Jon Burrows says he makes 'no apologies' for using petition of concern to scupper age rise and questions the 'competence' of 'blundering' MLAs pushing for it

The UUP leader was speaking at Westminster’s Northern Ireland Affairs committee, in the wake of an acrimonius two-day debate on plans backed by Alliance, SDLP and Sinn Fein to change the age from 10 to 14 in most cases, and two 12 in cases of rape, manslaughter, and murder.

Mr Burrows and three of his seven other MLAs had put their names to a DUP petition of concern blocking that move, as had the TUV’s sole MLA (a petition needs 30 MLAs’ signatures to work).

Speaking before the NI Affairs Committee today, he said: “I do think the petition of concern has been overused and misused in the past.

"It shouldn’t be used frivolously or to avoid any accountability.

"It is an emergency brake that was part of the Good Friday Agreement.

"There are many things in the Good Friday Agreement that would not be purist democratic… the petition of concern was one of those.”

He restated his concerns about raising the age, and told MPs: “No matter how much I talked about the dangers of this, the people who are proposing it – SF, SDLP and Alliance – simply wouldn’t listen, and we were on the precipice of passing a law.

"I do not apologise for using a democratic level to protect the most vulnerable in our society form a piece of legislation that was deeply damaging.

“I used with great reservation the only option I had to protect victims in our society.”

Quizzed by SDLP MP Claire Hanna on whether deploying the petition caused “dysfunction” at Stormont, he replied: “I think what feeds into the lack of democratic legitimacy is a Stormont that legislates in a blundering way.

"I do have concerns about the level of overall competence of people whenever they are bringing legislation that is going to fundamentally do things that they haven’t actually thought through.”

The former policeman said he had given “specific scenarios” to the Assembly of problems which would arise with the law change during the debate on Monday and Tuesday nights.

“Whenever I walked out of the Assembly, a female approached me who was the victim of a sexual assault and a burglary by a 13-and-a-half-year-old suspect,” he said.

"Under the proposal that was put in front of me the police would not even be able to arrest that suspect.

"They would not be able to take forensic samples off them.

"They would simply say to the householder: that was not a crime.

"And I vowed to do anything I could to stop that.”

In the Assembly last night, the debate which had been adjourned on Monday night raged on.

During it, TUV man Timothy Gaston said: “I did a wee bit more reading this morning to see what the nationalist and republican parties and the Alliance Party had to say about the issue in their manifestos.

"I discovered that two parties – the SDLP and Sinn Fein – had nothing to say about raising the age of criminal responsibility.

"Where is the mandate from the people that they talk about, given that it was not even worth putting in their manifestos?”

He said Alliance had in fact included it, “buried away on page 23 of its 94-page manifesto”.

He went on to clash with Paula Bradshaw of the Alliance Party, in a continuation of the friction between the two which has marked her chairwomanship of the Executive Office Committee at Stormont.

Ms Bradshaw sought to explain the customs of the Assembly to him, saying “I know that you have not been here for a long time, Mr Gaston”.

Mr Gaston replied: “And there we have the condescending, sneering remarks from the chair of the Executive Office Committee.”

“Mr Gaston, I was not sneering,” she replied.

"You were sneering at the Alliance Party and at the procedures in the chamber, and I was simply correcting you.”

And Mr Gaston in turn said: “I will take that on board, chairperson. That is me put in my place, if only it were as easy to do that.

"You will have found over the past two years that it is not just as simple to disregard what I have to say when I am given the floor.”