European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Baroness Smith of Newnham and Lord Berkeley

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 25th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I support my two noble friends who have spoken to this amendment. I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group and a member of the board of the European Rail Freight Association. They are absolutely right in the worry that these agencies will not be able to accept us after Brexit. I know the European railway agency people very well, and they would love us to stay, obviously, and would love to work with us, but of course they are forbidden from doing so by the European Commission, because that is part of the regulations. But the consequences, as my noble friends have said, are actually very serious. The manufacturing issue is not just about how we are going to take the components back and forward—it is the standards to which they are created and built and the safety certification that has to go along with it, which cannot easily after Brexit cross between us and the rest of Europe.

The issue also occurs on the railways, partly with manufactured items and partly with the operation. We do not yet know whether the train drivers that go across in the tunnel—Eurostar or rail freight—will have to have separate licences. The one good thing that the European railway agency started off doing was to try to get a common standard for red tail-lights across Europe, because each member state had its own standard, and when you got to a frontier somebody had to walk to the back of the train and change the lights. Mercifully, that is a thing of the past—but, unless all these issues are sorted out and the necessary drivers and other staff get the proper training, there will be no trains through the tunnel, and there may not be any flights, if my noble friend’s comments on the air service are correct.

We really need to get on with this. Everybody is waiting for a decision and, if we do not, we can expect to have very little traffic on the railways when we leave the EU. I do not think that the same will apply to the ferries across the channel, but we do not know. How all that affects the transport between the north and south of Ireland and across the Irish Sea, we had better leave to another day—but I hope that the Minister will have some positive response to my noble friends’ questions.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

My Lords, we have been told frequently that this Bill is about providing legal certainty on the day that we leave the European Union. We have already heard from three noble Lords a whole range of issues that will be extremely difficult in the transport sector when we leave the EU. If we cannot stay in the European agencies, are the Government doing to do at least as much as proposed new subsection (2) suggests and establish,

“an effective equivalent within the United Kingdom”?

If we are to have legal certainly, it is not enough simply to enshrine EU law into United Kingdom law. We need to know what the standards will be on the day that we leave. This is not something that is just hypothetical; this is not about widgets—it is about how our transport system functions on the day we leave. So far, we have not had sufficient answers on this, so I hope that the Minister might be able to tell us something that goes beyond the idea that this is simply going to be about the negotiations.