UK-EU Trade and Co-operation Agreement: Regions and Industrial Sectors

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

Thursday 27th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, on the Northern Ireland protocol, the issue is that the protocol is a very delicately balanced document designed to support a very delicately balanced agreement—that is, the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. When the protocol is implemented it needs to have regard to that balance and the set of provisions that try to protect this delicately balanced situation. At the moment, in our view, the protocol is not being implemented in a way that reflects that balance. It does not reflect the full dimensions of the Good Friday agreement, east-west and north-south, and that is at the root of the difficulty. That is not what we expected when we agreed it, but we still hope that we can get into that situation in discussions with the EU in the weeks and months to come.

On future impact assessments, when legislation is needed to implement reforms or changes, whether these result from the TCA or from anything else, there will of course be an impact assessment. That is the usual practice.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con) [V]]

Does my noble friend agree that it is absurd to attempt to measure the impact of Brexit in such a short term, as suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, and others, and that other factors will be difficult to separate from Brexit? Above all, new policies, whether they be domestic policies or trade agreements, take time to build up, and the impact of Brexit over one year, five years or 15 years will be very different. Do all these questions not sound suspiciously like attempts to rerun the Brexit referendum, and is it not time that we all recognised that the result has to be accepted and we should move on?

[Lord Frost (Con)]

I agree with my noble friend. These questions have been extensively debated over the last five years and the range of views on that subject has possibly not changed significantly over that period. Our view is that the medium-term benefits of being a full democracy, of having control over our own laws and regulations and having the ability to tailor them to our own requirements as a country, will be of huge benefit to us, so we are very confident that those benefits will materialise. However, he is right that five months after the end of the transition period is a bit soon to be 100% clear about that.