Professor Kieran McEvoy:

On the point made about former police officers, the Royal Ulster Constabulary George Cross Foundation, which represents former RUC officers, has come out strongly against it. So there is a diversity of views among the people who have served in the security forces, which is not often represented in the ways in which British Ministers speak.

On one point that Mr. Holder made, having studied and work on this for long time, one of the things that becomes clear is that the fear that drives this Bill is precisely about a judge or a police officer doing his or her job properly using his or her respective powers. It is where people have proper legal powers and do their jobs properly in terms of investigating the past via an inquest, the office of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland or, indeed, the work of Jon Boutcher. Good people with proper powers, proper police powers, proper investigative powers and proper powers of inquest are the problem. That is why I had a meeting with a senior official in the Northern Ireland Office on the evening that the Bill came out. I get on very well with this particular individual but I said to him that it looked to me as though what the office had done here was simply to do a search, find and replace for the word "investigation" with the word "review". There is a 2018 version of the Bill that was produced to implement the Stormont House Agreement. I asked him whether that is what had been done and if the office literally had done a search, find and replace throughout the Bill, and right down the spine of the Bill and every time. In the previous version of the Bill there is a lot of discussion around Article 2 compliant investigations being independent, effective and so on. All instances of the word "investigation" have been replaced with "review". It does exactly what it says on the tin and, frustratingly, there was a workable solution where all of this could have been done.