham commission, was that it was in fact conceived by the Assembly, set up by the Government of Wales, and had cross-party support when the commission reported. That meant that there was a seriousness about that report which impressed the Treasury. It was convinced, after all this discussion and all these commissions, that things had to change, but I could not do it on my own. It had to be done with the Assembly, the Welsh Government and Holtham and his commission, which spread over a couple of years. That is how it was achieved.
The same thing is going to happen in Northern Ireland. There has to be a concerted effort by all political parties in Northern Ireland to be able to persuade the Government that there is a serious case for equating Wales and Northern Ireland—I leave Scotland out at the moment, as that is an even more complicated case. But that is only reasonably sure of success if it is not simply left to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. There has to be this pressure internally, from those who have been elected and thus are there in that Assembly, elected by the people of Northern Ireland to take issues like this up.
I know there is a meeting in the next week or two with the head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service. She has quite rightly asked political parties for some guidance as to what to do. A budget is not simply adding up and taking away figures; a budget is about priorities of government. What do you put first? What do you put last? Where do you put this money and that money? You do that on the basis of proper consultation, not only with Members of the Assembly but with all the political parties. That can best be done only in the context of a democratic Assembly and government.
There is no question that there is some merit in discussing these issues in your Lordships’ House, but we are not here to run Northern Ireland; we have not been elected to do that—we have not been elected to do anything but certainly not to do that. When that meeting is held in the next week or two, I hope that the parties in Northern Ireland will impress upon the head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service the importance of trying to work out what those priorities would be and how to do it. Rather her than me—it is a terribly difficult thing to do if you are not an elected politician. The decisions are so tough and so harsh, and in some ways so impossible, that they can be made only by people who are answerable in a democracy to the electorate. That is not the case at the moment.
Yes, there is a very strong case for looking at change, and a strong case for asking officials to do what they did in Wales, but that can best be achieved only if the Assembly and the Executive are both restored.