The reluctance is not a reluctance to see the National Crime Agency operate or make a due contribution to the fighting and the reducing of crime in Northern Ireland, and crime that reaches into or out of Northern Ireland and affects other territories. The hon. Gentleman mentioned SOCA. When SOCA was first proposed, his party and mine had reservations about it, but many of those reservations were concerned with whether it would mean the loss of the valuable work done by the Criminal Assets Bureau. We wondered whether level 1 crime would be dealt with by the PSNI and level 3 would be dealt with by SOCA, and whether criminals knew that if they kept their criminal activity within level 2, there would be no one to deal with it.
Many issues arose in relation to SOCA, not just the issue of whether UK policing would affect Northern Ireland. We were seriously worried, for instance, about SOCA’s role in relation to the role of MI5. The notion of what is classified as national security, and of what a Government treat as national security, seems to be something of a movable feast in terms of the level of crime operations that are deemed to be within MI5’s
sphere of influence. We were trying to clarify all those matters, and the same applies here. We need to know about any additional policing element.
The Bill with which we were originally presented provided for constabulary powers to be given to National Crime Agency officers in Northern Ireland, and we needed to know how they would be aligned with the constabulary powers of the PSNI. The Bill also provided for NCA special constables in Northern Ireland. I think that the hon. Gentleman would have been very surprised if, four and a half decades on from all the working and striving to get rid of the B-specials, nationalist parties did not question legislation providing for new special constables. Those are exactly the sort of provisions that people want to address in a sensible way.