As Chief Whip of the Ulster Unionist Parliamentary Party from 1987 to 1995, in an attempt to derail multi-party talks initiated by Peter Brooke (the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland), in February 1990 Ross unsuccessfully introduced a Private Member's Bill, the Northern Ireland Act 1974 (Amendment) Bill, to provide that laws for Northern Ireland may not be made by (non-amendable) Orders-in-Council but by (amendable) Bill introduced into the United Kingdom Parliament, and repeatedly called on the then Conservative Government to implement its 1979 Conservative General Election Manifesto commitment to "establish one or more elected regional councils with a wide range of powers over local services" (in Northern Ireland), which had been drafted by the then UUP Leader Jim (later Lord) Molyneaux and adopted by the late Airey Neave (then Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland) in 1978.