European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Howard of Rising Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Lords Chamber

I am coming to the end of my remarks. I would like the Minister to say why the Government cannot publish those two bookends, because if we have them we will be able to judge what the Government are negotiating between the two—and I do not think the Minister will deny that they are negotiating somewhere in between those bookends. Somewhere in the middle there is a mysterious thing called a bespoke agreement. If I remember rightly, bespoke suits take longer to make and cost twice as much—but let us leave that to one side. It will be somewhere in the middle, and when we get it we will be able to judge whether it is near one bookend or the other—so why not do it?

[Lord Howard of Rising (Con)]

The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, seems to place great faith in these assessments or forecasts—but they have almost universally been completely wrong, ever since before the referendum. If noble Lords would like an example, I have from the House of Commons Library some comments on the Treasury:

“In May 2016, the Treasury published forecasts for the immediate economic impact of voting to leave the EU. It forecast for a recession to occur in the second half of 2016, with quarterly GDP growth of minus 0.1% in both Q3 2016 and Q4 2016”.


A second “severe shock” scenario was an even worse forecast.

“In reality, the economy continued to grow at its pre-referendum pace, with quarterly growth of +0.6%”.


That has now been adjusted by the Governor of the Bank of England to close to 2%. Frankly, the assessments and the forecasts are absolute rubbish and there is no point in publishing them.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

I remind the noble Lord that the impact assessment he is reading from was of course produced by the Government that he supports—although he seems to have little shame about that now. Moreover, if one looks at government legislation that comes through every day, hundreds of impact assessments are produced by the Government he supports. Is he saying that they are all rubbish?