Northern Ireland Troubles Bill (Programme) (No.2)

Alex Burghart Excerpts

Monday 19th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

I promise not to detain the House for more than a few minutes, but I think it is important to put on record the Opposition’s unhappiness with how Committee stage is being handled. Although we of course welcome a Committee of the whole House, which allows hon. Members from Northern Irish parties to contribute, the amount of time set aside is wholly inadequate for the task. This is one of the most complex and controversial pieces of legislation that the House will debate during this Parliament. It is a 98-clause Bill to which over 300 amendments—including, I think, 144 Government amendments—have been tabled, and the amendment paper is now longer than the legislation itself.

The consequence of the scheduling is that this House will have very little time to spend on detailed scrutiny, or indeed on detailed discussion of the amendments tabled. Most concerningly, the programme motion makes it clear that we will have only about an hour for Report, and that hour will almost certainly be entirely ridden over by overrun.

[Gavin Robinson (Belfast East) (DUP)]

I thank the shadow Secretary of State for making those points, and for highlighting the lack of opportunity for this House to properly and thoroughly scrutinise this legislation today or tomorrow. I lament the fact that this democratic Chamber will have much less of an opportunity to scrutinise the Bill than the House of Lords does. Once the shadow Secretary of State concludes his remarks, we do not need scores of Members to make the same point, because that would eat into our scrutiny time.

[Alex Burghart]

I entirely agree with the right hon. Member.

It looks as though we will get no Report stage at all. The idea that there is not time available to the House to debate this Bill properly is laughable. On Wednesday the House is confining itself to the Church Appointments (Repeal of Discriminatory Provision) Bill. On Thursday we have a general debate. This House will not get to vote on any of the Government’s 144 amendments directly, or on any of the Government’s 98 clauses individually.

The new Administration have done one good thing here, for which they should take credit: they have rolled the remedial order into this legislation. We strongly support that. It is something that those on the Conservative Benches have been calling for throughout the progress of the Bill, but we think that, as the right hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) said during the carry-over debate, it would have been far better for the Government to have adopted their own amendments and created a new Bill, and brought that to Second Reading. It would have presented a far more coherent picture of what the Government are now up to. The extremely messy way in which this legislation has evolved means that that would have presented the House with a clearer picture of what was going on, and there could have been greater time to consider the new Bill in its entirety.

As it is, and as the right hon. Member for Belfast East has pointed out, the main scrutiny will have to be done by the upper House. Although their lordships excel at such work, this practice is becoming far too common.