European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Beith Excerpts

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

These amendments may be technical but they are none the less important. They guarantee the integrity of our devolution statutes and provide the assurance that noble Lords have sought that those Acts will be subject to appropriate scrutiny. I beg to move.

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, these are very helpful amendments, in that they reassert respect for the constitutional importance of the devolution legislation. They are part of the context that we will return to next week when we try to sort out other devolution aspects of the Bill—perhaps with greater ease in relation to Wales than Scotland, but that is for another day. Some of them are technical and tidying-up, and have been achieved with agreement. All that is welcome.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, it falls to me to echo what the noble Lord, Lord Beith, has said, and to thank the Minister for moving the amendments and for the explanations that he has given. I hope he will agree to convey to his departmental colleagues our congratulations on their very hard work, the results of which are now before us. Of course, we should recognise that this is the calm before the storm, in the sense that Clause 11 is coming along. If there are some very simple technical amendments here, there are 16 pages of amendments to Clause 11, so there will be fun and games when we get to it. Still, as the noble Lord, Lord Beith, has said, this respects the devolution arrangements between us.

I wonder if noble Lords will be patient with me if I use this occasion to express my gratitude for the work of Carwyn Jones, the First Minister of the Welsh Assembly, who has announced that he intends to stand down. The steadiness of his hand on the tiller, and indeed his involvement in the discussions that have yielded these amendments, has been considerable. Wales, its parliament and the people of the UK owe him a great deal, and I would like to place this short tribute on the record.

So I think we are sitting pretty with this one. I know King Henry VIII was a Welshman, and he might even have voted with the Government on this one too. Without further ado, we have no problem with this at all.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering]

The noble Lord has the advantage over me. I was not thinking so much of potato seeds but the fact that the Secretary of State has said that we are to have higher standards of animal hygiene, animal health and animal welfare, which I welcome. That follows on from the little debate we have just had. There will have to be physical checks. There cannot be checks managed by technology, in which case potatoes and their seeds could effectively fall within that category. So the noble Lord has actually made and developed that point very neatly for me.

In the context of Amendment 47, I urge the Minister to maintain Clause 8 in the Bill and to keep an open mind as regards potential membership of the European Economic Area or applying to join the European Free Trade Association.

[Lord Beith]

My Lords, notwithstanding the noble Baroness’s arguments, I want to address this group from a different standpoint: that of government Amendment 47A, which is to leave out Clause 8. It may be because I have a suspicious mind, but, while the removal of Clause 8 would be quite welcome to the Constitution Committee, which had considerable concerns about its breadth, I am worried that in removing it the Government have satisfied themselves that there is nothing they could do under Clause 8 that they could not do under Clause 17 and its broad powers. What is more, there are things which the Government can do under Clause 17 which they are prohibited from doing under Clause 8. When we come to Clause 17, we will perhaps have to look more carefully at it than has been done so far.

It would be helpful if the Minister could set out the Government’s argument for deleting Clause 8. I am quite sympathetic to that, even though I understand the standpoint from which the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, was arguing. But were we able to get the Government to move seriously in the direction of having a customs union-EEA, as our vote last week showed that the House wants to do, I am quite confident that ways could be found to do that with or without Clause 8. I would be only too glad to assist if that happens—but I am concerned about the reliance on Clause 17, which may lie behind the removal of Clause 8.