Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Baroness Ludford and Lord Hannay of Chiswick

Committee stage
Wednesday 14th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

I am most grateful for what the noble and learned Lord has said, but he may have overlooked that we had a debate, at a much earlier stage, on the way in which the Government use the word “require”. The Minister says that nothing in the Bill requires the Government to take action that would be contrary to our obligations under the TCA. He seems to be overlooking—the use of the word “require” perhaps deliberately overlooks the fact—that the Bill empowers the Government to take action which, if taken, would bring us into conflict with our obligations under the TCA. Perhaps he could answer that point.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

Could the Minister confirm whether he agrees with the analysis of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, from which I cited extracts, on the various EU asylum directives that would continue to apply in Northern Ireland? I am afraid I have not checked what the noble Lord, Lord Murray, said in response to the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, the other day, but the trafficking directive and the victims directive also apply in Northern Ireland. What are the Government doing to make sure that all those directives are going to be respected in practice in Northern Ireland?

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Debate between Baroness Ludford and Lord Hannay of Chiswick

Committee stage
Thursday 2nd March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 29 in the names of my noble and learned friend Lord Hope and others.

A couple of weeks ago your Lordships’ European Affairs Committee, on which I have the honour to serve, went to Cardiff and Edinburgh to take evidence in the context of our current inquiry into the future of UK-EU relations. During those visits, on which we talked to Members of the Senedd and the Parliament in Edinburgh, the points about this Bill, and above all the points covered by my noble and learned friend’s amendment, were raised forcefully with us by representatives of all parties, including the party that supports the Government, in both Cardiff and Edinburgh. They told us they were completely in the dark about the application of this Bill if it became an Act, and in particular about how it would impact on the areas that my noble and learned friend has drawn attention to, which are devolved and are the responsibility of the Scottish and Welsh Governments. They said they were really worried that this would lead to many unforeseen negative consequences.

They said there had been no contact or discussion at the political level between either the Welsh or Scottish Government and Whitehall about these measures. There had been contact at official level, of course, and in previous parts of the debate on the Bill here, Ministers have said, “Oh, well, there are some jolly good contacts going on at official level and civil servants are talking to each other”. That will not do; it is not enough. There must be a dialogue with the Welsh and Scottish Governments about this issue; it deeply concerns them.

I hope that the Minister, when he comes to reply to the debate on this amendment, will give certain undertakings in that respect. Above all, I hope he will commit and say categorically that if this amendment is not put to a decision today—it is of course axiomatic that it will not be—these contacts at political level with the Welsh and Scottish Governments will take place between today and Report and he will report back to this House what has passed in those contacts. Without that, we are just heading towards greater and completely unnecessary discord. I hope this point can be taken on board. I do not think it a great deal to ask the Minister to commit himself to. Frankly, it is astonishing that it has not happened already.

One of the things that was quite clear from our contacts in both Cardiff and Edinburgh was that this absence of certainty about what is covered by the sunset clause is itself extremely damaging. Nobody has been able to tell them the list of measures that would be affected by the sunset clause. So I hope the Minister can respond positively when he comes to reply to this debate.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to give a few words of support to the amendments in this group, particularly those led by my noble friends Lady Humphreys and Lady Randerson. To pick up the phrase just used by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, it is astonishing that the Government are proposing to create such discord with this Bill and by their failure to respect the devolved Administrations and include them in the processes of consideration.

As an Englishwoman, though with roots throughout these islands, I am no expert either on the devolution settlement or on common frameworks—very far from it—but our party is a unionist one, which surely means fostering, respecting and supporting the operation of the union.

In paragraph 60 of the Explanatory Notes to the Bill, there is a very clear statement:

“The Government also remains committed to respecting the devolution settlements and the Sewel Convention, and has ensured that the Bill will not alter the devolution settlements”—


that does not appear to be the case—

“and will not intrinsically create greater intra-UK divergence”.

Quite a lot of weight is put on “intrinsically” in that sentence, because it has great potential to create intra-UK divergence and thus seems very contrary to government policy. On Monday we heard the Prime Minister deliver a passionate statement of support for unionism. He passionately said, “I am a unionist”—he also said, “I am a Brexiter”, but I was not so keen on that bit. The Bill does not illustrate that passionate unionism from the Government.

Coming specifically to the effect on Northern Ireland, I fully agreed with the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie. We on these Benches are also extremely concerned about the Bill’s impact on the Northern Ireland protocol, and in particular on Article 2 on the upholding of rights under EU law, including human rights. We hear with great concern the view of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, which argues that the Bill risks the basis of the Good Friday agreement. That cannot be at all overlooked.

I have a few questions in reference to the Windsor Framework that I hope the Minister can answer. First, will the Stormont brake apply to any laws affected by the REUL Bill or only to new legislation? Has the Prime Minister agreed with the EU to retain all EU law affected by this Bill in Northern Ireland as part of the Windsor Framework? If not, will that not undermine the Windsor Framework? Have the Government agreed to amend this Bill as part of the deal done on Monday in the Windsor Framework on the Northern Ireland protocol?

Practically speaking—given that, sadly, there is no sign yet that the Northern Ireland Executive will be up and running soon—who will be making decisions on which EU law is protected from the sunset? The situation in Northern Ireland is of course very delicate. Given that either removing retained EU law or pulling the Stormont brake could trigger a breakdown in trade between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, will the Minister commit that that will happen only when there is cross-community support for doing so? That question is perhaps more on the framework.

With regard to the Bill, there are major concerns about the devolution settlements, the common frameworks and, not least arising from the Windsor Framework, the effect specifically on Northern Ireland. I hope that the Minister can cover all those concerns in his response.

Free Trade Agreement: Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway

Debate between Baroness Ludford and Lord Hannay of Chiswick

Thursday 14th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

I am not used to debates without speakers’ lists; I am a bit nervous about going first.

I thoroughly congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, on securing this debate before the expiry of the scrutiny deadline. As he noted, this is the first genuinely new post-Brexit free trade agreement, as opposed to a copy-and-paste of the agreements we enjoyed as an EU member state. As such, it has to be welcomed—but with some caveats. The committee notes that, although this is substantially a new trade agreement, there is a different government approach to parliamentary scrutiny for this one compared to others, such as the forthcoming Australia free trade agreement.

The committee says that government commitments on scrutiny have developed “iteratively”. A less diplomatic way of putting it might be that it is all over the place. Certainly, government commitments on consultation, publication of negotiating objectives, scrutiny of documents, briefings to the committees, access to the texts and so on have not been respected in the case of this agreement. My experience as a Member of the European Parliament was that if the negotiators—the Commission and the Council—took MEPs into their confidence early on, particularly through an approval of negotiating objectives, the further stages were much smoother. But of course, the European Parliament has much greater powers than the Westminster Parliament over trade agreements.

The committee called the layout of the parliamentary report, one of the explanatory materials, “hard-to-read”. It certainly is; I made the mistake of printing it out and it has the titchiest font that I think I have ever seen. The committee also said that the

“rationale for its production is unclear”

and that even the impact assessment was “less informative” than on previous occasions. I hope that this might get a commitment from the Minister to do better in future.

I am interested to note that this free trade agreement includes mutual recognition of professional qualifications, which the Government did not manage to secure in the trade and co-operation agreement with the EU, such that any UK qualified workers wishing to work in the EU have to meet the qualification requirements of each individual EU member state, such that host country rules apply. Can the Minister, as an off-shoot of the subject we are debating, tell us what progress has been reached in securing reciprocal arrangements with any EU member state on a sectoral basis for recognition of qualifications?

The committee notes that although the agreement applies differently in Northern Ireland compared with the rest of the UK, none of the explanatory materials—the explanatory memorandum, the impact assessment, the parliamentary report—makes any reference to that, which is quite strange. Northern Ireland officials advised the committee that

“there remain considerable complexities around how Northern Ireland will fully benefit from UK FTAs”,

and that the

“inability to fully comply with FTA measures for NI, where these conflict with … the Protocol”,

needs to be considered. Obviously, the protocol is much in our minds now—as ever. Can the Government provide the committee and the House with a full explanation of these difficulties—this interaction between the protocol and FTAs—and what they involve in terms of WTO transparency, potential trade dispute risks and any other factors?

The Northern Ireland Government apparently saw the detailed text of this agreement only shortly before the announcement that an agreement had been reached. The Scottish Government have complained that they did not have a full role and were not involved in any of the crucial detail on tariffs and goods access or consulted on significant aspects of the negotiations. Unlike some colleagues—I am sitting behind one—I am not well up on the role of the devolved Governments, but I am concerned if a professed unionist party that currently sits in government is failing to be inclusive in trade negotiations. Can the Minister explain the Government’s record in respect of this FTA and what they intend in the future?

As the committee notes, and as the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, repeated, this FTA is

“in part an exercise in damage limitation”.

We cannot get back, certainly via this FTA, to what we had as a member of the European Economic Area. I notice that the explanatory memorandum does not even mention the EEA in its background section; it has been airbrushed out of history. It compares this FTA only with the previous ones on goods only. A fair comparison would be what we had as all being members of the EEA. This reaches the same level of farce as “Don’t mention the war”—Captain Mainwaring style.

The impact assessment claims that the FTA

“delivers more opportunities across services and investment and a range of other areas including digital, procurement and telecoms.”

This again can be compared only to the previous 2019 and December 2020 agreements, which covered only goods. As the Law Society protested, this FTA comes

“nowhere close to replicating the level of market access members”—

that is, solicitors, the members of the Law Society—had “prior to Brexit”, when we were in the EU and the EEA, in the provisions giving complete freedom to provide services. That is what the comparison needs to be with. It is disingenuous of the Government not to mention and describe that, since we here are all going to know it. At least there are some mobility provisions in this FTA, unlike in the TCA with the EU, but they are only WTO mode 4, in the jargon, and thus more far more restrictive than the freedom of movement to work that we all had in the EEA.

A big gap is the failure to get diagonal cumulation on rules of origin. This is a subject for which I have always had to put a wet towel on my head, but what it means in practice is that while the UK, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein will be able to cumulate EU content, the EU has not reciprocated in the TCA. This means that Norwegian and Icelandic raw materials incorporated above a certain threshold into goods exported from the UK to the EU will attract tariffs as third-country content. Can the Minister give us any glimmer of hope of resolving that important issue in future?

The preamble reaffirms the commitment of all parties to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948. What about the European Convention on Human Rights? As far as I know, and indeed I do know, all the partners—Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and, at least for now, the UK—are members of the ECHR. So why is the ECHR not cited and namechecked in the text while only the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is? Should I be worried about that?

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, speaking as a member of your Lordships’ European Affairs Committee, whose report we are debating, I welcome these three agreements. That may surprise the Minister, who has taken a certain amount of criticism on some of the other debates that we have had on trade agreements, but I do. It is important to avoid the legal and, potentially, practical hiatus in our trading relationship with those three countries that would have followed from our ceasing to be covered by the EEA at the beginning of 2021, this year. Now, as a result of those agreements, that will not happen, which is certainly good news.

However, I have to say to the Government that they would get more credit on an occasion like this if they did not claim, as official spokesmen have done, that these agreements were in some way a massive break- through, a first new-era post-Brexit set of free trade agreements. That is the sort of hyperbole that I am afraid, since it is not true, tends to discredit what is actually a perfectly well-done job. These are nothing of the sort. We have actually been in a free trade area relationship with these countries for many decades, since before we joined the European Community when we were part of EFTA with them. I have to admit—to my shame, because there is the problem of ageism—that I was part of the negotiations for the free trade agreement with Norway and the other members of EFTA when we joined the European Community.