Debate contribution: Justice Bill: Extension of Committee Stage

Debate contribution by Mrs Naomi Long on 5 November 2024.

MLA

Mrs Naomi Long

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

5 November 2024

Type

Debate contribution (made as a minister)

Business

Committee Business

Heading

Justice Bill: Extension of Committee Stage

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4631546

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I want to speak on the motion to extend the Committee Stage of the Justice Bill to 27 March 2026. I fully appreciate how unusual it is for a Minister to speak on what is normally considered a routine motion such as this, but the circumstances are slightly unique for two reasons. First, the length of the extension sought is unprecedented, with the Committee seeking an 18-month period for the Committee Stage of a Bill — a Bill that currently has 30 substantive clauses. Secondly, Executive Office guidance states that, where an extension is contemplated, the Committee Clerk should consult the Department on the implications and the Department should, in turn, take the views of the legislative programme secretariat in TEO in relation to the effect on the legislative programme overall. In this case, that consultation did not happen, and, combined with the length of the extension sought, I think that there are, potentially, some profound implications to the Committee's proposal that I feel that I should share with Members as they go about making their decision. While the guidance provided by TEO is primarily for Bill teams, it was developed in consultation with the Assembly, is written to follow Standing Orders and promotes, I think, a collaborative and sensible approach of working together. I want to outline some of the concerns that I have, but I also want to acknowledge that, in a meeting that I had yesterday with the Chair and the Deputy Chair, I did receive some reassurance. That has been repeated by the Chair in the Chamber today, and I accept that progress is being made in that regard. Therefore, what I am setting out are the worst-case scenarios because I want Members to be aware of what the consequences of taking the full 18 months could be, although I accept that the Chair seems reasonably determined to ensure that that will not be necessary. First, I understand that the Committee considers that additional time is needed for effective scrutiny, particularly in light of the Mediahuis judgement. As Members will recall, I raised that in the Chamber and with Executive colleagues at the time due to its potential to impact on any legislation before the House. I believe that it is fundamentally wrong to suggest that one can retrospectively look at Hansard and Committee minutes and judge from that the degree to which Members have scrutinised any provisions. The truth is that there is a lot of discussion and debate. Meetings take place outside the formal sessions and the formal scrutiny. People will discuss it with colleagues and advisers and seek other information. It is wrong to suggest that the amount of time spent equals good scrutiny. One could spend a lot of time talking about an issue that one is entirely satisfied with from the outset. That is not scrutiny and is not efficient. You could equally spend much less time on something and feel that you have properly scrutinised it and are content with the outcome. There is a difficulty in the tracking of the amount of time spent with the quality of the work done. I think that we would all accept that there are serious issues arising from the judgement by making that one of the considerations. However, even in light of the judgement, an extension of this magnitude is excessive in this case. If granted, it could potentially have a significant impact on the Department's planned legislative programme for the remainder of the mandate, as there will be only one calendar year of Assembly business left from the end of the Committee Stage of this Bill and the end of all Assembly business before the next local elections in May 2027. I will look first at the impact of the extension on this Bill. Much of the Bill's content has already been widely consulted upon and debated at length via public consultation and a previous Committee. I accept entirely that this is a new Committee that will want to apprise itself of the detail, but it also has to be recognised that these provisions are brought forward, often, in response to High Court judgements, rulings of the courts and considerable policy development that has been taking place over many years. Other provisions have been required in response to court rulings, and, therefore, there is relatively little in the way of genuinely new policy involved. The policy development work of this is well established and has been well scrutinised, and the need for these clauses, therefore, has been well tested. Furthermore, many of these provisions are long overdue, having been delayed by two suspensions of these institutions and deferred in the previous mandate to narrow the focus of what was to be a mixed-content Bill and ended up being the Justice (Sexual Offences and Trafficking Victims) Bill. Further delay in those clauses may leave the Department at ongoing risk of legal challenge and leaves the legislation in this jurisdiction lagging behind the rest of these islands. A number of organisations have already raised their concerns with me around what the extension to the Committee Stage of the Bill might mean for provisions around, for example, child bail and remand. The Chair, rightly, indicated the complexities of child bail and remand and the interplay between Departments, but those, with respect, are matters of implementation, not matters of legislation. It is already a presumption in common law that there is a presumption of bail for children, and it is already accepted that we should put the current arrangements on a legislative footing. That has been the accepted position of the Committee and the Department for some time. It is also the accepted position of those organisations that work in this area. It does not, crucially, remove the ability where housing or suitable accommodation is not available. It does not remove flexibility or judicial discretion in being able to, for example, remand a child in custody where that is the safest option. Those, with respect, are matters of implementation. The Bill is about the matter of principle that the first option considered by the judiciary should be bail. If we do not put this on a statutory footing, there is no imperative for other Departments to step forward and look at issues around accommodation, safe places for children to go and alternative provision to placing people in custody where that may prove to be unnecessary. For this Bill, we need to scrutinise the legislation, but we do not and should not, at this stage, engage in scrutinising the implementation, because that is a separate matter that will come back to the Committee after the Bill has been passed. The issues around that have already been widely debated. Members will be concerned, as am I, that a Committee Stage extension will extend further the period during which the use of live links in the justice system is reliant on emergency provisions intended for the coronavirus pandemic. That is something that I want to see brought to an end expeditiously. It is important, in that context, that we can move forward as quickly as possible with this legislation so that those emergency provisions can be set aside.

I will turn now to the wider impacts of granting an extension to the Justice Bill's Committee Stage. It remains my intention to introduce two further pieces of legislation in this mandate: a sentencing Bill and a victims Bill. In simple terms, were there to be a similar extension of Committee Stage for the sentencing Bill — the next Bill in my programme, due for introduction next autumn — which is likely to be more complex in policy terms than the Justice Bill, that Bill would fall before the Committee had completed its scrutiny of it. The consequences for the victims Bill are even more stark. The sentencing Bill will contain important and much-sought-after provisions, including provisions to encourage the disclosure of the location of victims' remains, to be known as "Charlotte's law"; to increase maximum penalties for offences of causing death by dangerous driving; to create a new offence of assaulting those providing a service to the public or performing a public duty; and to introduce a statutory aggravator model to modernise the law relating to hate crime. There is huge public and political interest, including from Members, in seeing those matters progressed as a matter of urgency. The victims Bill that I intend to introduce after the sentencing Bill is required in order to place the role of the Commissioner for Victims of Crime on a statutory footing, which I know that a number of Members are particularly keen to see happen so that she can better do the work that she is already fully engaged in of representing victims in the justice system and improving their experience of that system. The Bill is also required in order to deliver additional measures to improve support for victims and witnesses of crime and additional elements of the Gillen and Marrinan reviews. The loss of either or both of those Bills would have a significant impact not only on the efficiency and effectiveness of the justice system but on the public, which I know that no one in the House wishes to see. It would also have a negative impact on public perceptions of this legislature's ability to deliver on the public's priorities. I sought in my legislative programme to ensure minimum overlap between Committee Stages of successive Bills, as that has been the preference of Committees to date. With an extension of this duration, however, that would be impossible to achieve without losing both subsequent Bills. I thank the Committee Chair for giving a clear undertaking of the Committee's intention not to stack Bills end to end but rather to allow them to progress in parallel where that is required in order for progress to be made. Finally, on the proportionality of the proposed extension, I will compare the Bill with previous Department of Justice primary legislative vehicles. I have to say that I found that the previous Committee — I know that there are Members who were members of that Committee — did its work thoroughly and diligently. Any suggestion to the contrary does not reflect the input that the Committee had on the shape or content of Bills. Many of the issues that the previous Committee raised and, indeed, amendments that it tabled at Consideration Stage have proven to be critical to making better provision for victims of, for example, domestic abuse and stalking by ensuring that there is front-line training for various criminal justice organisations. It is therefore important that we recognise that the previous Committee, despite the narrative that seems to be developing, worked really effectively in its scrutiny role. Its approach was not slapdash. It did not rush the work. Rather, it did the work thoroughly and competently. The fact that things are overturned at judicial review does not always mean that people have not done their job as they ought to have done it. Although every Bill is different, the Domestic Abuse and Civil Proceedings Act 2021, which was delivered during the previous mandate, was similar in size to the Justice Bill that is before the Assembly now, and it was considerably more complex. The Committee Stage of that Bill ran from 29 April 2020 until 15 October 2020, which was a period of five and a half months that spanned the summer recess. Even the largest mixed-content Bill that my Department has progressed since the devolution of justice powers in 2010 — it became the Justice Act 2015, and it contained 107 sections and had nine schedules to it — had a Committee Stage that lasted only nine months, including the summer and Christmas recesses. The proposed 18-month Committee Stage is therefore exceptionally long, even by the standards of previous complex legislation that was thoroughly but expeditiously scrutinised. It is important that a balance be struck. I will talk a little about the amendments, because that has been a theme of the debate. Consideration Stage is the natural point at which a Committee or a Department proposes amendments to a Bill.

That is its purpose, and then there is a Further Consideration Stage at which those amendments can be refined. To be clear, there is nothing unusual about amending a Bill at Consideration Stage; it is, in fact, the Committee's only opportunity to amend the legislation. Therefore, the idea that it is in some way unusual or inappropriate not to have those amendments in hand now is a dangerous precedent to set because it also suggests that, if the Committee proposes amendments later in the process, it is being rushed or ill considered in its approach, and I would disagree strongly with that view.

The amendments in this case are unusual only in the fact that they will all be with the Committee by the end of the calendar year. As my colleague has indicated, the first set of those amendments is already with the Committee. A second set is making its way to the Committee, and the remaining sets will be with them by the end of the calendar year. It is not normal for amendments to be shared that far in advance. They are normally published, in line with the guidance, at Consideration Stage. The Department has gone out of its way to ensure, because we know that the amendments are anticipated and that the Committee would like to scrutinise them, that we will give the extra time and have, therefore, been able to facilitate that. Therefore, far from it being extraordinary that we are amending the Bill, it is extraordinary that we are sharing the amendments so early in the process. I very much welcome the Committee's commitment to properly scrutinising the Justice Bill. It is not just the statutory function of Committees and the House, but it assists me and my officials. I have no difficulty with an extension being sought to allow sufficient time to complete due diligence, but the extension needs to be proportionate, and, in my view, 18 months is excessive. On the ability to scrutinise without sight of all the clauses, as I have said on many occasions, the Bill is wide in scope, in that there are many elements to it, but each of those elements is discrete. For example, biometrics does not impact child bail and remand and so on. It is entirely possible, given the content of the Bill, for the Committee to proceed to detailed consideration of the clauses that are already in its gift at this point in time without any knock-on impact on the clauses that we are now sharing with the Committee at an early stage, which it can then scrutinise. The clauses do not impact on each other because of the nature of a mixed content Bill. There is no need for the complete Bill to be there unlike, for example, the Domestic Abuse and Civil Proceedings Act 2021, where the intimate connections between the parts of the Bill would have made such an approach impossible. This Bill is a different vehicle and method, and, therefore, there is more flexibility for the Committee to look at things ahead of the provision of other clauses. If people wish to proceed on this basis and the House agrees to an 18-month extension, I will seek firm reassurance from the Committee that it will, nevertheless, proceed expeditiously with scrutiny to avoid the full 18-month extension being required before returning to the House for the remaining stages. My officials remain available to assist the work of the Committee as swiftly as is practical. I would also welcome the assurance that the remainder of the Department's legislative programme will not be placed at risk. Finally, I will mention the two issues that have been raised again. The first is about Keeling schedules. I have explained that there is no automated ability to produce Keeling schedules. We have taken further views from First Legislative Counsel. They said that, if Keeling schedules were to be required for each Bill, it would be additional work for them that would require additional resources and could not be dealt with. I have exhausted my ability to take the issue forward, but I encourage the Committee Chair and the Committee in general to speak to First Legislative Counsel to understand what is involved in the production of the Keeling schedules and why it is not a matter that my Department would naturally take forward and why, they believe, it is not required.

I am happy to give way.

No and no. The issue of Keeling schedules should now be pursued through First Legislative Counsel, because using my Department as an intermediary in the argument has been exhausted. There is nothing that I can add on that. It is not for my Department to do. The other issue is the amendments on biometrics. I understand that they are many pages long, but, despite what has been suggested, they are about providing additional clarity. They are not substantive changes. They were worked through with the PSNI to ensure that clarity and precision were there. It was important that we did that. The Committee will have an opportunity to look at the clauses, which it already has, and at the amendments that have been provided. There is no delay in that regard. With regard to the Department's delays, there is, undoubtedly, a pressure on the House. When we sit for five out of 10 years, there is a backlog of work that needs to be done. The public would find it odd if, having not been in the Chamber for the two years prior to this, we were not willing to be in the Chamber as often and for as long as is required to clear that backlog. They have expectations of us as their public representatives to put their concerns first. Many of the issues that I am trying to address have been before the House for a considerable time. Let me give the Member an example that was raised by his colleague: driving under the influence and the cases in which doing so causes death or serious injury. The family of Enda Dolan spoke out earlier this autumn on the 10th anniversary of Enda's death. Having appealed for changes to sentencing laws in this place and been unable to get that done because, for five of those 10 years, there was no Assembly and because, for the last three years when we sat, we had other Bills that had to progress, they have this opportunity to see delivery in the sentencing Bill. They are not minor issues. The issues around placing child bail and remand on a statutory footing date back to pre 2015, when I was not a Member of the House, yet I have read into the issues and the challenges in the time that has been afforded to me. I do not believe that it should be a case of more haste, less speed, but there is an appropriate level of scrutiny. It is vital that we do not allow perfection to become the enemy of the good. We need to ensure that legislation is properly scrutinised but accept that, even with the lengthiest scrutiny possible, there may be things that need to change, because we live in a world that changes. Things emerge; things evolve. That is not to say that what we have brought to the Committee has not been stress-tested and future-proofed — of course it has — but my officials cannot be held to account, nor can it be suggested that they have in any way been lacking in clarity, given that the legal system itself is an evolving creature and they have to respond to those evolutions. What is true today may not be true in five, six, seven years' time. That is the nature of the work. We need to accept that that is the case. I want to encourage the Cttee, and I thank the Chair and Deputy Chair for reassuring me that they want to do the work expeditiously. I remain absolutely committed to ensuring that my Department does all in its power to ensure that the commitments that we have made to bereaved families, victims of crime and the wider community are delivered within the mandate. By working with the Committee, we can achieve that on all our parts, but it requires proportionality. I encourage Members to reflect on the consequences of taking such long periods for scrutiny for the progress that we can make in the House and on the impact that that will have on their constituents.

3,453 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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