European Qualifications (Health and Social Care Professions) (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Thornton

Thursday 7th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I trust that the House heard with great pleasure the Minister’s comments on how major an advantage this whole arrangement in the European Union has been to us. We should not be discussing any of these SIs without reminding people that our membership of the European Union has been a huge advantage to us, and that what we are doing at the moment is picking apart something which is to our advantage, for reasons which are increasingly difficult to understand. We should not allow any of this to go past without constantly reminding the Government that they are leading this country into a position in which it will be poorer and less advantaged than when they came to power. A historic responsibility will lie on their shoulders, and we should remind them of that constantly.

My concern in this whole debate is that we are being asked to discuss this SI under a double falsehood. The first is the argument that we need it because we might crash out of the European Union, but that we need not be too worried because we will not crash out. The second difficulty is that, if we do not crash out of the European Union, we are legislating for a series of things which will be there in the course of further negotiations. Even if what is referred to at the moment as the Prime Minister’s “deal” were to be accepted—and it is manifestly not satisfactory—it is not a deal at all. It is an agreement to go on discussing to get a deal. During that period of time, what we are discussing here will be there in the background. There have been a number of occasions on which Opposition spokesmen have rightly pointed out that the trouble with these things is that if they are in the background while we are negotiating, they have a real effect. We have to take this very seriously.

Nor should we pass over the problem we are presenting ourselves with. We are saying that, to get the best advantage out of this ludicrous foot-shooting activity, we are going to make sure that every European Union national can come to this country to do what we want them to do without there being any difficulty. Of course, we cannot do any of the things that have made that particularly valuable in addition; we are not going to share the information both ways, which is what the European Union enabled us to do. Rather like the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, I have a real concern that the IMI system will not continue. The idea that you can happily forget about it because it happens to be convenient, and do the things you can do because they happen to be convenient, seems to me an abnegation of responsibility which I find extremely difficult to accept.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, rightly referred to the additional matter of the electronic alert system. We will not be alerted to the very professionals we most want to know about, because we will have decided that, because Britain is so ultimately different from everywhere else, we will not have this association. I know it is not the fault of the Minister, who is having to defend the ridiculous situation in which we find ourselves, but it is for this House to remind people all the time of what this really means.

Then we go on to the fact that these regulations are in conformity with the withdrawal Act, which says that we are not going to use it to create any new legislation, but merely take into national legislation things that would not be in it if we left the European Union without any agreement. The trouble is that this is not actually possible, because we have to have regulators making decisions. They are now going to make decisions under a new regime—in that sense it is a new regime—and I very much want to hear the response to the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, on how we make sure the regulators make, roughly speaking, the same decisions across the whole range, and how we make sure that those regulators do not make decisions that extend or change the position we are in now. The latter would be contrary to the undertakings given by the Government.

However, the word that I very much worried about when the Minister used it was “flexibility”. She said that no longer being in the European Union would give us a flexibility on the establishment of professional qualifications which we did not have up until now. I do not think that flexibility can possibly be accepted within this SI, because that genuinely changes the position from what it was before. It may be that it is convenient for the Government to talk about flexibility as an advantage. I find it pretty difficult to see what that advantage would be. What would be the point of being flexible in changing our arrangements in such a way that they were out of line with the arrangements of our neighbours, when we rely upon those neighbours for such a high proportion of our professionals? It seems to me that flexibility is one of those convenient words used by the Government and those who believe in Brexit to suggest that there are some advantages hidden here which we have not yet got hold of. I do not think that there are, or that it would be legal for us to use flexibility under this SI, because it is specifically not supposed to introduce into our legislation anything that we have not had up to now.

I am afraid I will move on to something that I constantly say; that there is no impact assessment here. Why is there not? This is the real reason I say to the Minister that this is unacceptable. The reason there is no impact assessment is that the Government want us to believe that there is no impact. It is very inconvenient for the Government to say that the impact is that we will no longer have the advantages we had before leaving the European Union. They ought to be listing those advantages and explaining what the impact on us will be. But they are not doing that, because that would make more and more people aware of the lunacy of the measures we are now taking, and the ridiculous position in which Brexit places us.

But then there is another question. If you do not have an impact assessment, you also do not appear to have any idea about how much it will cost. I am afraid that I am a Conservative, and I am always interested in costs—I like to know how much it costs. I know that that is a disadvantage in the whole Brexit discussion, because the one thing we never get is the cost. It is amazing, is it not? We have a Conservative Government who never talk about the costs of Brexit, which is an absolutely ludicrous position for us to be in. Let us ask ourselves—I repeat the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton—“What burden? What resources? What cost?”

One of my difficulties is that I have had the misfortune to have had to sit through a large number of these SIs, and every time you ask about the cost, the Minister concerned explains—charmingly, and with considerable aplomb—that the costs are negligible.

[Baroness Thornton]

Negligible.

[Lord Deben]

I have got it right this time. That is what they say. In every individual case, negligibility may well be the truth, but what is negligible in one case, when added up with a lot of other “negligible” costs, ends up being rather expensive. I am amazed at the number of things you can do with negligible cost. We are filled with these SIs—with all the things that we can do for nothing. I ran businesses, and I have to say that I do not know anything you can do in business which does not cost you something. I would love the Government to explain to me how they are managing to move whole areas of control and regulation over to British regulators without any cost. I would be able to apply that to my businesses and it would be extremely valuable, because all I know is that the moment you change or move anything, it costs money.

I want to know not only how much it costs but whether we have the resources for it. It is also said that we have these organisations that are perfectly capable of doing all this, as if this is an easy thing to do, when in fact it is not only difficult, but if we get it wrong, we are endangering people’s lives. Clearly, we have not worked out what the cost of doing this is; I just do not understand whether we have the human resources and the trained resources to do it. After all, we have shown so far that we cannot run the National Health Service without large numbers of people coming in from outside. I would like to understand whether we can regulate all this without some additional resources, and if so, we ought to know exactly what resources we will need and how much they will cost.

I am sorry that I have to say this to the Minister with such vigour, but it needs to be said; otherwise, this House looks pretty damn stupid. We look as if we are sitting around, having a gentle argument about what is the programme for catastrophe. This is what we are talking about: how a nation decides how to put itself into a very much less favourable position than it is in at the moment. Sometimes people say, “Ah, but Britain will manage—look what it did during the war!” But we did not ask for the war; we did not say that we wanted it. It happened, and we said that we had to fight it. Here we are asking for it, and are seriously sitting around planning for it. We are asked to do that with a degree of politeness and charm, and courtesy and care, when we ought to be very angry indeed that any Government should even suggest that we need SIs like this.

Human Tissue (Quality and Safety for Human Application) (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Debate between Lord Deben and Baroness Thornton

Wednesday 9th January 2019 Grand Committee

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I will not repeat the remarks I made on the previous statutory instrument about the cost, the waste of time and expertise, and so on of the exercise that we are going through. Instead, I will make a few points about this particular instrutment.

European Union safeguards on public health set high standards for the quality and safety of human cells and tissue. I thank the Brexit Health Alliance for its briefing on this subject, because it and I agree that the continuation of the UK’s alignment with these standards is in the interests of citizens on both sides of the European Union/UK border. I do not know what is going to happen next, so I will not speculate. It is clear that it is in the interests of citizens that we get this right. In the UK, we have the Human Tissue Authority, an experienced regulatory body which, one assumes, will continue to be resourced and to work to the same safety standards as before exit.

The issues I raised concerning embryology cross over to the issue of human tissue, and are about inspectors, the safety of premises, the cost and how tissues will cross borders when the UK becomes a third country. I can see from the regulations and the Explanatory Note what the Government think will happen to tissues and organs, but perhaps the Minister could walk us through what will actually happen. Will tissue that is needed in the UK from, say, Spain be able to reach the person who requires it without let, hindrance or regulation? That—and I will say the same on the next SI on organ donation—seems to be the crux of this issue for the ordinary person: whether or not these regulations will allow that traffic to take place with the same ease as today. If it cannot and does not, then these regulations will not work.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister has been put in an impossible position, not by this Committee, but by the Government. We should apologise to the Minister for the fact that we have only her to address in this matter, when we are trying to address the Government. It is no good avoiding the fact that these are part of contingency measures which are themselves entirely unacceptable, because they are not going to work.

The whole process we are concerned with, and to which I deeply object, is to try to shore up an entirely fictitious position. If the Government had really believed, right at the beginning, that there was to be no deal, they would not have proposed a series of measures which were about having a deal. They would have been organising themselves for what would happen if there were no deal. I am applying this particularly to the second of the SIs we are discussing. It is not my noble friend’s fault, and of course she is going to say that it is not within her competence, which I understand, and I admire her considerably. After all, she is my Whip and she keeps me under considerable control, as is noticeable. It is not fair that the Government have put all Ministers into the position in which they have to argue the unarguable. They have to argue the impossible.

Let us look at the issues here. The argument is that if we left the European Union without a deal, we would need legislation in place to ensure that life would continue as normal—but it ain’t gonna continue as normal if we do not have a deal. That is what the Committee has such difficulty in dealing with. What happens if we cannot import or export because there is no possibility of getting through the ports? The Minister said that we will use planes but, if I may say so, the plane situation would be worse because the international agreements on insurance for aeroplanes would collapse immediately and there is no mechanism to put them back into place.