My right hon. Friend makes an interesting point. A very good illustration that proves his point concerns welfare reform. We were faced with a difficult situation in Northern Ireland following welfare cuts and changes to welfare benefits. The then Minister, Nelson McCausland, negotiated mitigations that helped the situation in Northern Ireland, but generally it presented a difficult position for all the parties in Northern Ireland. The parties, including ours, took the hard decisions and brought them to the Assembly, but Sinn Féin refused to go along with it, and because of the make-up of the Assembly and the veto principle, it was able to block those decisions, and the institutions almost collapsed as a result. We had to have the Stormont House and fresh start negotiations to prevent the collapse of the Assembly.
As my right hon. Friend points out, Sinn Féin, in particular, refuses to take hard decisions and work within the parameters of a devolved legislature that has to set budgets and work within the block grant. That is part of the problem and one of the reasons we are now in this situation. Our party stands ready, as it did in December 2016 and at the time of the elections in March 2017, and as it has done every day since, to get back into government immediately, without any preconditions or red lines, to tackle the issues that matter to the people of Northern Ireland.
In any survey or poll conducted right across both communities, the issues that matter to people are those that matter to people everywhere: health spending, education, infrastructure, housing, the environment. These are the things people care about, and they want their politicians to be delivering on and dealing with them—and
so do we—which is why we are mystified, and why most people in Northern Ireland are bewildered, that Sinn Féin put narrow partisan political issues above dealing with these issues. When we proposed dealing with issues of concern to Sinn Féin in parallel with getting the institutions up and running and dealing with the big issues affecting all of us, and even suggested time limiting the Assembly to ensure there was no bad faith on our part, it was rejected out of hand.
Let us be very clear: devolution is our first option and our clear preference. We are not the barriers to devolution in Northern Ireland; nor, I believe, are other smaller parties such as the Ulster Unionists, the Social Democratic and Labour party and the Alliance party. It is very clear what is blocking devolution.
There is another point that we make over and over again, and it was strongly emphasised by the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), and he was absolutely right. Without prejudice to efforts to get devolution up and running, we do need decisions to be made. The same point was made by the hon. Member for Lewes.
It is the fact that there are no Ministers in place that is causing drift and putting Northern Ireland into limbo. That is why some decisions are not being made in the Department for the Economy, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for East Antrim referred. The problem is not the absence of an Executive per se, but the absence of Ministers. As the hon. Member for South West Wiltshire said, the situation cannot continue for much longer. The various decisions that need to be made by Ministers are basically about allocation and prioritisation. Civil servants cannot make those decisions, because they would just be making personal decisions. They are not accountable. We need to ensure that something is done, and that it is done in a relatively short space of time.