Mr. Daniel Holder:

It seems to be ideological. To use the Deputy's example of the anti-poverty strategy, four of the five parties in the Northern Ireland Executive to various levels welcomed the judicial review that found it acted unlawfully in not adopting it. Only the DUP opposed it. In the engagements we had on that, the objection of the DUP seemed to be that the anti-poverty strategy is specified in the St. Andrews Agreement and the legislation as a strategy to tackle poverty on the basis of objective need. There is far more objective need among the Catholic nationalist community, where levels of poverty are far higher than among the Protestant unionist community by whichever measure one wishes to take. Area-based measures may involve more resources rightly going to people on the basis of objective need.

If we want to instead have a system where resources are allocated on the basis of clientelism or sectarian parity, then a system rightly focusing on objective need is not one people will subscribe to. The objective need issue was the particular barrier in respect of the anti-poverty strategy. It is the Stormont House Agreement the UK has reneged on rather than the anti-poverty strategy.

It is right that we look at the bill of rights as a safeguard over power-sharing in the same way a constitution is in almost every other jurisdiction. The architects of the Good Friday Agreement had objective rights-based safeguards in mind. There are many different models around the world. Some countries have guardian councils that veto laws on the basis of ultra-conservative religious moral views. I do not think that is what the architects of the Good Friday Agreement had in mind. However, that is ultimately what we have ended up with because we have a situation where the St. Andrews veto is used to veto a consultation on same-sex marriage equality, to block provisions relating to women's reproductive rights, and to block minoritised language rights for the Irish-speaking community. We have ended up with a system of political vetoes that amplifies the power of the opponents of equality in the sense that even with a majority on the Executive and in the Assembly, and a legal obligation in the case of the anti-poverty strategy, a particular commitment cannot be got over the line.

The bill of rights was meant to constrain power. We have given evidence to the bill of rights committee where we went into some detail about things that could have been prevented. One obvious example is the Líofa decision, which was instrumental in the collapse of Stormont. That collapse was not just about the renewable heat incentive scheme, but a much broader pattern of non-implementation and obstruction of rights-based commitments. There is no freestanding right at present to non-discrimination on the basis of language anywhere outside where it is parasitic to ECHR rights through the Human Rights Act, but a case would have been pretty straightforward on the grounds that a bill of rights would have a freestanding right to non-discrimination against Irish speakers. It would have been pretty easy to challenge that decision. The gay blood ban introduced by a DUP Minister is another example. Again, there were attempts to judicially review that, but a bill of rights being in place would have made that type of policymaking much easier to challenge.

We saw a re-emergence, especially in north Belfast, of patterns of gerrymandering in housing provision. There was one in the Department for Social Development, again, under a DUP Minister. There were particular projects, such as Building Successful Communities, a resourcing project, in which the criteria for where new houses would be built seemed a little odd. It did not include objective housing need, which is what you would expect things to be based on. It included areas with a high number of vacant properties or areas that were in proximity to areas of housing need, i.e. on the other side of the peace line. At the same time, there were objections to houses being built in particular areas on the grounds there had to be community consensus before houses were built. This was in the context of "you can't build houses there because Catholics will live in them", which is where much higher objective housing need is, and until there is community consensus.

In the anti-racism context, imagine if the most objective needs for housing somewhere in England are among an ethnic minority population, yet there are objections to housing being built on the basis of objective need and an idea that those houses cannot be built until white people agree. That kind of thing, and we have documented this, was happening. That would never have got past the right to housing in a bill of rights, which is not about the myth of the state having to provide every single person with a house. That is not it. It is about preventing extreme actions by Ministers and extreme legislative acts that interfere with the right to housing. That could not have happened, and could have been easily challenged, if a bill of rights was in place.