United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Lord Fox and Lord Liddle

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 28th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a very interesting debate to join. It is a pleasure to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, to his place, as it were, once again defending an extremely complex and difficult piece of legislation. I hope he will give pretty comprehensive answers to the points raised by my noble friend Lord Rooker, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, and the noble Lords, Lord Purvis and Lord Inglewood, because they all had great merit.

I spoke at Second Reading but was not able to attend the first day of Committee because of commitments in Cumbria. In all the furore about the unconstitutional and completely unacceptable clauses of the Bill, the Government have got away with the rest of it, which may not be unconstitutional but is certainly unacceptable. Therefore, this House should expose it to very critical scrutiny.

We need clarification—this is where my noble friend Lady Hayter’s amendment is so important—in very simple and clear language of what the Government mean by mutual recognition and how this will work out. The idea of mutual recognition was an important foundational principle in the history of the European Union and the single market, but only because mutual recognition without anything else is a weapon that results in a race to the bottom. In the single market White Paper put forward by Jacques Delors in the early 1980s, the whole point was that you had to have common standards and harmonisation in a list of certain areas—I think there were 300—to go alongside the principle of mutual recognition.

I have two points to make on this. First, on the position of the devolved authorities and the nations of Britain, do the Government recognise that an essential principle of devolution is that diversity and experimentation are good things, and that it is therefore important that in a devolved settlement the devolved nations should be able to experiment with setting standards in the areas of public health, environment and consumers? This is part of the point of devolution. It is not something the UK Government should seek to prevent. It is very important that the Government make clear their support for the principle of devolution and diversity.

My second general point is the one to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, drew attention in his support for my noble friend Lady Hayter’s probing amendment: why do the Government include in their general principle this business of goods being imported into the United Kingdom? Does this essentially tell the devolved Administrations that, in any trade agreement that the UK Government negotiate, they will have no say over the standard of goods coming into the UK and would have to accept them whatever they thought about their compatibility with their own aspirations to set standards? That seems to me a fundamental point that needs an answer. This legislation is deeply complex, but we need clarity from the Government on fundamental points.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a relatively short debate in terms of the Bill so far, but it has raised some fundamental issues which beg some quite deep and considered answers from the Minister.

When the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, brought up Cumbrian cattle-driving and we had the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, to follow, I felt we might have had quite a long discussion around that, although we did not. The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, in characterising Defra as an English department, brought out the Janus face Secretaries of State have in being not only Secretary of State for the United Kingdom but in most cases also Secretary of State for England. Herein lie some of our problems and uncertainties.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, set out and explained very well the issues surrounding mutual recognition. In the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, this House has the benefit of someone with fantastic knowledge and it is important to listen to him. Animal feed is an important area, although it is not always clear. If I may beg your Lordships’ indulgence for a short anecdote, in the mid-1970s our farm was subject to one of the small outbreaks of anthrax, which is very rare—I found the animal that died of it, and it was not a pretty sight. We were put into quarantine—something like lockdown—and it was tracked down to the importation of cheap beans from India. That is why the control of animal food in this country is really important.

In terms of animal feed on the island of Ireland, I was struck that the Government have already exempted the electricity market there—the Minister and I debated this on a statutory instrument—from the overall UK market. They have done that because of the integrated nature of electricity on the island of Ireland; it is an entirely sensible move, of which we approve. It seems to me that animal feed is very similarly integrated and would benefit from a similar island-of-Ireland-wide process. The Minister might like to think about that going forward.

As usual, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, asked a series of excellent and important questions. We need answers to them to understand the objectives of the Bill.

In Amendment 21, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, seeks what I think many of us seek to do: to look at this, as somebody mentioned, through the other end of the telescope. This is turning things upside down. Why do we not start with the common frameworks and what is currently working around the devolved authorities and legislate only what needs to be done to create the market we all want? My noble friend Lord German’s twin-track, two-road approach is a very good example. Where is the gap? How do these twin tracks come together? There is no explanation anywhere of how the common frameworks and the Bill are supposed to work together. The only conclusion I can draw is that the common frameworks are allowed somehow to dwindle, because the Government seem to be putting an enormous amount of energy into the Bill.

As usual, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, is right: we need to facilitate trade and make it as frictionless as possible across the UK. It is a shame we cannot make it frictionless across the whole of the European Union. The fact is, we have devolution, and the internal market Bill must respect that. At present, it seems that it does not. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, made this point very ably.

As usual, my noble friend Lord Purvis came up with a series of important questions, including Scotch whisky-based ones. He came up with the revelation that there is a complete and absolute internal contradiction in the Bill. The Government brought forward an amendment that causes the following to happen: if England decided to set up its own approval system and started approving active chemicals banned in the EU, Scotland could refuse them. Conversely, Scotland could presumably go further than the EU ban and ban substances which England approved. That is the Government’s position, based on an amendment they brought to the Commons. However, he Minister has said that we must stop this happening, and that the Bill will do that. Something is not right, and the Minister needs to explain what is wrong.

The telling point made by my noble friend Lord Purvis and other noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, is that without clear definitions, it will not be the Government causing the race to the bottom—it will be companies taking this to the courts. That is why we expect from the Minister a very detailed answer to these important questions.