SDLP leader Mark Durkan has called on Northern Secretary Peter Hain to press the Democratic Unionist Party towards negotiating a deal by the November 24th deadline.
After a meeting with British prime minister Tony Blair last week, the Rev Ian Paisley had strongly indicated that a deal would not be done by his party. But the Foyle MP urged Mr Hain to "stop praising and start pressing" the DUP towards a deal to restore the assembly. He said the DUP had never believed the deadline would be enforced.
"Obviously the DUP have been good students of this process and obviously they have seen the form of the two governments," Mr Durkan said on Radio Ulster's Inside Politics programme.
"They haven't held up [ enforced] a deadline yet. They allowed the Ulster Unionists to mess about for a long time with the institutions, they allowed Sinn Féin and the IRA to drag their feet and refuse to accept what the agreement required in terms of decommissioning, so there is a tendency in the DUP that says 'we are hardly going to be stuck on this deadline'."
He said he was opposed to talks between the parties and governments taking place in the Scottish golfing resort of St Andrew's next month.
"These sorts of hothouse events in the past haven't actually worked. I think people are a bit cynical about the sort of showboating that goes on in front of the satellite vans.
"I would prefer to see parties and governments knuckle down in talks at the very inexpensive location we already have in Northern Ireland rather than go on for a bit of a media circus at a large cost to the taxpayer."
Speaking on BBC1 Northern Ireland's Politics Show yesterday, political development minister David Hanson said failure of the parties to reach agreement by November 24th would have "dire consequences".
Mr Hanson warned that if the deadline was not met, assembly members' salaries and allowances would be stopped and it would be a "long time" before the assembly was restored.
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams said he would give his backing to the party signing up to policing when the British government "fulfils its promises" to them.
Mr Adams said that while many nationalists and republicans were slow to trust the PSNI for historical reasons, they still deserved a police service.
"The British government have made a number of commitments to us and it is quite public that they are going to do certain things," he said.
"When they do those certain things, I'm going to go to the ardchomhairle of our party to ask for a special ardfheis, so that we can consider whether we will support or what our attitude will be."