United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Lord Purvis of Tweed and Baroness Fookes

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

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

I have had a request to speak after the Minister from the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

The Minister did not explain why services from the Isle of Man to the rest of the United Kingdom will be considered within the United Kingdom internal market, but goods coming from the Isle of Man are outside the single market. There are many service providers from the Isle of Man. In fact, financial services are probably a bigger part of the Isle of Man economy than goods for export. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain this. The Minister did not respond to my point about whether these regulations apply to the services that citizens receive for higher education. This is very important within Scotland.

My point to the Minister, I believe, justifies my argument on the good working relationship across the four nations on fertilisers and pesticides. The Minister referenced the justification for the government amendment about the need to work in emergencies. Paragraph 1 of Schedule 1 already has exclusions from market access principles for threats to human, animal and plant health. Emergencies were already covered. The amendment that the Government brought forward was not on emergencies; I looked at the regulations that it covers, which are in paragraph 9 of Schedule 1 on fertilisers and pesticides. The Bill will allow the Scottish Government, and a Welsh Government or UK Government acting for England, to make a different judgment on the advice they get from the single regulator about the safety of a pesticide for, as the Minister Paul Scully said, “movement and use”.

So, if English farmers, under the authority of the regulations in the Bill, decide to use fertilisers on crops—barley—that are unsafe in the view of the Scottish Government, the Bill will allow the Scottish Government to prevent that barley from being used in Scottish distilleries. The Minister said that the whole purpose of the Bill was to prevent that from arising. So he has managed to undermine the entire intent of his argument at Second Reading, which was that the purpose of this legislation was to prevent a barrier from a different decision being made on safety grounds. If this amendment, which the Government brought forward, allows for different decisions to be made on the safety of pesticides used in different parts of the UK, I hope the Minister will reflect on what he said about the justification for the Bill.

Trade Bill

Debate between Lord Purvis of Tweed and Baroness Fookes

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 6th October 2020 Grand Committee

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

I have received a request from the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, to speak after the Minister.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his comprehensive response to the debate on this group of amendments. I am grateful for that; it shows the seriousness of this issue. I and other noble Lords will reflect on his remarks.

I have two questions. The first relates to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, which I support. As I understood it, if we were to bring retaliatory measures or sanctions, they would have to have been authorised by the dispute settlement body at the WTO, so by the time they came to Parliament, either under the negative procedure or the affirmative procedure, they would be public anyway. Therefore, Parliament’s ability to use the affirmative procedure would be based on what was already in the public domain.

Secondly, I am still not sure why the Government have not indicated that they will continue with their support for moving towards an investment court system in our continuity agreements with Singapore, Vietnam and Mexico, which are yet be signed, given that the European Union has stated categorically that moving towards such a system is the approach for those countries and is now, to quote the Commission in October 2019, “on the table” in all ongoing investment negotiations. I simply do not understand why the Government, who supported moving to a multilateral system, now say that they are fully engaged and cannot say what their position is yet. Why can the Government not simply say that they support this in principle and are working with others to bring it about?