European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Tuesday 4th December 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

As we pass the witching hour, we are all still present and correct. I have never spoken in the Chamber after midnight. I feel that a pumpkin may appear, and some small mice may come out. Perhaps they come out later; I do not know how the pest control is doing. [Laughter.] That woke everyone up.

Let me begin with a French phrase. Qui sème le vent récolte la tempête: who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind. We are in this debate, in this position, in this Parliament, with no good options before us. We have only bad options and less bad options, after two years of negotiating what I believe has always been a fantasy Brexit. I think that David Cameron has a huge amount to answer for. He opened the Pandora’s box of English nationalism with his promise of a referendum, and the genie cannot easily be put back in the bottle. The Europe issue has defeated every Tory Prime Minister since Edward Heath. Thatcher, Major and Cameron all left because of Europe, and I fear that this Prime Minister may well be undone by it as well.

Let me be clear: I will not be voting for the Government’s draft agreement. I did not vote for a referendum; I voted to remain; and I was one of only three Labour MPs with leave seats who voted against triggering article 50. I feared that the Government had no idea what they were doing. I feared that they would call a general election and waste valuable negotiating time, and so it came to pass.

Let us not forget that that election was intended to crush the saboteurs. Members were called Luddites and people who wanted to disrupt democracy. However, the election did not crush the saboteurs. The election was tough, but it was not tough on those who, like me, opposed the Government’s approach to Brexit. It was tough on the causes of Brexit: the years of austerity, the grinding poverty, the creaking public services, the endless belt-tightening for families, the explosion of food banks, the public squalor that we see with homeless people sleeping on our streets and the shrinking of the state. The electorate were tough on the Conservative party. The Prime Minister, as I had feared, wasted six months and lost her majority. Then she came back to this place and, in the Lancaster House speech, showed that she had learnt nothing, setting out red lines on leaving the customs union and the single market.

And so, one by one, like layers of onion peel, the promises of the leave campaign have fallen away, leaving the people with tears, broken promises, and less trust in politicians than ever before. We have a political declaration with 585 pages, which is full of hope, exploration and best endeavours—full of warm words—but which signifies very little and which places the UK firmly as the weaker negotiating partner after we leave. We will be removed from all EU databases, and we face the prospect of a backstop border in the Irish sea.

Minutes were issued after the European Council’s approval of the withdrawal agreement—the so-called interpretative declaration. Rather like the Prime Minister, who has to come and translate everything for the House of Commons, the European Council has had to translate what that really means for Spain and Cyprus. According to the declaration, article 184 of the withdrawal agreement states only that we should use our best endeavours to cover the territories named in article 3. What are those territories? They are Gibraltar, the Cyprus sovereign bases and Britain’s overseas territories. We will use our best endeavours, but there are absolutely no guarantees in law that those territories will be covered in the withdrawal agreement, and, effectively, Spain has a veto over Gibraltar.

I am concerned that our environmental obligations are at risk of being breached, and the Government now have an unprecedented constitutional and administrative task before them. They have passed just five of the 13 Acts of Parliament they need to enact before Brexit. They have 700 statutory instruments, just 45 of which have gone through Parliament, and goodness knows what faces us when we come back in the new year.

This morning at 10 o’clock, I chaired the Environmental Audit Committee and we heard from the chemicals industry about the fact that it has spent half a billion pounds registering some 6,000 chemicals with the EU’s chemical database, and the Government are now expecting it to spend a similar amount re-registering the same registrations all over again with the Health and Safety Executive, which has no experience with public health or the environment. I am delighted to see the environment Minister in her place.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dr Thérèse Coffey)]

The HSE is already very experienced. It is the competent authority on behalf of the European Chemicals Agency, or ECHA, in this country, but would the hon. Lady prefer that the future UK chemical regulation system did not have the information on which the ECHA is currently reliant?

[Mary Creagh]

Perhaps the Minister should take the time to meet the chemicals industry and listen to its concerns. It described Ministers’ approach to this problem not so much as strategic, but as being a view from the moon as it is so far away from the reality it is facing. I exhort the Minister to read the Hansard transcript. The intellectual property of the ECHA database is the subject of a great deal of argument and legal concern. I exhort her to read the details of what we heard this morning.

We have been calling for a new environmental Bill. We do not want to go back to being the dirty man of Europe, and we know that 80% of the UK’s environmental laws originate from the EU. They mean we bathe on cleaner beaches, drive more fuel-efficient cars and can hold the Government to account on things like air pollution. We are still waiting for the draft environment Bill; it is a bit like waiting for Godot—we never know quite when it is going to turn up, a bit like with the waste and resources strategy, which we are also waiting for.

These EU environmental laws such as the chemicals database cannot simply be cut and pasted into UK law. The Minister’s Department is setting up this new chemicals database. This is the foundation industry on which British manufacturing, aerospace motoring and electronics are based and it is at risk because of what is happening.

[Dr Coffey]

indicated dissent.

[Mary Creagh]

The Minister shakes her head: she is wrong; read the Hansard. These regulations are brought to life when they are held by regulators, the Commission and the ECJ and backed up by sanctions, and the Minister’s proposals do not allow stakeholders and the public to have a say in which chemicals are approved and which are not.

The cakeism, the cherry-picking and fudge before the summer will not work as we head into winter. We are promised this brave new world of free trade areas, but what the Prime Minister does not tell people is that it means less free trade with our nearest neighbour, it means shrinking our economy, and it means a backstop down the Irish sea.

For the past 40 years, we have worked together with our partners and allies to develop great social and environmental standards, and the EU has been the longest and most successful peace process the world has ever seen. There is no deal the Prime Minister can do that is as good as what we have now, and we are living in strange days when we have three votes—[Interruption.] I have listened to the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) and others on the Government Front Bench—[Interruption.] Calm down. We have had three defeats for the Government today, and we are going through the motions. We know this deal is going down. My constituents in Wakefield were promised something totally different. The Government are unable to deliver on their promise. That is why we need to put this decision back to the people before they pay the price.