Northern Ireland

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his opening points. On the hon. Gentleman’s question about changes to strands 1 to 3 of the Good Friday agreement, despite his opposition to my taking powers through Order in Council, the reason I was planning to do so is that I am concerned about running up against the deadline and making the changes in time. There will be a brief spill-over period after we come back in October before Parliament prorogues and then an equally brief time after Queen’s Speech—I do not yet know the date, but Members can imagine the timetable—before we reach 24 November. I was concerned about having enough scope to take through emergency legislation, but if that is what we have to do, we shall have to try. However, I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will acknowledge that we shall have to make changes in the strands to get all the parties together. There is no point in keeping our heads in the sand. The DUP has a mandate and has made it absolutely clear that it requires changes, and I acknowledge that. The Government stand ready to make those changes once we can achieve agreement on them, and that will require legislation. As I said, I would have preferred to have done that a little more easily through an Order in Council, on which I would have consulted widely and sought agreement, but obviously separate primary legislation will be necessary. Let us hope that, given the timetable, we can make things dovetail. On standing orders, the Secretary of State—in other words myself—will have responsibility for drawing them up, as happened last time. We want to consult all the parties about them in detail, especially the Northern Ireland parties that will be in pole position, to try to reach agreement. The Assembly can of course amend the standing orders, as it can confirm or reject my nomination of Eileen Bell as the Speaker; the question of any deputies to be appointed will also be provided for in the Bill. I do not envisage any new status for north-south co-operation during this period, but we will, of course, continue to do what we have been doing energetically for the past year and indeed before to gain everyone’s support for co-operation on the economy and a range of other matters. We will discuss the possible shape of additional north-south co-operation, but we do not want to get into the business of pre-empting that. We want the Assembly and the institutions restored, and we want north-south co-operation to proceed on basis that it has successfully done so recently. Obviously, an order will be introduced fairly soon on water charges, and I will want to take into account everything that the Assembly might want to say about that, particularly views that command cross-community support in the Assembly and that address the public expenditure consequences of adopting a different approach. Of course, if the Assembly voted unanimously to reject water charges, I would have to take account of that, but I would want to know where we would find the £200 million or so of extra public expenditure generated by those water charges and where we would get the finance to invest in Northern Ireland’s decaying sewerage and water system. Finding those answers would be the responsibility of anyone who addresses the issue in the Assembly.