Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain has called on the UVF to end its involvement in criminality and paramilitarism.
Hain has called on the UVF to end its involvement in criminality and paramilitarism.
"The UVF have not ended their paramilitary campaign, they are still involved in criminality in a big way and all of those things are things which the IRA have promised to deliver on and is delivering on," he said.
Mr Hain's comments come as the row over the Ulster Unionist Party's decision to admit Progressive Unionist leader David Ervine into their Assembly Group at Stormont intensifies.
As he attended the opening of a children's park at Stormont in memory of Mo Mowlam, Mr Hain said he understood there was a real issue for Assembly members about the PUP's links to the UVF.
"Therefore Sinn Féin are in a much stronger position to claim a seat in a power-sharing Executive since they have decommissioned, they have ended their paramilitary campaign, and according to the Independent Monitoring Commission they are driving criminality out of their ranks.
"Now that is a big, big advance compared with where the UVF are. The UVF ought to catch up quickly," the Northern Ireland secretary said.
Mr Ervine announced plans to join up with the Ulster Unionist party's Assembly Group ahead of yesterday's inaugural meeting of the new Northern Ireland Assembly.
The move will ensure that the group will now swell to 25 MLAs. It will also mean that there will be a unionist majority in any future Stormont Executive and will give the Ulster Unionists an extra ministerial seat at the expense of Sinn Féin.
The UUP will also be called ahead of Sinn Féin in the Assembly under its speaking rights. Assembly Speaker Eileen Bell has been asked by the Rev Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists to check the legality of the move.
Dr Paisley yesterday also suggested that it now calls into question whether the UUP was a fit partner in any future power-sharing government at Stormont because it had allied itself to a political party with links to an active loyalist paramilitary organisation.