MINUTES OF EVIDENCE AND
MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS FOR 12 JANUARY 2000

Printed in support of Report 1/99 (Committee for Finance and Personnel)
Report on the Financial Assistance to Political Parties Bill (NIA Bill 3/99).

Financial Assistance to Political Parities Bill (NIA Bill 3/99)

1. Finance and Personnel - Minutes of Evidence given before the Committee for Finance and Personnel on 12 January 2000 [Part 1., in support of Report 1/99 (Committee for Finance and Personnel) Report on the Financial Assistance to Political Parties Bill (NIA Bill 3/99)] to be printed [Francie Molloy, Chairman].

2. Minutes of Proceedings of the Committee for Finance and Personnel for 12 January 2000 [Part 2., in support of Report 1/99 (Committee for Finance and Personnel) Report on the Financial Assistance to Political Parties Bill (NIA Bill 3/99)] to be printed [Francie Molloy, Chairman].

Ordered by the Committee to be printed
Wednesday, 19 January 2000

PART 1.

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE RELATING TO
THE FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE TO
POLITICAL PARTIES BILL (NIA BILL 3/99)

1. The Committee for Finance and Personnel met on 12 January 2000 in Parliament Buildings, Stormont, Belfast to take oral evidence on the Financial Assistance to Political Parties Bill (NIA Bill 3/99).

2. The following Members attended the meeting:Mr Francie Molloy (Chair)

• Mr James Leslie (Deputy Chair)
• Mr William Bell
• Mr Seamus Close
• Mr John Dallat
• Mr Oliver Gibson
• Mr Gardiner Kane
• Mr Donovan McCelland
• Mr Alex Maskey
• Mr Peter Weir
  

3. The following witnesses were present to give evidence on behalf of the Northern Ireland Assembly Commission:

• Mr John Fee MLA, sponsor of the Bill;
• Mr Tom Evans, Clerk to the NI Assembly Commission;
• Mr Dennis Millar, Director of Finance and Personnel, NI Assembly;
• Mr Gerry Cosgrave, Head of Administration, NI Assembly;
• Mr Percy Johnston, Legal Advisor, NI Assembly, and
• Mr Jim Hamilton, Department of Finance and Personnel,

(Mr Francie Molloy in the Chair)

Witnesses:
Mr John Fee MLA (NI Assembly Commission);
Mr Tom Evans
(Clerk to the NI Assembly Commission);
Mr D Millar
(Director of Finance and Personnel, NI Assembly);
Mr Gerry Cosgrave
(Head of Administration, NI Assembly);
Mr Percy Johnston (Legal Advisor, NI Assembly); and
Mr Jim Hamilton
(Department of Finance and Personnel).

The Chairman:
Good afternoon, Mr Fee. I would like to welcome you and your legal adviser to this meeting. This is the first public meeting during which a Bill will be launched, and I invite Mr Fee, as sponsor of the Bill, to make his introductory remarks.
Mr Fee:
Thank you very much, Mr Chairman. Despite the fact that these Bills are quite short, they are actually quite complicated.
I would like to thank all of the people who have helped get us to this stage, Tom Evans, the Clerk to the Assembly Commission, Jim Hamilton from the Department of Finance and Personnel, who has been working very hard with the Office of Legislative Council to get the Bill drafted, Dennis Millar, the Director of Finance and Personnel with the Assembly and, I am sure you all know, Gerry Cosgrave, Head of Administration and our Accounting Officer. Percy Johnston, behind us, has been seconded to the Assembly to give legal advice and to help to ensure that the Bills are competent. I believe they are, and I have made that declaration.

FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE
TO POLITICAL PARTIES BILL
(NIA BILL 3/99)

The Chairman:
We shall now move on to the next Bill with Mr Fee giving a short briefing.
Mr Fee:
It will be brief this time. The Bill is reasonably straightforward. As members will have seen from the explanatory and financial memorandum which accompanies the Bill, the authority to pay what is commonly known as "party allowance", or "short money" in House of Commons terms, fell with devolution. The Northern Ireland Act 1998 does not confer any authority on the Assembly Commission to give financial assistance to parties. The purpose of this Bill, therefore, is to provide such authority. It will allow the Assembly Commission to begin paying party allowances immediately the Bill is passed.

Clause 2 of the Bill puts an onus on the Assembly Commission to prepare, and lay before the Assembly, a scheme for making payments to political parties. The clause sets out examples of the terms which a new scheme may include, and it should be noted that the Bill requires that a new scheme be devised as soon as is practicable. I understand that work has already begun on developing a new scheme and that it will be presented when it has reached the appropriate stage.

However, in the absence of an agreed new scheme, this Bill provides for the existing arrangements, put in place by the Secretary of State, to continue in force with effect from the date of devolution, 1 December 1999. I understand that while financial arrangements were made with some parties for December, others did not get any support during December. The effect of this Bill would be to backdate the financial assistance to the beginning of December 1999.

The existing arrangements will only remain in operation until, at the very latest, 31 March 2000 - the end of the financial year. After that there is no provision for financial assistance to parties unless a new scheme is agreed in the interim. Therefore, the clause effectively puts a time limit on when the Commission should come back and get a party allowance scheme agreed with the Assembly. This is recognised as being an essential part of the support for political parties going about their work in the Assembly. All that the Bill does is extend the existing provisions for another number of weeks and put an immediate onus on the Commission to devise a new scheme and have it agreed. I think that the devil will be in the new scheme rather than in this Bill.

The Chairman:
Thank you. Mr Dallat, have you any questions?

Mr Dallat:
No, I do not think so.

The Chairman:
Mr Close?

Mr Close:
No, the devil is in the detail.

Mr Bell:
No.

Mr Leslie:
Yes. I notice that "political parties" is not a defined term, and I can think of a very good reason for its not being so. However, I would be interested to know what the draftsman's thinking was in not defining the term. I think that I am right in saying that the practice in the Assembly so far has been for the Speaker to decide what constitutes a political party. That may be a reasonable practice as long as members are aware that that is the default mechanism.

Mr Millar:
As has been said, it is very difficult to define a political party, and the devil will be in the detail.

The detail of the scheme will set out what a political party should be, and everyone will be given an opportunity to comment on whether it is a proper definition. It will be in the scheme.

Mr Leslie:
Will the Commission make the scheme?

Mr Millar:
The Commission will make the scheme.

Mr Leslie:
So the argument as to what constitutes a political party will be conducted in those circumstances by the Commission?

Mr Fee:
No, it will have to come back to the Assembly. We have to define it; it has not been properly defined yet, and this Bill puts the onus on the Commission to try to at least draft some definition or some way of handling that. It was deliberately not defined, but it will have to be, and then that definition, I assume, will have to be agreed with the Committee and the Assembly.

Mr Maskey:
The procedures in here have been carried out based on what happened at the election. Parties are treated on the basis of their electoral mandate, and no party can chop or change to get extra positions. So the principle has already been established. It is well established for d'Hondt and all the rest, so what I am saying is that this principle runs through nearly everything.

Mr Fee:
No. For the purposes of the financial support to parties, all of the arrangements presently in place, were put in place by the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State did, on at least one occasion - if not on more than one occasion - recognise parties which had not fought the election and made provision for financial assistance to be given to such parties. The calculation was made both on the existence of the party - £20,000 per party - and the total number of its members. The point at which they joined the party was then a matter at issue, with one party claiming that, at the election, they had so many members or whatever. We recognise that the existing scheme is deeply flawed, but I do not believe that we should be going into the detail of that here. In this Bill we are asking permission to extend it for two months but for the Commission to come back to you with a properly thought out and properly costed scheme.

Mr Maskey:
You have just raised an interesting possible point of information. Bob McCartney's party got £x, and then Cedric Wilson came along and got another bag of money; that is an important issue which I will be raising with the Secretary of State.

Mr B Bell:
That is why I said you were wrong.

Mr Maskey:
That may be the case, but as regards all the functions of the Assembly to date, all proportions, all the figures relate to the point of election. Whatever the Secretary of State decided to do may or may not have been wise, but as far as I am concerned, the principle has been established and what affects us in here is dictated by the electorate.

The Chairman I thought that under Standing Orders two Members could constitute a party.

Mr Fee:
I think you are right, but the detail has on occasion got blurred by the Secretary of State's actions. While I do not believe that anybody has claimed anything that they are not entitled to, we do not currently have a coherent scheme for support for parties.

The Chairman:
It may be necessary to put something in the Bill about the number of members in a party. If we put through a Bill without provision for the number or the members of a party, will this come back as an issue at another time.

Mr Fee:
The scheme will come back. It is difficult as you know, Mr Chairman, to start changing the legislation, whereas the scheme that comes back can, relatively easily, be chopped and changed if the Assembly is not happy with it. It is not a piece of legislation.

This Bill places an onus on the Commission to do this within a very short time frame: by 31 March. I do not think you should try and put any detail into the actual legislation.

The Chairman:
Do you have any questions, Mr Gibson?

Mr Gibson:
None whatsoever, but I must say that I foresee difficulties in that I am not going to be able to run my own political party myself alone.

Mr Fee:
Mr Chairman, I have one comment on this Bill. We feel that it needs to be passed this month. The finance people are preparing all the cheques, the monies and the like, but they are not legally authorised to issue the monies unless this Bill is passed. Since this Bill does not immediately change anything I would like to ask you if you could, if your Committee is in agreement, see if we could get Assembly time to try to get it passed as soon as possible. Then the onus will immediately be on the Commission to get a proper scheme written.

Mr Gibson:
I imagine there will be consensus around the table to get this passed in order to keep the existing system alive. The onus would then be on somebody else.

Mr Maskey:
Do we know the total amount of money for the parties as it stands at the moment?
The Chairman:

It is £141,000.

Mr Millar:
That is what would be paid from 2 December up to the end of the financial year.

Mr Maskey:
How much would that amount to annually?

Mr Millar:
Annually it would be three times that: £420,000.

Mr Gibson:
Is that not a continuation of the existing system?

Mr Millar:
Yes.

The Chairman:
Thank you very much, Gentlemen.

The meeting finished at 4.46 pm.

PART 2.

MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS RELATING TO
THE FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE TO
POLITICAL PARTIES BILL (NIA BILL 3/99)

1. The Committee for Finance and Personnel met on 12 January 2000 to consider the Committee Stage of the Financial Assistance to Political Parties Bill (NIA Bill 3/99) under Standing Order 31.

2. The Committee ordered that the Minutes of Proceedings be printed in support of Report 2/99 (Committee for Finance and Personnel) on Wednesday, 19 January 2000.

COMMITTEE FOR FINANCE AND PERSONNEL

EXTRACT FROM MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS,
THIRD MEETING WEDNESDAY, 12 JANUARY 2000

Members Present:
Mr Francie Molloy (Chair)
Mr James Leslie (Deputy Chair)
Mr William Bell
Mr Seamus Close
Mr John Dallat Mr Oliver Gibson
Mr Gardiner Kane
Mr Donovan McCelland
Mr Alex Maskey
Mr Peter Weir

In Attendance:
Mr Martin Wilson (Committee Clerk)
Mr Peter Hughes (Assistant Committee Clerk)
Ms Sharon Bowman (Administrative Support)

The meeting opened at 2.00 pm in closed session.
The Committee went into open session.

7. Consider any Bills

7.1 Mr John Fee MLA, sponsoring member of the Allowances to Members of the Assembly and Office Holders Bill (NIA 2/99) and the Financial Assistance for Political Parties Bill (NIA 3/99) appeared before the Committee on behalf of the Northern Ireland Assembly Commission. He was supported by officials.

[7.2 Allowances to Members and Office Holders Bill (NIA 2/99)…]

7.3 Financial Assistance for Political Parties Bill (NIA 3/99).

7.3.1 Mr Fee made an opening statement and was questioned about the provisions of the Bill.

The meeting went into closed session.

7.3.2 Agreed: The Chairman put the following motion to the Committee. The Committee agreed that it should be adopted as read:

"The Committee considers that the provisions of the Financial Assistance for Political Parties Bill (NIA 3/99), as introduced, are sufficient to enable the Northern Ireland Assembly Commission to make provision for financial assistance to political parties for the purpose of assisting Members of the Assembly connected with such parties to perform their Assembly duties."

7.3.2 Agreed: The Committee agreed to issue the draft report on the Financial Assistance for Political Parties Bill (NIA 3/99) containing the adopted motion to the Northern Ireland Assembly.