House of Lords: Sittings

Lord Elton Excerpts

Thursday 20th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, we are all prepared to give up our holidays for the urgent affairs of state. I am sure that our Scottish colleagues would be more than willing to do that. My noble friend the Opposition Chief Whip always puts the country before his personal convenience. I know he will be one of the first on the plane down to London after the holidays.

I return to the no-deal preparations that are being made, because they are extremely serious.

[Lord Elton (Con)]

I do not wish to give the noble Lord reason to extend his oration but I would like an explanation of how he feels that this House will have any effect on the executive decisions of the House of Commons, who have never listened to our arguments about this before and are unlikely to do so in the future. It seems to me that we would just be beating the earth to no purpose.

[Lord Adonis]

I have a very high opinion of your Lordships and their ability to persuade the House of Commons to do the right thing. There is not much point in our meeting—ever—if we take the view that the opinions we express are going to be rejected by the House of Commons. We are here in this House because we believe we do make a difference, not because we are irrelevant, although if the noble Lord and others think they are irrelevant there are options for them to avoid being a burden on the taxpayer. But that is not the view that I take.

I come back to the serious issue that we are discussing. This is what Mr Heaton-Harris said yesterday is involved in the no-deal preparations which the Cabinet yesterday agreed to intensify because of the likelihood of there being no resolution to the Brexit crisis before us. He said that,

“we have taken further steps to ensure that people and businesses are ready. That has included publishing more than 100 pages of guidance for businesses on processes and procedures at the border in a no-deal scenario; contacting 145,000 businesses that trade with the EU, telling them to start getting ready for no-deal customs procedures; advising hundreds of ports of entry, traders, pharmaceutical firms and other organisations that use the border about the disruption that they might experience so that they can get their supply chains ready; and producing a paper on citizens’ rights”.

It is hard to exaggerate how serious those preparations are outside wartime. The legal arrangements for a no-deal Brexit are still not fully in place. The preparations are a huge expense to the taxpayer and a massive drain on the resources of Whitehall. Mr Heaton-Harris said:

“More than 10,000 civil servants are working on Brexit with a further 5,000 in the pipeline, which will allow us to accelerate our preparation”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/12/18; cols. 879-80.]


I am not sure what it means to be a civil servant in the pipeline of Brexit; none the less, more than 5,000 are in that happy condition. As I say, short of being in a war situation, it is hard to conceive of a more alarming position in which the Government could place the country.

Surely our duty in Parliament is to see that this crisis is resolved as soon as possible. We have an opportunity to do so by meeting earlier rather than later in January. I believe we have a duty to do so. Therefore, I beg to move.