October European Council

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 22nd October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

The noble Lord will be aware that alongside the withdrawal and implementation Act and treaty there will be a future partnership or future framework document setting out where discussions have got to about the future relationship. That will be the first time the noble Lord will see where we have got to in that discussion. That will then be the basis of the negotiation discussions, once we have agreed the withdrawal agreement and implementation period, to take forward that relationship. On the structure and scope of the documents, some of the things we have mentioned that we have started to make good progress on will be obvious from that document. That will then be worked on and will be the basis of the future partnership that we will look to have by 2021.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

Does the Leader recognise that a prolonged period of uncertainty in which many of the complex details have not been decided will be disastrous for the private and public sectors across this country? I have been briefed in the past week by people from two of Britain’s leading universities on the desperate uncertainty they have over future access to European research networks and research funding and visas for foreign academics and their wives and husbands who come to this country, and the likelihood that the Home Office visa system, which is presently close to breaking down, will break down unless this is clarified fairly quickly. If we have an agreement now which is loose and short, these details will remain uncertain. Can we be guaranteed that, before a lot of these things are swept away as we formally leave, there is much more certainty on the detail across different sectors than the Government have yet begun to talk about?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

Of course we are mindful of uncertainty, which is why we are working flat out to ensure that we come up with a suitable solution to the Northern Ireland issue, which is the one issue that is still outstanding in relation to the withdrawal agreement and implementation period. The very reason we agreed an implementation period was to give that certainty over two years and to give time for us to ensure that we have the future agreement in place and that we can begin our new relationship in January 2021. That has been at the heart of our approach throughout these negotiations.

Exiting the EU

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

First, I say to the noble Lord that we always read the reports from your Lordships’ Select Committees with great care and attention. We may not always agree with their conclusions, but that does not mean that the work and intelligence within them is not taken very seriously by the Government. He is absolutely right about the importance of our services-based economy, which is exactly why we want to provide regulatory flexibility, because we believe that this is where potential trading opportunities outside the EU are largest. The UK will be able to negotiate our own trade deals focusing on services and digital, and these are very high in our thoughts.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Statement says that we will continue to play a strong role in shaping European standards and the international standards that underpin them. Those standards are negotiated within the European Union in a whole series of committees, on which British officials and other representatives sit alongside others. We will have left all those. Can she possibly explain how we will continue to play any role at all in shaping new European standards?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

As the noble Lord will be aware, many European standards are built on international standards, which we shall play an important role in helping to shape.

Business of the House

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Evans of Bowes Park) (Con)]

My Lords, in moving this Motion I remind the House that we will interrupt the first debate just before midday so that the House can join in the national minute’s silence to remember the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June 2017. I beg to move.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps I might take this opportunity to ask the Leader of the House about future business. We have a very light level of business at present but we have been told to expect a series of Bills, followed by up to 1,000 SIs, by the end of November to enable us to leave the European Union by March 2019. Given that those Bills have not yet reached us and that there are a large number to come—I am sure that the noble Baroness will support the House in wanting to thoroughly scrutinise them and the SIs—are contingency plans being made for the House to meet for longer hours or on more days from the end of the summer onwards so that we can get through this business before we leave the European Union?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

We will certainly make sure that we give noble Lords ample time to scrutinise everything that is necessary. The usual channels will continue to discuss this. We will bring business forward as soon as we can and make sure that noble Lords do their excellent job of looking at the legislation that is coming forward.

G7: Charlevoix, Quebec

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 11th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, does the Leader of the House accept that, for some of us, this is an almost surreal communiqué? It talks about the agreement of communiqué, but the President of United States has already resisted it. We are committed to the World Trade Organization, but the United States Administration are currently doing their utmost to undermine the global trading system, including—as I read in my emails this morning—by resisting the appointment of new judges to the arbitration procedures. So we have a crisis in the global trading system that this Statement does not begin to reflect.

Does the noble Baroness also accept that the commitment to a “rules-based trading system”, which is again proclaimed in the Statement, is resisted by many within her own party as incompatible with British sovereignty when it comes to the European Union and that their suggestion that the World Trade Organization will be sufficient does not come to terms either with the weakness of the world trading system or with the necessary compromises of sovereignty which those international rules would require of Britain?

Lastly and most importantly, since the Secretary of State for International Trade and the Foreign Secretary appear to regard the EU as the enemy, and the sooner we get out from co-operating with it the better, can the noble Baroness inform us whether we intend to co-operate with the other members of the EU in imposing countermeasures for the next nine months, for the next nine months plus the transition and implementation period or for longer? We thought that solidarity with the EU was something that we were about to get rid of.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I reiterate that we remain a leading supporter of the global rules-based trading system. However, we accept that some elements of the WTO could be improved and we will continue to discuss issues such as improving transparency and dealing with state-owned enterprises and industrial subsidies with our partners—but we believe that the WTO plays an important role at the centre of our system.

On the noble Lord’s question on steel tariffs, I have said that we are working with our EU partners to achieve a permanent exemption. We will work with them in relation to countermeasures. The Commission will be required to seek member state approval for these to come into effect, which it intends to do this month. We will of course be involved in those discussions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

As I have said in answers to a number of questions, all I can say is that we hope that they continue to stand by the agreements. We will certainly continue to honour them and we will continue to have discussions with President Trump on these issues.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

May I ask again for a reply to the question I asked: will we continue to apply EU countermeasures to the United States after March 2019? This is an important question—and if there is no answer now, could we have one in the next few days?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

What I can certainly say is that we understand the importance of the steel industry in this country. We want to make sure that jobs are protected and we will continue to do that going forward. I will see if there is any further information that I can provide.

European Council

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I am sure we all wish to congratulate the Prime Minister on the active engagement she continues to have as a member of the European Council—but of course there will be only three more, or at most four more, European Councils in which she will be able to be an active participant before we leave. It is interesting to see that there is a commitment to,

“review progress in June, with Foreign Ministers being tasked to report back ahead of the next Council”—

we have great confidence that Boris Johnson will succeed in doing that—and that the Secretary of State for International Trade will,

“continue to support preparations in the EU to defend our industry”.

If, after we leave, we plan to have some sort of institutional arrangement with the European Union in which we will participate, when will the Government start to explain to their public—including that section of the deeply divided British public which reads the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph every day and does not believe that we ought to have any continued structural arrangement—what sort of arrangement they propose we should have? Over the past few months the Government have not explained to their public, except on the rare occasion of the Prime Minister’s Mansion House speech, what sort of relationship they begin to envisage. We read about it in Commission documents but do not hear about it from our own Government. Is it not time that the Government began to spell out to us what sort of future relationship they see we might have?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

The European Council has just agreed its guidelines for negotiations. We have been very clear through the Prime Minister’s speeches—Munich on security and Mansion House on economic partnerships, as the noble Lord mentioned—about the kind of relationship we want. We will now be putting flesh on those bones. The noble Lord made the point himself that the relationship between the UK and the EU will remain strong because we do want to work together in these international fora and we do face common threats and challenges. We can perfectly reasonably develop relationships in order to do that. We have shown that we are stronger together and that is what we will continue to be.

United Kingdom-European Union Future Economic Partnership

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 5th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

A customs partnership would mean that at the border the UK would mirror the EU’s requirements for imports from the rest of the world, applying the same tariffs and the same rules of origin as the EU for those goods arriving in the UK and intended for the EU. By following this approach, we would know that all goods entering the EU via the UK paid the right EU duties, removing the need for customs processes at the UK/EU border. In relation to agency membership, there are indeed precedents. Switzerland, for instance, is an associate member of the European Aviation Safety Agency, which means that airworthiness certifications are granted by its own aviation authority and disputes are resolved through its courts.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

On managed divergence and regulatory alignment, the phrase “managed divergence”, which I gather the Cabinet agreed on 10 days ago, does not appear in the Prime Minister’s speech or this Statement. What we have on regulatory alignment is the very odd statement that Parliament in many cases will pass identical laws to an EU law. That sounds remarkably like a sort of Potemkin sovereignty, in which we do it independently but we simply follow what the others have done. That is not real sovereignty at all. Do the Government now accept that the advantages of regulatory alignment across the whole goods sector are such that, in practice, we will want to maintain the same standards, or do they accept, as the Foreign Secretary and others wish to go on insisting, that there are some rules out there that we will somehow want to diverge on?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

It will be not just for this Parliament but for future Parliaments to decide what our regulations look like. As the Statement set out, we may choose to commit in some areas of regulation, such as state aid and competition, to remain in step with the EU. The UK drove much of the policy in this area, so we have much to gain from keeping proper discipline on the use of subsidies and anti-competitive practice. The noble Lord is right: the Statement said that Parliament may choose to pass an identical law. Businesses that export to the EU have told us that in some instances it is strongly in their interests to have a single set of regulatory standards. However, if the Parliament of the day decided not to achieve the same outcomes as EU law, it would be doing that in the knowledge that there may be consequences for market access, but it would be its decision to do so.

Business of the House

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 1st March 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Evans of Bowes Park) (Con)]

For the last time, I beg to move the fourth Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we are going to work very long hours during the Committee stage of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill. Can the Minister assure us that we will not be in danger of breaking the European Union working time directive with the number of hours we will be sitting?

Motion agreed.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I want to make three points: on the degree of freedom the Government are asking for to make secondary legislation; on the absence of guarantees for consultation with English regions and local authorities; and about the uncertain links between withdrawal from the EU treaties and Britain’s future contribution to Europe’s political and security order.

The Leader of the House has just told us that the Bill offers certainty. It does not. The Government are asking both Houses to take an enormous amount on trust. It would be easier to trust the Government if they could provide some indication of what future relationship with the European Union they want to negotiate. Scrutinising this Bill against a background of open disagreements among Ministers and Conservative MPs about future alignment or the divergence of regulation will be peculiarly difficult. If half the Conservative Party does not trust the Cabinet on this, and the unelected journalists of the Daily Mail and the Telegraph are actively mistrustful, how can we grant the Government such wide ministerial discretion?

The cloudy phrases that the Prime Minister trots out to obscure where the Government intend to take us, on a relationship that is fundamental to Britain’s future economy, security and place in the world, make the confusion worse. What is a “bespoke” agreement? A friend has told me that a bespoke suit is one that costs a great deal more than one off the peg, but offers only a few tweaks in the way it is put together. The phrase a “deep and special” agreement is deliberately ambiguous. No Minister has spelled out the subtle differences between a “transitional” agreement and an “implementation” agreement, or the distinction between “a” customs union and “the” customs union. This House is justified, therefore, in narrowing the degree of ministerial discretion that the Bill permits. We have been given little idea of what Ministers might consider “appropriate”, as the Bill says, in exercising the executive powers it gives them. We should therefore amend that term wherever it appears to “necessary”, to narrow the degree of freedom they are given. I hope that this will command support across the House.

There will be much debate in Committee about the implications of Brexit for the devolution settlement with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and whether repatriation will tip the existing balance of competences in favour of Westminster. Those of us who live in the English regions—above all those of us who live in the north—will want to see how far we can insert amendments to provide for effective consultation also with English local authorities. Yorkshire and the north-east have a combined population larger than Scotland, have much greater economic interdependence with the European continent than Wales or Northern Ireland, and have benefited from EU funding while Westminster has starved the north of funds. We will work with the Local Government Association to insert a requirement for consultation in this Bill, unless the Government come forward with clear proposals of their own—and I gather that that is now under discussion.

The Bill’s focus is primarily on repatriating powers under the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. I will seek also to probe the Government on the implications of withdrawing from the more intergovernmental Treaty on European Union, which is concerned with fundamental rights, democratic principles, common foreign policy, and security and defence policy. Do the Government intend to opt out of any concern about the future European order after we leave? Or do at least some Ministers intend that continued co-operation in these crucial fields will somehow be woven into the “deep and special partnership” that the Government promise us they will eventually define? It would be a complete betrayal of a crucial theme in Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech to opt out of sharing the responsibility for maintaining and strengthening a democratic order across the whole of Europe. If I may remind the House, she said:

“Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community … The European Community is a practical means by which Europe can ensure the future prosperity and security of its people in a world in which there are many other powerful nations and groups of nations”.


This Bill shows that those who claim Mrs Thatcher’s legacy have betrayed it.

However, the Government are now reported to be reconsidering the complete withdrawal from foreign and defence collaboration. There are even whispers about continued membership of the European Defence Agency, covered by Article 45 of the Treaty on European Union. I and others will be probing the Government on what form of continued association they intend to negotiate on the areas covered by Articles 23 to 46 of the TEU, and how they intend to seek parliamentary approval for their engagement in these fields.

Another empty phrase, “We are leaving the European Union but we are not leaving Europe”, is intended to blur the question of how we will associate with the EU’s established frameworks, which successive British Governments, from the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, onwards, helped to build. The Foreign Secretary has said nothing about this central issue so far as I am aware, but we are entitled to an answer as the Bill goes through.

European Council

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 18th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I am afraid I do not agree with the noble Lord. The fact that we have got to where we are shows that there is willingness on both sides to work together to make sure that we have a good outcome for both the EU and the UK. I look forward and expect that we will continue the phase 2 negotiations, including around the details of the implementation period, in the constructive manner we have seen so far.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Statement starts and ends with references to the foreign and security relationship we hope to build with the European Union after we leave. The Council conclusions of the 28 member Governments, of which we remain, for the moment, one, talk about a new initiative in closer security co-operation among Europeans, which will presumably exclude the United Kingdom. Given that some members of the Conservative Party may be deeply unhappy at any special relationship with the European Union on foreign policy and security after we leave, would it not be a good idea for the Government to begin to set out publicly, for their own public as well as for those with whom they are negotiating, what sort of foreign policy and security relationship we wish to have? I also draw attention to the last sentence, which has some fine words on violent language and threats of violence. Given that the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail have led in using violent language against people who have been “traitorous” to the Conservative Party, as they put it, is the Prime Minister planning to call in the editors of those two newspapers by any chance?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I think the Prime Minister is quite clear in the Statement about the fact that we do not agree with or tolerate such language. In relation to defence, the noble Lord may have been referring to the launch of PESCO, which is an important initiative to encourage collaboration across the European defence industry and has the potential to drive up defence investment across Europe. Although we do not plan to join the PESCO framework, we want to keep open the option to participate at a project level, including after we have left the EU, so we were pleased with the Council conclusions that allow that. In terms of our future relationship, the noble Lord will be aware that we have published a future partnership paper on Foreign Policy, Defence and Development and indicated, for instance, our interest in future partnerships, including a capability collaboration through the European Defence Agency and the Commission’s European defence fund.

Brexit Negotiations

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

The joint report sets out that the common travel area with Ireland will be maintained.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I note that the Statement gives a lot of importance to getting out from under any jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. I find that a little surprising in view of the recent report by the Institute for Government, which shows that the British Government have fewer cases before the European Court of Justice than do most other members of the European Union—and, indeed, that most of those are decided in favour of the UK. I am puzzled also as to whether the deep concern with national sovereignty and the willingness to make financial and economic concessions in order to regain this sovereignty applies to other international courts. The Leader of the House may be aware that President Trump has just attacked the arbitration tribunal of the World Trade Organization, suggesting that it is biased against the United States, that it does not respect American sovereignty and that the United States might have to leave the World Trade Organization. Do the British Government sympathise with President Trump in that suspicion of international courts, or is it is just the European Court of Justice that we object to?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

EU citizens’ rights in the UK will be upheld by implementing the agreement in our law, instead of continued EU law enforced by the EU courts. Our courts will pay due regard to EU case law as agreed at the point of exit to interpret that law as needs be, just as they decide our law now in reference to international law, where relevant, such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.