THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE (Hansard, 23 July 1998)

§ Mr. Peter Robinson
I beg to move amendment No. 76, in clause 16, page 9, line 16, leave out 'chairmen' and insert 'chairman and deputy chairman'.

The First Deputy Chairman
With this, it will be convenient to discuss amendment No. 9, in clause 16, page 9, line 19, at end add— '(4) Ministers of the Crown shall not serve on the Executive Committee'.

§ Mr. Robinson
I am slightly surprised that amendment No. 76 was chosen for debate, because it very much followed on from our earlier debate about the Siamese twins in the First Minister and Deputy First Minister. Strangely, instead of being Chairman and Deputy Chairman, they become joint Chairmen. I wonder why we have that change in terminology. Earlier the Government were trying to bluff people into believing that we had a First Minister and a deputy, but the reality seems to emerge when they are chairing meetings of the Executive Committee as joint Chairmen. Will the Minister help us to understand how two Chairmen will preside over a meeting? Surely, if they are First Minister and Deputy First Minister, they should be Chairman and Deputy Chairman.

§ Mr. Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield)
I should like to turn the Committee's attention to amendment No. 9, standing in the names of my right hon. and hon. Friends, which says that Ministers of the Crown shall not serve on the Executive Committee". The issue is something of a hardy perennial. It was under discussion in the House only yesterday, in the context of the Government of Wales Bill and the ambition, in that 1327 case, of the Secretary of State to fulfil, for a limited time, the roles of Minister of the Crown and Assembly First Secretary.
In the view of the Official Opposition, there is a clear constitutional issue, which applies as much to the position in Northern Ireland as it does to that in Wales and that in Scotland. The starting point is simple—the ministerial guidelines, of which the code for 1997 was published in July. The first guideline reads: Ministers must uphold the principle of collective responsibility. To that is joined the second guideline: Ministers have a duty to Parliament to account and be held to account for the policies, decisions and actions of their departments and next step agencies.

§ Rev. Ian Paisley
I am sure that the hon. Gentleman has heard the right hon. Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble) say that the Executive Committee is not a Cabinet. Surely the hon. Gentleman is quoting guidelines for Cabinet responsibility—that Ministers must agree, and that they must move in unison. Surely that is a Cabinet structure.

§ Mr. Grieve
I am quoting from the rules relating to United Kingdom Ministers. As the hon. Gentleman says, there are also guidelines which are set out in the Bill, and in the Belfast agreement, relating to Ministers in the Northern Ireland Assembly. In particular, schedule 5 of the Bill provides that it is the duty of a Minister to support, and act in accordance with, all decisions of the Executive Committee and Assembly". Of course, in the Northern Ireland connection, the matter goes further, because in Committee today we have heard something about the curious relationship between the First Minister and his deputy. I do not use the word "curious" in a pejorative sense. I accept that we are putting in place a constitutional creation, but it imposes on the two people mutual responsibilities—and, indeed, loyalties—which are explicit, or at least implicit, in the context of the Bill.
The question arises—I accept that it is a hypothetical question at the moment—how could those two sets of guidelines, one for Northern Ireland and one for Ministers in the United Kingdom, be reconcilable with the possibility of a United Kingdom Minister holding a place on the Northern Ireland Executive, or vice versa? The view of the official Opposition is that the two are completely incompatible.
We could end up with extraordinary anomalies. How could a Minister observe collective responsibility to both bodies? We could also have the extraordinary situation of a Minister ending up supervising his own actions because, under clause 21(3)(a) of the Bill, it is possible for a Member of the Northern Ireland Executive Committee to act as the agent for a Minister of the Crown of the United Kingdom. We could therefore have the very bizarre situation of a Minister of the United Kingdom giving a delegated agency task to himself in another guise.
This may appear to be somewhat esoteric, but it is not. I shall explain to the Minister and the Committee why I do not believe that it is. There is already ample evidence that, where one has devolved administrative structures—let alone devolved structures relating to assemblies and government—conflicts can arise.
1328 I have to tell the Minister that, only a very few years ago, I was sent up by a Government Department to a port on the north-east coast of England to pick up the debris of a prosecution that had been brought by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, England, against a Scottish trawlerman. In the course of the proceedings, it had become apparent that the directives under which he was acting, which had been placed upon him by the Scottish branch of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, differed markedly from those that were being operated in the port in Lincolnshire where he had landed his catch.
The result was a disaster for the Government Department that had brought the prosecution—perhaps rightly so, because it was castigated for the inconsistencies that existed. The fact remained that, because there was, at least, a doctrine of collective responsibility, the fall-out—to which I was not privy because I was there only in the role of advocate—could at least be contained within the Ministry, in the relations between the Scottish Minister, holding his collective responsibility and his responsibility to the House, and the English Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, with his responsibilities in relation to his own Department.
Even with the limited—but important—powers that will be devolved under the Bill, a fisherman coming out of Ardglass, fishing in the Irish sea and landing his catch at Fleetwood might easily encounter an identical problem if the rules were interpreted differently in Northern Ireland and in England. In those circumstances, it would be the clear duty of those holding Executive office in Northern Ireland and those who were Ministers of the Crown of the United Kingdom to resolve that difficulty; and its resolution, in terms of collective responsibility, is incompatible with one person operating in both bodies at once.
When the issue was discussed in the House of Lords, in the Welsh context, it was suggested that there was no reason why the Bill should not go ahead, because, if the Prime Minister wanted to appoint as a Minister of the Crown a person who happened to be a Member of the Welsh Assembly, he should not be fettered from doing so, and vice versa. However, it is an anomaly which creates its own problems from the moment that it comes into being. The Committee should—and I hope that the Minister will—have the courage to accept that, in this context, and especially in the Northern Ireland context in view of the unusual relationships that will exist within the structure of the Northern Ireland Assembly, that anomaly should be prevented from the outset.

§ Mr. Worthington
Amendment No. 76, which is in the name of the hon. Member for North Antrim (Rev. Ian Paisley), follows a familiar theme of the Ulster Democratic Unionist party. Basically, we are simply following the agreement. Strand 1 of the agreement states: The Ministers will constitute an Executive Committee, which will be convened, and presided over, by the First Minister and Deputy First Minister. We feel that this clause and the way in which it is drafted is consistent with the agreement's intentions. All we are doing is honouring the agreement. I do not want to go any further, because I would simply repeat what has been said many times tonight.
1329 8.30 pm
Similarly, as the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) has recognised, this other issue is a hardy perennial that has come up over and again during the devolutionary year. I do not want to repeat points that were made in debates on the Scotland and Government of Wales Bills, but we take the same position on this as on those other Bills.
If the right hon. Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble) were to take up a ministerial post, we would not want to exclude him from the Executive Committee, but the argument of the hon. Member for Beaconsfield is even more exotic than anything else that has come out tonight. In fact, it is not a hardy perennial, but the most tropical and fragile of plants. We take the same position on this as on the devolutionary Bills on Scotland and Wales. We do not think that we should deal with what are fanciful situations that will not occur.
Northern Ireland Ministers must be Members of the Assembly. It is unlikely—I put it no more strongly—that Members of the Assembly will be Ministers of the Crown, but we do not feel that it is necessary to block that possibility.

§ Mr. Peter Robinson
I am at a loss to understand the reasoning of the Minister, who refers to paragraph 17 of the agreement to support his contention that there should be joint chairmen. Paragraph 17 says: The Ministers will constitute an Executive Committee, which will be convened, and presided over, by the First Minister and Deputy First Minister. Clearly, it does not say that they should act jointly, act together or act at the one time. There is no reason to believe that they have to be either joint chairmen or that they have to act together at the same moment in chairing a meeting. The Minister is reading too much into the agreement. Nothing in the agreement is inconsistent with the amendment that has been tabled in my name.
I ask the Minister to look at the matter again. I think that he has gone beyond the agreement unnecessarily and I hope that he will report back at a later stage. In the meantime, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.