Stormont facing mountain of European legislation, warns major think tank

Northern Ireland’s civil service is now faced with “major strain” because of the volume of European Union legislation it must examine to cope with the effects of the Windsor Framework, a major British think tank has warned.

Devolved UK administrations, including Stormont, have a workload that “is now the equivalent to that of the UK government, but they have far less capacity” to manage the volume of regulations and laws, the UK in a Changing Europe declared.

“These include not only administering the new border procedures, but keeping up with relevant changes in EU law which potentially apply in Northern Ireland, of which there are hundreds per quarter,” the think tank went on.

The UK government has now committed to giving the Northern Ireland Assembly advance notice of relevant EU legislative changes, which may take some of the load off the NI civil service, but Stormont “will have to conduct its own analysis of the changes”, it said.

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“Nevertheless, administering post-Brexit functions is likely to place a major strain on a civil service of about 22,300 – a number only marginally higher than at the time of the referendum,” it said.

The NI civil service has redeployed officials to Brexit-related work, but at the cost of other duties. However, it has not been able to recruit many extra staff since 2017 because of the lack of an Executive between 2017 to early 2020, and from 2022 to this February.

The number of officials stood just above 22,000 before the 2016 referendum, but fell by nearly 1,000 by 2020. They stood 1,000 above the 2016 numbers in 2022. However, hundreds of officials have retired in the past few months.

By contrast, the Scottish civil service has grown by 66 per cent, or 10,500 officials, since Brexit, though the increase has been prompted by non-Brexit-related devolution of new social security and tax powers to Edinburgh. The number in Wales has risen by 13 per cent.

Raising questions about environmental regulation, the think tank noted that the Office for Environmental Protection – which has responsibility for England and NI – must now focus on “a few big investigations a year” because of budget cuts, exacerbated by falling contributions from Stormont.

In its assessment, the think tank said it was “yet to be seen” how Stormont would handle its Windsor obligations and how the Stormont Brake – which gives MLAs the right to object to changes to EU rules being imposed on Northern Ireland – would work.

“That has the potential to mean repeated internal divisions in Northern Ireland on whether to diverge from the rest of the UK [by aligning with the European Union] or with the Republic [by rejecting alignment],” it said.

The brake can be invoked only by London, and not by Stormont, which means there “is potential for controversy”, while a departure by London from “tight” observance of the UK/EU law could lead to a new bout of EU/UK distrust.

However, a decision by London to reject a brake call by unionists could expose it as “falling well short” of the promises made by British prime minister Rishi Sunak that it would address Windsor’s “democratic deficit”, thus exacerbating Stormont instability, it said.