Former Northern Ireland Secretary Lord Mandelson has told MPs he has no regrets over his involvement in a contentious government process to deal with on-the-run republicans.

The Labour peer insisted he approached the fugitives issue in a "sensible, proportionate and principled way".

The politician was giving evidence to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee inquiry into a scheme formulated by the last Labour government at the request of Sinn Fein that saw about 200 letters sent to so-called on-the-runs (OTRs) assuring them they were not being actively pursued by the UK authorities.

The probe was triggered by the high-profile case of John Downey, who walked free from the Old Bailey earlier this year when his prosecution for the murders of four soldiers in the 1982 IRA Hyde Park bombing was halted by a judge when it emerged that he had been sent one of the letters in error.

Lord Mandelson was not Northern Ireland Secretary when the mistakes around the Downey case were made but he was in office when the process effectively started operating in 2000.

He told the committee he was satisfied how he had acted in trying to address the issue of on-the-runs.

"No, I do not have regret in trying to find a way through the problem of OTRs, which in my view I did in a sensible, proportionate and principled way," he said.

The peer said that in his time the way letters were sent was more of a "sketchy process" rather than the more substantive administrative scheme it developed into in later years.