Social Development Committee Agrees Way Forward on Inquiry

The Assembly Committee for Social Development met today to discuss the Minister for Social Development’s decision not to release the unredacted fact-finding report into the DSD Special Adviser, Stephen Brimstone.

Last week the Committee wrote to the Minister proposing that the Chair of the Committee, Mr Alex Maskey MLA, and the Minister meet to discuss a possible way forward through arbitration, facilitated by a High Court judge. However, the Minister responded that, while he was happy to meet the Chair, he could not agree to this proposal. The Chair of the Committee therefore decided that such a meeting would have little or no merit.

Speaking after today’s meeting, the Committee Chairperson Alex Maskey MLA said: “This has been a long and deeply frustrating process of engagement with the former Minister and, more recently, the current Minister to obtain a report which the Committee believes it is legally entitled to.

“The Committee recognises that the current Minister was not involved in any way in the alleged actions of the former Minister or Special Adviser. However, in the interests of transparency, the Committee calls on the Minister to publish the full unredacted fact-finding report; to do otherwise is to hold the Assembly in contempt. 

Mr Maskey continued: “Committee members are understandably angry at the refusal of the Minister to even release the full unredacted report to an independent arbitrator for consideration. They are however content that the Committee has a significant amount of evidence, including the unredacted sections of the fact-finding report. This will allow Members to draw their own, and much wider conclusions, based on the terms of reference for this phase of their inquiry.

Mr Maskey concluded: “Therefore, based on the extensive written and oral evidencethe Committee has accumulated over several months on the inquiry, and in the interests of bringing it to a conclusion, the Committee has decided to move quickly to agreeing and publishing its own report.”

ENDS

The Clerk of the Social Development Committee is:

Dr. Kevin Pelan
Northern Ireland Assembly
Phone: 028 90 521864
Mobile: 07917881639
Email: kevin.pelan@niassembly.gov.uk