Discretion in place of process: family employment and the DUP’s commissioned review…

The Democratic Unionist Party’s exposure over Jeffrey Donaldson is not only a matter of individual wrongdoing but also a failure of institutional process. Its employment of relatives, lawful but now disproportionately visible within the party, exemplifies a reliance on privately held knowledge where formal disclosure was needed, the same weakness implicated in the escalation failure the case has revealed. A leadership-commissioned review cannot yet answer for that record while its essential arrangements remain unpublished.

The controversy that has overtaken the DUP since Jeffrey Donaldson’s conviction is most accurately read as exposing a failure of institutional process that sits alongside, rather than in place of, his individual wrongdoing, and the practice among some of its elected representatives of employing relatives matters as evidence of that failure rather than as a wrong in itself. The appointments are lawful and declared. However, what they expose is a party that relied on the private holding of knowledge, where formal mechanisms of disclosure were required, and that reliance reportedly allowed knowledge held by individuals to remain outside formal party channels. It is also why a review commissioned by the party leadership cannot, without published terms, powers and reporting arrangements, answer the questions this case has raised.

Two legislatures moving in opposite directions

Westminster and Stormont have moved in opposite directions on the employment of relatives from public funds. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) prohibited members from engaging new ‘connected parties’ on 9 June 2017 while permitting existing appointments to continue, and the Commons register has thinned accordingly, from seventy-five such arrangements on the register of May 2024 to thirty-three by June 2026. Stormont has adopted no comparable prohibition. Its 2025 determination on office and staffing costs continues to allow a member to recover the cost of employing one connected person, provided the member declares the appointment together with the relative’s name, the connection and the nature of the work. Family employment, therefore, survives at Stormont as a practice sanctioned and publicly registered in outline, rather than as a diminishing inheritance.

Once common, now concentrated

The current public Assembly register records nine sitting members whose employment of a relative is declared under office-cost expenditure, and six of them sit for the DUP, a party holding twenty-five of the ninety seats. That distribution is not evidence of impropriety, since nothing on the register suggests any relative was unqualified or improperly paid. It shows instead that a lawful but structurally hazardous arrangement now survives disproportionately within one party.

Far from just a backbench residue, the pattern reaches the party leadership across both legislatures: Gavin Robinson’s Commons entry records his father as a part-time Office Manager; Michelle McIlveen’s Assembly entry records her brother as a Researcher. Several other DUP representatives, among them Paul Givan, Paul Frew, Trevor Clarke, Joanne Bunting and Harry Harvey, also employ relatives in similar roles.

This concentration is recent. The Assembly register of 2011 shows the same practice running across unionist and nationalist benches alike, with Sinn Féin, SDLP, Ulster Unionist and Alliance members employing relatives as readily as those of the DUP, and a 2022 freedom-of-information response records fourteen connected-person declarations by members elected, re-elected or co-opted since the March 2017 Assembly election, several by members who had since left the Assembly. The residue that remains is weighted towards the DUP because the other parties have largely abandoned the practice, not because it was ever peculiar to unionism, and an argument reaching for a distinctively unionist propensity would misread its own evidence.

The problem is not the appointment itself

The durable objection to family employment is structural, and it holds whatever the merit of any individual appointment. A relative working in a member’s office is the person best placed to observe irregularity in the member’s conduct and the least able to report it, and where the roles of employer, manager and family member converge on one household, the routes by which a member of staff might ordinarily carry a concern to someone independent simply close. An office staffed in this way loses the insider who might otherwise have served as a check, and it does so with unusually little external oversight.

From private knowledge to institutional failure

That structural weakness is the thread connecting family employment to the failures the Donaldson case has exposed. The party leader has accepted that current and former members held information about Donaldson’s conduct, which never reached the party’s officers, leaving the institution unable to act on it, and a former MP has described receiving an allegation in 2021 that a young woman had been exploited by Donaldson and relaying it to the then-leader. These accounts describe a failure of escalation rather than of knowledge, and family employment is the clearest institutional example of a setting in which disclosure may depend too heavily on individual discretion rather than on independent process.

Not every failure that has surfaced lies within the party’s reach, and an honest account must say as much. Separate reporting has raised questions about whether information or suspicion about Donaldson existed outside the DUP before the formal complaint of 2024, including within policing or safeguarding channels, and those questions cannot be answered by a party-commissioned review. Treating the DUP’s fitness to investigate as the whole of the matter would obscure a strand that no party review can examine.

Employment, conduct and public money

Eleanor Donaldson had been employed as his secretary since at least 2010, on a salary that the most recent parliamentary records place between £25,000 and £30,000 a year, and she faced a trial of the facts because she had been found unfit to stand trial. The jury found that she had done the acts alleged, including aiding and abetting her husband’s offending, without reaching the finding of guilt that a conviction requires. This establishes that the jury found she had done the acts alleged in relation to the offending; it does not establish that her employment in his office was the means by which anything was concealed, and the two claims should be kept apart.

The end of that employment illustrates the structural weakness more sharply than any question of concealment. When Donaldson’s offices were wound up after he had been charged, his wife received a redundancy payment from public funds, part of the £123,000 in staff redundancy payments that The Irish News reports were made during the winding-up period and that the IPSA administers as a contractual entitlement. The amount paid to her has not been disclosed, though the same report estimates it at around £20,000 based on her salary and length of service. Because the entitlement is calculated by reference to age, service and pay and takes no account of the recipient’s conduct, a relative whom a jury, in a trial of the facts, had found to have done the acts alleged as aiding and abetting the member’s offending qualified for a taxpayer-funded payment on the same terms as any other employee. The Ulster Unionist leader, Jon Burrows, has called for the sum to be disclosed and repaid and for the rules to be changed to prevent a recurrence. On this evidence, the public-money risk in employing a relative does not end with the working relationship but extends to the entitlements its ending triggers.

A review yet to prove its independence

The review now promised brings these strands to a single test the party has set for itself. Its premise is that the relevant information never reached its officers, and a review commissioned by the current leadership cannot command confidence unless it is plainly able to test an account that is central to the present leadership’s position. Until its terms of reference, panel, powers and reporting arrangements are published, it cannot operate as an independent assessment of the account already given by the party leadership. The party’s difficulty is that it appears to have let the private holding of knowledge stand in for any process that would have forced disclosure, and it cannot resolve that concern by commissioning a review whose essential arrangements remain unknown.

Sources: Reuters, ‘Northern Ireland’s Donaldson found guilty of child sex offences’, 22 June 2026. https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/jury-finds-northern-irelands-donaldson-guilty-historic-child-sex-offences-2026-06-22/; Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, policy on connected parties (RFI 2020-06-6). https://www.theipsa.org.uk/freedom-of-information/rfi-202006-6; Register of Members’ Financial Interests, House of Commons, 28 May 2024 (seventy-five family-employment declarations); TheyWorkForYou, House of Commons Register of Members’ Financial Interests, category 9: family members employed; https://www.theyworkforyou.com/interests/category?category_id=9&chamber=house-of-commons; Assembly Members (Office and Staffing Costs and Allowances) Determination (Northern Ireland) 2025. https://www.niassembly.gov.uk/your-mlas/members-salaries-and-expenses/determinations/assembly-members-office-and-staffing-costs-and-allowances-determination-northern-ireland-2025/; TheyWorkForYou, Northern Ireland Assembly Register of Interests: family members who benefit from Office Cost Expenditure. https://www.theyworkforyou.com/interests/category?category_id=53&chamber=northern-ireland-assembly; Northern Ireland Assembly, Register of Members’ Interests, 2011 (cross-party family employment); Northern Ireland Assembly, freedom-of-information response 29-22 (2022) (fourteen connected-person declarations since 2017); The Guardian, ‘Current and ex-DUP members knew of allegations about Jeffrey Donaldson, party says’, 29 June 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/29/dup-members-knew-allegations-jeffrey-donaldson-party-says; The Irish News, ‘Eleanor Donaldson given taxpayer-funded redundancy payment after being charged with aiding husband’s sex abuse’. https://www.irishnews.com/news/northern-ireland/eleanor-donaldson-given-taxpayer-funded-redundancy-payment-after-being-charged-with-aiding-husbands-sex-abuse-HDMFYXRIQJHLPGZXRJH7KQRHHM/