Northern Ireland (Ministers, Elections and Petitions of Concern) Bill (First sitting)

Stephen Farry Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 29th June 2021 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

If there is time at the end, but I want to see if we can get everybody in.

[Stephen Farry (North Down) (Alliance)]

Q Good morning, and it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. As a strong advocate for reform of petitions of concern, I slightly wanted to play devil’s advocate in this scrutiny process on the Bill. Do both witnesses feel that the measures are in some ways too cumbersome, given the potential 16-day window in some circumstances between a petition being tabled and an actual vote? How will that work, particularly in things such as the Committee stage of a piece of legislation? Will that become a straitjacket for the Assembly? Are there alternative ways in which the same outcomes around petitions of concern could be achieved, rather than what is in the Bill? Is there a risk of parties somehow gaming the system by doing multiple petitions of concern on more or less the same item, time after time, which further delays reforms going through?

Professor Tonge: Briefly on that, the obvious solution to your last point would be to restrict the number of times any particular party can table a petition of concern. As I say, I do not think they will be key players anyway throughout the life of the next Assembly, or any Assemblies thereafter, because they have had their day. The obvious solution is simply to limit the number of times a POC can be played. There has been talk of limiting petitions of concern to certain types of legislation—I do not think that is a runner because it would very hard to define. However, why not only allow a party one or two opportunities to table a petition of concern during the lifetime of an Assembly? That would be a logical solution, so that only in extremis could any party play the veto card.

Daniel Holder: I think the risk of gaming the system is there, given what we have heard to date, and it would be helpful if that was constrained to an extent. At the same time, the time available will be helpful to allow the special procedure committee to sit and scrutinise a measure at that stage. Yes, certainly we would encourage a discussion on the broader reform of the provisions, including the designation provisions that have become a very crude instrument. Although they are termed as cross-community voting, they are of course not linked to any indicator of community background as such, but to Unionist or nationalist traditional political affiliation.

[Stephen Farry]

And the petitioners have the option of simply reconfirming—

[The Chair]

Sorry, Mr Farry. We are really running out of time. I am going to move to Colum Eastwood, so that every Member who has indicated that they wish to ask a question will have had the opportunity to do so.