United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Lord Vaux of Harrowden and Lord Liddle

Report stage & Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 25th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 62A, proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles. We owe her our thanks for bringing this important wrinkle in the Bill to our attention. She and the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, have already eloquently set out the reasons why this amendment is needed, so I will not detain the House for too long.

The Bill creates draconian powers of investigation for the CMA, with associated penalties which, as we have heard, are much more suited to its duties of investigating market abuse. Indeed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, pointed out, the wording has actually been lifted from those duties. However, the purposes of the investigation set out in this Bill are very different from market abuse investigations. In this Bill they are investigations into the impacts of regulations or provisions made by the various national authorities. Businesses are not in this case being suspected of, or investigated for, market abuse, yet the Bill will mean that they will have to respond to notices subject to penalty as if they were.

Even if we reluctantly accept that these powers and penalties are appropriate—and I do not—we must surely ensure that the powers, and in particular the penalties, do not become an undue or unfair burden on business. I listened carefully to what the noble Lord the Minister had to say in this opening speech, and I am afraid that I do not think that the protections and the consultations that he mentioned go far enough in this case.

While larger businesses may be able to cope with such an investigation, small companies do not have compliance departments or in-house legal teams. They do not have the excess capacity to be able to deal with such investigations. Even in normal times, these investigations would be burdensome for small companies, and it is even more the case when they are trying to recover from the Covid crisis and at the same face up to the challenges that leaving the EU single market will create. This is no time to load additional burdens on to small businesses. Therefore, I urge the Minister to accept this simple—and, I had hoped, uncontroversial—amendment, or at least to come forward with some protections for smaller companies, as has been suggested.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the opening statement from the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. I think he has proposed an improvement in the Bill, by adding further requirements for consultation with the devolved Administrations. That is for the good. I also have a great deal of sympathy with the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles. I can see the argument that, if there are impediments to the internal market in a particular sector, the new body will require an information-gathering power, and if you have that power you have to have an enforcement power. It is welcome that the Minister says that these powers will be exercised in a voluntary and proportionate way. Yes, maybe—but I do think that there is a special concern about small businesses, to which I hope the Minister can find a way of responding positively in his reply.

I have to say—and I cannot resist the temptation to poke fun at the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, on this—that if such clauses had been proposed by the European Commission, we would have heard his screams of protest from the committee rooms of Brussels to the banks of the Tyne, which he represented, and he would have raised the roof on the wonderful auditorium of the plenary in Strasbourg. I can hear him now in excellent Brexiteer mode. Of course, now that Brexit has happened, these concerns are of no consequence. The truth is—and I think this is going to become clear—that for business Brexit means more and more bureaucracy, and this is what we are seeing in terms of the new customs arrangements and in terms of this Bill. There—I cannot resist making that point.

Having said that, there are many serious issues with this Bill. I regard it as a treaty-breaking, devolution-wrecking, United Kingdom-unravelling Bill. These are serious points for debate and many of the amendments we are considering this afternoon, I am afraid, contribute to those consequences. So I hope that a compromise can be reached on this matter before Third Reading and, on that basis, I will abstain in the Division.