EU Exit: End of Transition Period

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 24th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the opportunity to question the Statement, despite it dealing with only one, albeit a visible, part of the preparations needed for 1 January: the physical movement of goods. On finances, accounting, the mutual recognition of qualifications, equivalence, citizens’ rights, consumer protection and pet passports, there is nothing. I was asked recently about what would happen to a UK national working and living abroad who, for example, retires back to the UK in 10 years’ time, after the cut-off for the temporary measures, with his or her EU spouse and children. Will that family be able to return with the British national? The fact that these questions are still being asked is testimony to the amount of uncertainty remaining.

The Statement is very UK-focused, with no mention of the challenges to the Crown dependencies, nor indeed to Gibraltar, which has had to issue a technical notice warning that while EU goods will hopefully still be imported with the same processes, anything from Britain will have to be checked into the EU through a border post and checked back out again. While I welcome the chance to ask about the challenges our exporters, importers, ports and customs face, we should not pretend that this covers everything, nor that everything is done and dusted.

From the Statement, we have learned of the risk of 7,000 lorries in Kent. In order to help visualise this, my honourable friend Kevin Brennan helpfully pictured it as a single line from Dover to Westminster. Clearly, the Government do not want them all in Kent, so they are introducing a “Kent access permit”, which I guess is today’s equivalent of a “Passport to Pimlico”—presumably with Michael Gove as today’s Stanley Holloway. It is unclear how these access permits will be policed, because there can hardly be a “ring of steel” around the county. Can the Minister therefore tell the House how many roads go into Kent, how many police will be needed to carry out the checks and where he envisages finding the extra police, as I presume that others will not have the authority to halt or turn back an otherwise legal lorry? Can he also outline how these measures will prioritise perishable goods and key degradable items such as radioisotopes and medical products, and just-in-time supply chains?

Given that much of the documentation required will be electronic, it could easily continue within lorries en route, so it may not be complete when they enter Kent but would be finalised by Dover. How is that going to be policed? Once in Kent, the lorries may still have to go to the yet-to-be-built lorry parks the Government are planning in 29 local authority areas, without bothering to consult residents. What are the costs of the lorry parks and their staffing? Are those included in the costs noted for “the border” because they will be inland?

Mr Gove has said that

“we have invested in the sites in Ebbsfleet and North Weald, Ashford, Warrington and the west midlands … we are working with the Welsh Assembly Government to invest in a facility near Holyhead in Anglesey.”—[Official Report, Commons, 23/9/20; col. 969.]

When will these sites be ready and what are the costs?

It is no good telling business to act now without information or systems in place. They are pleading for the details to which they need to work. The Statement says:

“Every business trading with Europe will need to … familiarise itself with the new customs procedures”.


Quite so, but they do not know what those new procedures are. The food and drink industry would love to be ready for Brexit but there is no guidance about what labels businesses will need to use to sell their goods legally into the EU and Northern Ireland next year. As I mentioned in Grand Committee yesterday, this applies particularly to the organic sector.

The Government need to explain why on earth all the essential prerequisites for a smooth transition are not already here. The Statement talks of £700 million for infrastructure and new technology, 1,000 extra staff, £80 million to help businesses, plus a new information campaign; all on top of what has already been spent—more than £4 billion, according to the NAO—including on staff, external advice and advertising. In addition, we still have the cost of Mr Grayling’s non-existent ferries and other no-deal preparations. The Minister may not have the answer today but will he write to me with the full, total costs of government expenditure needed for the change to our trading arrangements?

The Government also acknowledge that there will be some £7 billion worth of additional bureaucracy for businesses. Can the Minister also write with the full cost to the Government and to business of all the changes that will be needed? It would also be interesting to see alongside those costs an estimate of how many years before those “great prizes” and export opportunities mentioned in the Statement pay off all the investment of the change before we are able to reap the real benefit.

I have a specific question for the Minister. The Statement says that our new trade deals will

“help developing nations to grow faster”

and provide “lower prices for consumers”. Can he explain how that will happen and why only now it becomes possible? We would love to see both outcomes—developing nations growing faster and lower prices for consumers—but I fear that it might simply mean less being done, lower standards and less protection for the environment. To reassure me that that is not the case, perhaps the Minister could explain how that is achievable in a less harmful way. If he has time, he might like to put on record the Government’s response to the latest LSE/UK in a Changing Europe view, published today, that the economic cost of no-deal could be two or three times as bad as the impact of Covid.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I am not sure whether to sympathise with the Minister for having to defend a Statement with which he cannot entirely agree, to admire his loyalty in following each step the Government take towards a harder break with the EU than was ever hinted at by the Vote Leave campaign in the referendum, or to be appalled by his willingness to swallow the shifty rationalisations of the Johnson-Cummings-Gove cabal.

Yesterday in Grand Committee, the noble Lord, Lord True, attacked the European Union for challenging

“the United Kingdom’s well-established position on state aid”.—[Official Report, 23/9/20; col. GC 506.]

True or false? I asked two friends in the City if they knew what the Government’s established policy on state aid was and they burst out laughing at the idea that there is any clear policy. The interview that Lynton Crosby gave the Financial Times on Monday helped me to understand the Government’s current position. He said that

“in negotiations like this you need a little bit of crazy to keep your opponents guessing”.

I thought, “Ah, this is the art of the deal. The Donald Trump approach to negotiation—monster your opponents, talk tough, insist that they act reasonably, and either they will compromise further than they intended to or you can walk away and blame them for the failure. It is the Johnson-Trump playbook.” If the Statement is an attempt to bluff the EU into believing that we are well prepared for a no-deal outcome, it is clearly a failure. It shows that we are woefully unprepared and is an attempt to shift the blame onto business and potentially on to the French and Belgian Governments.

It has been clear to almost everyone concerned with the UK’s external trade since Theresa May’s Government decided to leave the single market that the channel ports would pose problems, except that Dominic Raab did not realise that and Boris Johnson did not bother to think about it. It was also clear that it would take well over a year to create the new infrastructure needed and to recruit and train the additional staff. Yet, here we are, 100 days short of 2021, and the Statement deplores a “lack of business preparedness”. The rest of us deplore the lack of government preparedness. The same mixture of incompetence, ideology and negligence that has marked the Government’s approach to Covid-19 marks their approach to the channel ports.

The same sweeping aside of inconvenient facts marks Ministers’ handling of the Irish border. The British Academy held its first seminar on the problem of the Irish border if the UK were to leave the EU in March 2016, attended by officials, among others. Yet the Prime Minister now claims that in October 2019, three years later, he still did not understand the complexity of the issue. The Statement refers to hundreds more Border Force staff “being recruited now”. Why were they not recruited months ago? How many of the additional Border Force and customs personnel required will be fully trained and in post by 1 January, and how many are still being recruited or trained?

The Statement refers to new technology being important. Is this now being fully tested and will it be in working order on 1 January? The Statement refers to “queues” and “associated disruption and delay” in Dover, at least for the first six months. What arrangements have been made to ensure that fresh food, vegetables and fish are not delayed beyond the point where they are spoiled, which would lead to shortages in British supermarkets? Can the Minister explain what is meant by the warning that

“if our neighbours decline to be pragmatic”

we will face the worst circumstances? Do we demand that the French and Belgians decline to enforce their own border checks because we are not ready to enforce our own? Is this the Trump-Johnson playbook again: “We are unreasonable but will pin the blame for chaos on you, unless you help get us out of the mess”?

The noble Lord, Lord True, will now defend Michael Gove’s extraordinary Statement with his weasel words about an “exit on Australian terms” and his fantasies about how a “truly sovereign state” may behave. I hope that there will come a point where the noble Lord will consider that his self-respect as a Conservative requires him not to follow Johnson and Cummings’s efforts further down the road to alternative reality and fake facts, be true to his best instincts instead and follow the principled example of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen.

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Lord True) (Con)]

My Lords, there were a number of observations there, some of which could be characterised as a little wide of the Statement and perhaps a little behind the game—the game being that the British people have decided to leave the European Union. We are leaving the single market and the customs union and are preparing for that. Frankly, continually railing about this situation—as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, did with some colourful language in parts of his intervention—does not help us address some of the specific issues in this Statement. For the avoidance of doubt, I am very content with the direction of travel of the United Kingdom and this Government. Unfortunately, I cannot ease the angst of the Liberal Democrat party in that respect, but I note it. Since the noble Lord offered sympathy to me, I reciprocate.

So far as the specific questions I was asked are concerned, I hope I have made a note of most of them. If I have not, I will follow them up. The overall stance of both interventions was, “Why haven’t we done more sooner? Why are there still some uncertainties?” Obviously, there are still some uncertainties; that is the nature of a broad negotiation. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, went wide of the specifics in the Statement, as she fairly acknowledged, but much of the central, core stuff that this Statement is concerned with flows from the fact—which is not affected by whether we get a free trade agreement—that we are leaving the customs union and have to address that situation. We have already adjusted our own phasing of border controls up until July 2021 specifically to help. I note what was said about our friends and counterparties in other member states. Obviously, their policy decisions are for them, but we hope to have fruitful and helpful exchanges with them up to and through this process’s conclusion.

I was asked about Gibraltar. I assure the noble Baroness that the Foreign Office is working closely with Gibraltar and that its interests will very much be taken into account in the transition process. Next Monday there is a meeting of the withdrawal agreement joint committee, which will deal with a number of aspects.

Comment was made about the reports in newspapers about what was called the Kent access pass. It was said in newspapers that this was a border in Kent. The noble Baroness asked how this would operate. It is an approach related to road use, and it is not intended that every vehicle will be stopped. As the noble Baroness says, that would be difficult to do. The reality is that disruption will occur if vehicles without the right documentation arrive at the point of departure. The Government’s whole strategy—our conversations with the road haulage industry, the publicity campaigns we have been running and the process of “Check an HGV” and smart freight—is designed to make sure that the maximum number of haulage vehicles will have the appropriate documentation. If they enter Kent and do not have that documentation, it will be possible for that to be picked up by ANPR and other resources.

The concentration will be on the M2 and M20. The Kent Resilience Forum is looking at all aspects of movement in Kent, but it is a roads-based approach intended to reinforce the advice with an element of deterrent. The cost of the port and inland infra- structure is up to £470 million; some of that is in place. Conversations are ongoing with local authorities and local Members of Parliament about the specifics. Some of this has already been put in the public domain; more will come into the public domain shortly.

On standards, there is not a direct correlation between price and standards. Some very high-quality goods can be cheaper. One of the purposes of free trade deals, which the Statement quite rightly says will help many countries around the world, is that—this is in the history of free trade deals—they tend to lower prices. That is to the benefit of the underprivileged as well as the privileged.

Border Force recruitment is going on. I do not have the exact figures, but £10 million has been put aside to recruit around 500 more Border Force personnel and training is in progress. I will pick up the other points in the two statements after I sit down, when I see Hansard. There are various estimates of elements of the cost. I will try to help as far as I can.

This is a practical programme. There are many thousands of excellent civil servants working on it, and the Government have great confidence that Britain will be ready and able to trade from the end of the year.