Windsor Framework (Non-Commercial Movement of Pet Animals) Regulations 2024

Lord Bew Excerpts

Wednesday 27th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, there has been some confusion about speaking, so I beg your Lordships’ indulgence and will speak as briefly as I can on this issue.

I put on record the fact that I have never supported the Windsor Framework; I have spoken and voted against it previously. I pay tribute to my friend, the indefatigable and persistent noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, for her amendment, which naturally I support. I also support and pay tribute to Jim Allister KC and Member of Parliament for North Antrim for the excellent evidence he provided to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. He raised important issues, including the potential breach of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and of the UN Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States.

I found the powerful remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Dodds of Duncairn, very compelling and astute. We have a lacuna in terms of our scrutiny and oversight of EU issues in this House and the other place. We no longer have the European Scrutiny Committee, chaired by Bill Cash, my former colleague in the other place. Even the European Affairs Committee in this House is not tasked in its terms of reference to look in detail at statutory instruments such as this. As noble Lords will know, we are very unlikely, by convention, to be in a position to amend or strike down statutory instruments.

I will make a few very brief points. I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, wished to relitigate Brexit; we are not talking about that, we are talking about this statutory instrument. Nevertheless, it is about the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom. It is about a border in the Irish Sea. It is about treating people in Armagh, Fermanagh, Antrim and Down and other parts of Northern Ireland as second-class citizens vis-à-vis people in Surrey, Shropshire or Kent. That is very important.

It is also so unnecessary because, as I have said before in this House, Lars Karlsson brought forward what the EU rather derisively called “magical thinking” but were technical solutions to enable an SPS regime to be put in place in Northern Ireland. That would have avoided a hard border and would not have led us to these draconian regulations.

I am also concerned about these regulations because they were foisted on our Government in 2023 after we left the European Union. They have been made by a supranational legal, legislative and political entity over which we have had no control, influence or ability to make our views clear. That is a significant issue.

I will finish with a detail for the Minister. I am sorry that she has had this hospital pass this evening. She is an excellent Minister, if I may say so, but she is in safe hands with the Northern Ireland Whip sat next to her, making sure that she is on the straight and narrow.

I will press the Minister very briefly. Defra said it is going to engage comprehensively in the run-up to the launch in March 2025. Can she elucidate on that a little bit and tell us a bit more about it? As she knows, the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee talked about the lack of proper and comprehensive public consultation.

In Regulation 5(3) in Part 3, the threshold of evidence for the individual who owns the pet to have to report to the SPS inspection facility is very low and very arbitrary. Maybe the Minister will say something about that.

Is reasonable doubt built into the regulations in cases of suspension following non-compliance under Regulation 6? It is very important that is not misused.

I have two other points. On the reviews, the speed of response by the competent authority in reviewing the decisions is not included in the regulations and it should be. Finally, how will the storage of data under Regulations 9 and 10 be managed? Quite a lot of data is going to be collected. Will it be safe and how will it be stored?

We cannot vote down this statutory instrument. It is a constitutional and democratic outrage. I find it unacceptable. For that reason, I will strongly support the very reasonable and sensible amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey.

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I support the statutory instrument because it follows logically from the Windsor Framework, which is complex and, in many respects, inevitably unsatisfactory in certain details but a necessary compromise with the European Union and one that is part of the process by which devolution was restored to Northern Ireland. Underneath everything that lies in the statutory instrument is the concept that Ireland is one eco unit. That is what is in the Windsor Framework and what underlies this legislation. It is the most fundamental point underlying it.

However, the Windsor Framework does not say that Ireland is one economic unit. This is an important point to make while we address this subject. Page 5 of the Windsor Framework says:

“Inherent in this new way forward is the prospect of significant divergence between the two distinct economies on the island of Ireland—from food and drink to plants and pets, building on the existing differences in every area of economic and political life such as services”—


which, by the way, appear to be very strong now in Northern Ireland—

“migration, currency and taxation”.

That is the Windsor Framework. That is the international law that the Government, who give a very strong emphasis to their commitment to international law, are committed to.

Yet today I listened to the Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson—at Question Time giving excellent answers, for which I am extremely grateful, to a number of searching questions, but on this point, she said something that is open to misinterpretation. She said there is an island economy. I agree. There is no question that there is an island economy and that for some activity, whether it be dairy products or the single electricity market, which has been mentioned already tonight, as well as a handful of individual companies that operate on an all-Ireland basis, there is an island economy, but there are many more individual companies operating across the UK’s internal market.

The Government are in a position where they cannot leave any ambiguity. This is part of the process by which Stormont was returned, and the Good Friday agreement was returned to operation. The “island economy” is a complex and slippery phrase. I have just said that I can understand completely why somebody might say there is one, but it is also very important to notice the very strong commitment in the Windsor Framework to there being two distinct economies on the island of Ireland. I suppose you can say that the island economy is a fact; it is just not as significant as the fact there are two distinct economies on the island of Ireland. There is a danger here that if we do not get this right, the whole compromise which has led to the re-establishment of Stormont will start to unravel. This is a commitment the Government have entered into in international law.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I cannot fault virtually anything the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, said in her eloquent analysis from a technical point of view. The noble Lord, Lord Dodds, made a very important point that there is going to be a conveyor belt of these regulations as far as the eye can see at this time. Every time one of these comes along, there will be a wailing and a gnashing of teeth, and we will complain, and quite rightly so, because it is an affront to our status as citizens of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. The noble Lord, Lord Dodds, mentioned the future and how things can be changed. I think we have to shift our focus to how we change things in a permanent and much more beneficial way.

In 2026, there is a review pencilled in of the trade and co-operation agreement. I believe that we should be putting our heads together now to develop a series of proposals that can rectify, in as far as it is possible, the situation we are in. While politicians do not like to say it, the truth is that this problem is fundamentally insoluble because we are half in and half out of the single market and half in and half of the United Kingdom’s single market. So, ultimately, we are fiddling around with these sorts of things and tweaking them, and tonight the Minister can justifiably say that this instrument is less bad than the one before it and that is true, but, as was pointed by the noble Baroness, what do we do with tourists? Does somebody bring their pet with them and have no intention of staying in Northern Ireland? We can all find ways to chip away at these things, and that is true.

However, we must now focus on working up an alternative that at least would begin to restore some of the sovereignty and remove some of the friction. I have to say that if people had done their homework some years ago, all of this was foreseen and foreseeable. There are no surprises here. The minutiae might be different. We might see something here that we had not quite seen, but we all knew and were told and were warned—we had debates galore in this House and in other places—that when the negotiation on Brexit was taking place, it was probably the worst piece of United Kingdom statecraft that many of us have ever witnessed. It was a bad negotiation and, ironically, some of those who negotiated it who are sitting on their Benches are getting up and attacking the negotiation. The individual who led it is attacking the outcome of his own negotiation, but that is neither here nor there.