European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Lord Bridges of Headley Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting
Monday 20th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bowness (Con)]

My Lords, I have added my name to this simplified amendment. In Committee, I appealed to the Government to recognise that many people remain concerned about the nature of our future arrangements with the European Union. This is not about for or against Brexit but about the future. The Government appear to want us to take everything on trust, but we need to know in advance not the details of their negotiation but the approach they will take in negotiations.

This is not a novel idea. I know that in the United Kingdom we are not keen on adopting approaches taken by other countries, but—without going into the details—I refer Ministers to the working of the grand committee of the Finnish parliament. It is a good start to learn how other parliaments reconcile coming to an agreement with their Governments about their approach to European Union matters and the attitude we seem to be taking. That approach, with modifications, is to be found in the proceedings—and indeed, so far as Finland is concerned, in the constitutions—of member states. It is not a novel idea.

Statements, Questions and take-note Motions in arrears of events are no substitute for the kind of procedures to which we refer. The citizens who accept Brexit but want to ensure that we try to keep as many of the benefits of the last 40 years as possible need to be listened to. If the Government do not bring forward any amendment at Third Reading to deal with this, I am afraid many people will feel that the Government, in the name of an ideological pursuit of a hard Brexit and possibly no deal, have no intention of healing the divisions in the country. The Government need to establish some trust among the rest of us.

[Lord Bridges of Headley (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly on this, largely echoing a lot of what the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said. In Committee, much was said about how the Government are “deliberately cutting” Parliament

“out of any meaningful role”, [Official Report, 15/1/20; col. 719.]

to quote the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. We heard it again just a moment ago, when she said the Government are shutting out voices from the debate.

I concede entirely that—as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, rightly put it—this amendment is a watered-down version of the one debated in Committee, but my objections to it remain the same. I will not overstate the case; it is important not to do so. For example, I would not claim that this amendment will bind the hands of Government, and of course it will not thwart Brexit. I will make just two simple points.

The first is that the amendment creates what I see as a legislative straitjacket that binds us into an inflexible parliamentary process that cannot really take account of the diplomatic and political reality of the negotiations, which—as we all know—by their very nature will not abide by the bi-monthly reporting cycle that the amendment sets out.

The second and much more profound point—this is what the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, was referring to—is that Parliament already has considerable powers of scrutiny to hold the Government to account. I know my noble friend slightly dismisses them; I do not. I see them as absolutely intrinsic to the way that this House and the other place work. I am not talking here about the shenanigans we saw in the last Parliament, with MPs taking control of parliamentary business, but those traditional means of scrutiny—the other means that Parliament has, in this House and the other place, to interrogate and scrutinise.

I asked the Library to do some research for me. I asked how many PNQs, Urgent Questions, Oral Statements, Select Committee reports, Written Statements, Oral Questions and Written Questions have touched on Brexit since the day of the referendum. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, may say that this is nothing or is irrelevant; I totally disagree. In the calculation the Library made, it excluded the Bills we have debated, including the 650 hours this House has spent on debating EU-related issues. Let me give your Lordships the results of this exercise. Since the referendum, there have been, in Parliament as a whole: 10 Private Notice Questions related to Brexit; 32 Urgent Questions; 116 Oral Statements; 179 Select Committee reports; 743 Written Statements; 6,241 Oral Questions and supplementaries; and 15,366 Written Questions. I do not think this can be just waved away as nothing; I see it as fundamental. This is 22,687 items that drive a coach and horses through the need for this amendment, 22,687 ways in which Parliament has had a meaningful role. It can interrogate Ministers on the points that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, made, and I believe this is 22,687 reasons why we do not need the amendment.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

If the noble Lord’s research had gone a little further back, he might have been quite startled by what he found. He would have found that the procedures laid down in this amendment are almost precisely those that the Conservative Government applied in 1970 when negotiating our accession. Regular reports to Parliament, regular Questions by all in both Houses—they are all there, and there is nothing wrong with it.

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

I totally take that point, but I do not believe we should be setting this out in statute—as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said. There is nothing to prevent the Government and Ministers coming to this House and the other place to make that point, nothing to prevent MPs calling for Urgent Questions and so on and so forth, so I am sorry to say that I disagree with the noble Lord.