Product Safety and Metrology etc. (Amendment etc.) (UK (NI) Indication) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Lord Moylan Excerpts

Friday 27th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, good design and branding have been at the heart of commercial success at least since the Great Exhibition. For example, in 1913, Frank Pick, the legendary managing director of what became the London Underground, commissioned Edward Johnston to produce a typeface for that railway. That typeface is still in use to this day. It is a London icon—clean, simple, modern—and was the exclusive property of TfL until the copyright expired in 2015. It is used on signs, letterheads, the Tube map and everywhere you look.

If noble Lords turn to the sample of the form of the UKNI logo to be imposed on Northern Ireland businesses from the end of this year, they will find that it fails to meet that standard by a long way. To my mind, it is ugly, blockish and typographically illiterate, with its mixture of serif and san-serif letters, designed almost to hamper, rather than promote, the export of Northern Ireland goods and products. My question to my noble friend the Minister is who designed it. Did he have a hand in it himself, or was it produced by a committee? Was public money paid for it and, if so, can we get our money back? Is there anything that can be done, even at this late stage, to improve it?

My second question is more constitutional. Who is making this law? I understand, at a simple level, that this Parliament is clearly making this regulation, because it is in front of us for that purpose. But let us say that, a few months or some time down the road, the democratic leaders in Northern Ireland join together—as I am predicting they might—to say that this logo is not doing the job of marketing and branding, and they would like it changed. To whom would they write? Would it be to the UK Government, so that we could make that decision unfettered? Would they have to write to this strange and unaccountable joint committee that now appears to set many of the rules for the Northern Ireland protocol? Would they be reduced, as leaders in Northern Ireland—the DUP and Sinn Féin—were only a couple of weeks ago, to writing a begging letter to Brussels, in that case to ask if their supermarkets could still be supplied on the customary basis?

Given that Northern Ireland is the only part of Europe that I can think of that is, at the moment, being actively de-democratised, noble Lords would like to know the answers to those questions and have some assurance from my noble friend.