Windsor Framework (Democratic Scrutiny) Regulations 2023

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Baroness Lawlor

Wednesday 29th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to my noble friend the Minister for the efforts he continues to make to promote the peace process—as he did through a number of Administrations—of which these regulations are a step. But it would be curmudgeonly not to acknowledge the efforts of other Governments in promoting the peace process, of which the Belfast agreement, which your Lordships have mentioned across the House today, was a major step.

The fact that the Belfast agreement was accepted reflected two truths. First, it was accepted across the majority of parties who were party to the sad legacy of Northern Ireland—a legacy that was a historical inevitability, perhaps. But it was also a success because it built on recognition of the constitutional status of Northern Ireland within the UK, and that that status would not be overturned except with a majority vote of the people.

We have heard today how the Northern Ireland protocol has undermined the Belfast agreement in a number of ways. It has also undermined the economic integrity of the United Kingdom and the UK’s economic area. That it was signed or reached was the result of a determined plan by the EU from 2017 to play the orange card against the green, and to use that card to undermine Brexit and its success economically and politically.

While the negotiations leading to the Windsor arrangement and the Stormont brake are to be welcomed as a step in the right direction, I do not think we should forget that the real problem remains. It is the problem of the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and its part as an integral part of the UK’s economic area. Therefore, until the protocol itself is addressed, as noble Lords have acknowledged today and have urged my noble friend to take account of, these problems will remain. I therefore urge my noble friend to do all he can to address the constitutional problems that remain within the Northern Ireland protocol so that we can move to a position where the UK and the EU are not the sole parties—indeed, not the major parties—in this arrangement and the Dublin Government and the UK Government continue the process they reached in the Good Friday agreement in 1998 without the help, for better or worse, of the EU.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, noble Lords will remember that, in the course of debates on the retained EU law Bill, we have heard complaints from noble Lords across the House, largely from opposition parties but also from government Back Benchers, that it is outrageous to be asked to sign off legislation without a chance to scrutinise it in detail. We have been told that decisions on whether to retain or discard laws needs close parliamentary oversight and debate. I have to say that I was somewhat taken aback that, even before the publication of the Windsor Framework, the Opposition committed to supporting the Government. Since then, skeleton documentation has been enough to have politicians across all parties vote en masse for the framework, despite the fact that actually that equates to voting blind on yet-to-be-written laws that will apply to the UK that will not be scrutinised, let alone with an opportunity to be opposed, by the UK Parliament.

Today, what we have been asked to do is to nod through an agreement that allows the EU, which we have left, to draft brand-new EU laws to govern trade taking place solely within UK borders. There has been no outrage, though. We are just quite calmly accepting that the future rules on the movements of goods, plants, foodstuffs, medicines, parcels, pets and so on from Great Britain to Northern Ireland will be decided by direct regulation made in Brussels and voted on not here but in the European Parliament, all of which we will never get to scrutinise in the UK Parliament. You sort of could not make it up. It seems an ironic twist as well that the people who will have close oversight of UK laws are—wait for it—the EU. Under the framework, the EU is granted new rights through EU law to be consulted in advance on huge swathes of legislation on UK trade and tax legislation governing the UK economy, all to monitor the so-called competitive risks within the UK single market.

I think that we might suggest that something has gone a bit awry here. Certainly, the process should be scrutinised and our own process should be scrutinised. In this place, concerns are rightly often raised about the overuse of statutory instruments and the delegation of powers to the Executive, yet here we are faced with a statutory instrument and we are able to look at only one part of the framework in the Stormont brake. There is no feasible way of changing anything. That is why I welcome the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, because it gives us a chance to have a debate. I thought the noble Lord, Lord Hain, asked some important questions about delegated powers, but in the end, this House, the other House and Stormont —none of us—have no way of challenging an important document about the conflict about which legal authority will govern the UK. In the other place, the discussion was reduced to a derisory 90 minutes. We should remind ourselves that the whole framework was announced as a done deal at a press conference that put Ursula von der Leyen centre stage and the UK Parliament, never mind the public, was reduced to being a bystander.

Financial Services and Markets Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Baroness Lawlor

Committee stage
Tuesday 7th March 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I enthusiastically support Amendment 186. I thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, spelled out extremely articulately the importance of banking hubs and how that name could often be prosecuted for mis-selling. Even banks themselves, in terms of the service that they offer when you go into the few that are still open, can be accused of having only the minimum service required.

The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, told a heartbreaking story about a 91 year-old but you do not have to be 91 and have a heartbreaking story. Things can just go wrong; your card can stop working or whatever. When you try to solve it on your phone and it does not work, you then go into the bank and, to be honest, you are treated as though you are wasting the bank’s time and as though you have done something wrong. The staff often cannot solve the problem and ask, “Why don’t you solve it online or on your phone?” The answer is that I would have done so if I could have done. In other words, I do not think that it is necessarily a special needs problem, as the noble Lord just said. I think it can happen to anyone. Sometimes, you need human intervention to sort out your banking.

I am also interested in supporting those amendments that would allow access to cash, including Amendments 180 and 181 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe. I especially like Amendment 189 from the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, and its attempt to make cash critical national infrastructure in the UK; I also support Amendment 189A, which is headed “Access to physical banking services”.

I suppose I am concerned about noting that the importance of cash relates not just to those who struggle with their phones or other technology. This discussion sometimes implies that some of us are just Luddites who cannot cope or do not want to embrace the full excitement of new technology and digital futures. I want to emphasise that I can see the advantages of a cashless society. Mainstream cashless transactions carry certain information about payment participants, what was purchased and when, which can be a huge barrier to money laundering and tax avoidance. That is genuinely important but, for individuals as consumers, it can also mean—this may be slightly different to what others have emphasised—that it helps people with budgeting because they have electronic receipts and can see both what is going in and what is going out. I am rather enthusiastic about those technological steps forward; I do not in any way want to hold back the march of progress, in the way that some have implied.

However, precisely because cashless transactions mean that information about payment participants is available to financial institutions and banks in a different kind of way, they can also give those organisations huge surveillance capability and invasive powers in ways that we did not see so much in the past. It is then not about you taking cash out but about everything having to be recorded. This means that people are not able to do the things you could with discretion. It should be noted—this is not entirely being paranoid—that, in China, financial surveillance is used to censor and restrict people’s freedom to express opinions against the state.

Noble Lords might think that that would never happen in a democracy but, in a later amendment in my name—when I say later, I mean if it ever arrives; it is Amendment 241B, should anyone like to note that, because I do not suppose that anyone will be here to listen to my speech on it—I was inspired by payment processing in fintech companies, such as PayPal, and the move towards everything being cashless, with a cashless society and everything being digitised. This has meant that PayPal, for example, can close down accounts on the basis of politics; in fact, it has done so, so I am not just being paranoid.

There also tends to be a casual assumption that those who want to keep their financial transactions private—that is, by using cash from time to time—might be up to something dodgy, as though the only reason someone might want to be free to choose to use cash is if they are involved in embezzlement or tax fraud. Today, it has been much friendlier than that; people just assume that you are technologically incompetent and old-fashioned, so cannot keep up. We just have to be a bit careful about this. I have also noticed a trend where financial services are judging how individuals are making their purchasing decisions—judging their use of money in a way that they may not have done if were not quite so detailed.

Recently, I was interested that HSBC—my bank—was involved in a report that condemned people’s decisions about how much they spent on gambling and was backing affordability checks. I know that I disagree with some noble Lords in the Room on gambling—I can already see them—as I think that is a legal leisure activity and that you should be able to do what you want. The idea that the bank is saying that it has customers who spend too much on gambling, a perfectly legal leisure activity, and then gives a breakdown of them, indicates that rather than being a dispassionate financial service it is getting involved in things in a way that it perhaps should not. I have never gambled, but my bank could well send me a note about how much I am spending in TK Maxx, saying that has all gone a bit mad.

When we had cash, we took the money out, we spent it on what we wanted and nobody could see. A cashless society creates a slightly different situation. Amendment 186 on accessibility and Amendment 184 on levels of cash acceptance, along with the whole issue of digital exclusion and financial inclusion, are very important but do not quite capture some of the broader political trends associated with this issue.

I am also very sympathetic to the notion of the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes. On the one hand, cash is not a human right—I do not want to get stuck on that, as I am never keen on regulations lasting for ever; a time-limited sunset clause is a good idea—but I am anxious that we do not forget the political trends surrounding this by simply treating it as a technical issue.

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, if I may come in briefly, I am very sympathetic to the aims of noble Lords who wish to see cash access and banking services available to those who need them and do not use or rely on digital. However, I agree with the aims of the Bill: international competitiveness and growth. I do not think that this Bill’s powers regarding the financial markets and services sector should be used in a blanket way to impose an obligation on service providers to provide a service whose use, by all accounts and evidence, is on the decline.

Not only do I support the two amendments from my noble friend Lady Noakes, but I think we should pay attention to the overall aims for the regulators in this Bill, which are international competitiveness and growth. I urge the Minister to focus on the real problem of access to cash and banking services for many people, and, where there is a problem or gap, to focus the efforts and use the powers of government on trying to deal with the declining number of users in our society—albeit a real group—rather than use the law to impose obligations in a blanket way on the sector, contrary to the aims of competitiveness and growth. As noble Lords have explained, such a move could undermine the competitiveness of the banking sector.