Building a Co-operative Union (Common Frameworks Scrutiny Committee Report)

Baroness Andrews Excerpts

Wednesday 13th October 2021 Grand Committee

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[Baroness Andrews]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Common Frameworks Scrutiny Committee Common Frameworks: building a cooperative Union (1st Report, Session 2019–21, HL Paper 259).

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, on behalf of the committee, I say how much we welcome this opportunity to present our report and to update the House on the progress we have made since we published it. I thank the missing Ministers this evening—the noble Lord, Lord True, and Chloe Smith MP—who were extremely supportive and shared our journey to an extent. We welcome the noble Lord, Lord Greenhalgh, this afternoon and look forward to hearing what he says.

Part of the benefit of working closely with Ministers is that we benefited from working with their officials in the Cabinet Office as well. They were always, and continue to be, extremely helpful to us. We welcome the Government’s response although, in a way inevitably I suppose, it was largely a statement of principle and support and there was a marked absence of hard, practical acceptance of the recommendations, but we hope that will improve too.

I start by thanking the committee and congratulating it on its stamina, not least over the past year. We have done a lot of things for the first time—we are a rather unusual committee—and it has been hard work. I am very pleased to say that, on Monday, the Liaison Committee agreed that we will extend our work until next summer. We really welcome that, because there is a lot still to be done. It is a real tribute to the work we do and to the need for Parliament to maintain its scrutiny over the common frameworks. It is also a tribute to the connections we have built up with the devolved Administrations across the UK.

I am blessed to chair a committee with such quality, insight and experience, often in high office, of what the journey to devolution has meant and its history. It is what gives our committee its unique weight and perspective and has enabled us to talk very frankly to the devolved Administrations, Ministers and stakeholders. Our expertise has already been poached; the Cabinet Office seized the noble Lord, Lord McInnes, and took him away from us. Although he has probably not gone to a better place, he has probably gone to serve a higher cause. In exchange, we got another hostage, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, who brings intimate knowledge of the United Kingdom Internal Market Act. The only downside of meeting in person today—it is lovely to see the committee as we have not met in person as a committee before—is that we do not have the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, who has been a very important member and given us enormously wise advice.

I also thank our wonderful staff: Moriyo Aiyeola, who took over from Erik Tate, Tim Stacey, our absolutely splendid policy adviser, and Glenn Chapman and Breda Twomey, who keep us in order and make sure that we do not stray too far from our companion committees, the Constitution Committee and the Northern Ireland protocol committee, on which some of our members also serve.

My speech today is something of a common framework because there are lots of things that I know my colleagues will want to pick up in detail, and I look forward to hearing from them. I have to start with a rather blunt question to the Minister. I know that this is a new brief for him so we will be kind, as always, but we also have to ask some awkward questions. When he winds up, please can he tell us which Minister is now responsible for the common frameworks? Which department is now responsible for the common frameworks? No Cabinet Minister has yet been appointed to replace Chloe Smith. Does that mean that, from now on, there will be no Minister in the Cabinet Office responsible for co-ordinating and driving the common frameworks programme?

If the responsibility has moved to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, we presume that the Secretary of State, Mr Gove, will be the man in charge, but can the Minister tell us who the responsible Minister will be? If this is the case, it would have been nice to have been told earlier than now. I speak for the devolved Administrations as well. So we need answers this afternoon as a matter of urgency and credibility but also plain courtesy, especially to the devolved Administrations. I hope I am not being too pessimistic about this but I think the department will have to make an effort to make sure that the common frameworks are not seen as another aspect of local government, having gone into the department which traditionally has been about local government.

This debate is timely in many ways and the issues we raised in March are more urgent than ever. We subtitled our report “Building a Cooperative Union” because our work suggests that is what the common frameworks can uniquely do, especially when the political environment seems to be hostile to that ambition. Some of our witnesses said, in very many different words, that government relations with the devolved Administrations had never been worse. Obviously, we are not offering a holistic solution in our report—that is not our job and we would be naive to try—but it offers a pragmatic prescription rooted in what works.

The content of what we do is often technical, sometimes dauntingly so, but the context is wholly political. Although we are forced to focus on process, as the frameworks themselves do, the function of the frameworks is no less than to guarantee safe and appropriate services across the UK, covering a host of issues: nutritional standards, carbon emissions, food and feed safety, blood products and transport systems. Every framework is different, every department behaves differently, but they determine huge areas of health and safety across the UK.

Since the common frameworks emerged in 2017 with a set of clear principles, 32 frameworks have been designated to replace the rules which had been established by the European Commission to guarantee a functioning internal market and to protect the common resources of the environment, which is why over half the frameworks are concerned with environmental issues.

Much of this constructive work was virtually invisible, which is why it is a challenge to explain what the common frameworks do, but we emphasised in our report that these frameworks could play a unique role in creating new opportunities for collaboration and consensus across the UK, through shared information, interests, policy and process. Above all, they were the way by which the common framework of the internal market could be maintained at the same time as managing divergence, which was not disruptive. In short, the common frameworks are a new asset, they have huge potential and they should not be underplayed.

Since we reported in March, there have been some setbacks and these have been largely external. But there has been some progress and this is to the credit, not least, of the work of the Cabinet Office officials and, I like to think, of our committee itself, in the way we have drawn attention to inconsistency, sloppiness in some cases, and things that could be done better, including transparency.

Of course, we have been dealing with delay. Every deadline set by the Government has proved to be widely ambitious and widely missed. The first deadline was Christmas 2020, and the second was the Easter just gone; now we are told that it is Easter next year—we shall see. The fact that our committee has been extended to next summer gives us some scope.

As for progress, when the committee reported in March, only seven of the 32 frameworks in development had reached provisional status. In July, we had better news: a further 21 frameworks had reached provisional status. However, while the UK, Welsh and Scottish Governments had signed them off, the Northern Ireland Executive had not. That has now, thankfully, changed, and the Northern Ireland Executive have approved the frameworks agreed by the four Administrations. This is most significant—and I am sure we will talk a lot about Ireland this afternoon—given that it is clear that common frameworks have the potential to be a positive force to reduce future tensions deriving from the protocol. To support this, we recommended that the Government should ensure that policy changes introduced with the protocol should be considered through the frameworks, in just the same way as divergent policy changes suggested by the other Administrations are so mediated. That would provide not just parity of process but a more predictable and transparent outcome.

The Government have accepted that in theory but, again, to what extent it will be applied in practice remains to be seen. That applies to our other recommendation that the significant number of frameworks that intersect with the protocol should include processes for reporting on the divergence that occurs and its effect. We have not seen any evidence of those reporting mechanisms being developed since we produced the report, but they are recommendations that do not ignore political realities; they are a pragmatic approach to a problem that we would like to contribute to solving. Perhaps the Minister could update us on the Government’s thinking on those areas.

The second area that has obstructed progress is the interaction between the common frameworks and the United Kingdom Internal Market Act, which has continued to be a cause of friction between the UK Government and devolved Administrations. The Welsh Government believe that the Act unlawfully altered the devolution settlement, and they are pursuing legal action. The Bill was amended in Committee, thanks not least to one of the members of our committee, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and the Act now contains the power for the Secretary of State to create exemptions from the effects of the Act in areas agreed through a common framework. We recommended in our report that each framework should be updated to include a consistent and transparent process for agreeing areas where this very important power will be used. It is proving difficult to do that; it is not easy—and we look forward to the Minister, I hope, telling us that some progress has been made, because it is definitely adding to frustrations and delays.

I turn briefly to the internal challenges of the programme itself. Much of the insecurity and difficulties around the frameworks is due to the lack of transparency, and I know that my colleagues will want to pick that particular failure up. The lack of transparency inhibits success, and that should not be the case. We have proposed a simple solution that an open consultation should be included in the scheduled review that each framework is due to undergo, but that has not happened. I look forward to hearing what the Minister says about that.

We also acknowledge in our recommendations that frameworks are still at an early stage. That makes it difficult to make any judgments as to whether they will raise or lower standards, maintaining or diluting previous European Union standards. It is difficult to determine that since, rather than establishing minimum standards, the 11 frameworks that we have seen have largely included agreements on the process for the future agreements of standards rather than the standards themselves. Since we reported, I can give one example whereby preliminary documents on the radioactive substances framework include agreement on maintaining or exceeding European standards.

All this is taking place within the wider challenges of the future of the devolution settlement. I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Dunlop, is with us this afternoon, and very much look forward to his contribution. Indeed, we look forward to seeing his report being implemented in full, as we do the outcomes of the intergovernmental committee and the Minister’s response on progress. Where we as a committee can speak with authority and unanimity is on the need for a clear commitment to ongoing parliamentary scrutiny.

In our report we recommended that the four Administrations should provide regular updates to their legislatures, and to public reporting as part of their planned reviews of the frameworks. Again, the Government are very much in favour of this in theory, but the commitments we have seen have been, frankly, lacklustre. The Welsh Government have no such inhibition in relation to the Senedd. The UK Government seem to fear making such a commitment as far as our Parliament is concerned.

In the context and in conclusion, I put on record the fact that our scrutiny committee is doing things for the first time and in different ways—not least because we are a unique and welcome point of contact between the Parliaments of the four countries. Our warm relationships and our continuing and frank exchanges have been mutually valid: they have set a tone and a precedent for what could and should happen going forward. The strength of devolution lies in the balance between common and individual interests and common frameworks both exemplify this and have the power to strengthen the wider and critical relationships. We hope most fervently that this is something that the Government, and Parliament as a whole, will want to invest in. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his response. He will know now, I think, why the committee is so formidable—formidable to chair and formidable in its questioning. I am conscious that a great number of questions were put to him this afternoon. I think there was quite a lot of good news in what he said, but we will have to read what he said carefully. It is of the utmost importance that we get the greatest clarity—and, frankly, the greatest enthusiasm—from the Government for the common frameworks.

The question raised by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, is fundamental. The centre has a role here in making sure that the common frameworks are properly co-ordinated and driven in the right directions, in the right way and at the right speed, that they really work and make an optimum contribution to strengthening the union. We will watch very closely how the Minister’s department is going to manage them, and the level of transparency. I have absolute confidence in officials, and we are very grateful that we at least have the name of the Minister; I am sure that we will want to talk to him as soon as he is properly in place.

Many of my colleagues raised the character of the frameworks, saying that they look dull, technical and impenetrable. I should say to the noble Baroness, Lady Bryan, and other noble Lords who have spoken that there is no such thing as an interloper in this debate: we welcome any interest shown by anybody from any part of the House, and well beyond. We have talked about the misleading nature of the frameworks. They are so much more than the sum of their parts, as they deal with huge constitutional issues and possibilities. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas, spoke of them as constitutional innovations. They illuminate the lopsided nature of power in the UK, shining a new light on what is possible and necessary through devolution, and the risks of the state of the debate on devolution. These are huge historic themes, not small, technical adjustments. Since the issue has gone into the Department for Levelling Up, it will become confused with a whole range of other issues and imperatives.

Our imperative is to make sure that these frameworks, which were and may still be precarious—just as the existence of our committee might have been precarious—are maximised in their impact across the UK, for the benefit of the whole of the UK. We will hold Ministers’ feet to the fire and we will want to see what progress is being made, that faith is being kept, that transparency and quality is improved, that timetables are kept, and that the impact on the ground for delivery is as it should be. If there is divergence, it must be managed transparently and constructively.

Everything that my noble friend said about the position of Wales is absolutely true. The internal market Act was totally disruptive, and there was a very serious chance that the whole process would lose credibility. It did not—not least because of this committee’s work. That is the standard to which we will hold ourselves over the next year. We will be vigilant and pretty ruthless about what we expect in terms of behaviour from not just this department but all departments across government.

Motion agreed.