European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Alison Thewliss Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Monday 4th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Paul Masterton]

I am grateful to have the opportunity to speak, as a Scottish Conservative MP and as a member of the Scottish Affairs Committee, on what I believe is being termed devolution day. I draw Members’ attention to the Committee’s—in my biased view—exceptional report, which our Chair, the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), may well highlight at some point. The report was unanimous, and it draws on huge amounts of common ground between Scotland’s two Governments. That suggests that despite some histrionics, consensus exists on this area of the Bill, and that consensus will enable us to improve the Bill.

We must recognise that the debate takes place in the context of active, and now constructive, talks between the UK and the Scottish Government. That makes it a little difficult to debate the words on the page, because there are so many moving parts, but I will focus my remarks on where I believe clause 11 needs to end up and the route that the Scottish Conservatives envisage for getting there.

As has been addressed, several provisions of the Bill fall within the scope of the Sewel convention; in other words, the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly have been asked to give their consent to the Bill. The Scottish and Welsh Governments have signified that, unless the Bill is substantially amended, neither will recommend that consent be given. The UK Government’s position is, I believe, the right one. They are committed to working to obtain a legislative consent motion and expect to achieve one.

As Scottish Conservatives, we are committed to ensuring that the Scottish Parliament can give its consent to the passage of the Bill. As Members may not all be aware of the timescale, I will explain that the plan is for the Scottish Parliament to vote on whether to grant a legislative consent motion ahead of the Third Reading of the Bill in the other place. It is not an all-or-nothing event; it is perfectly possible for an LCM to be initially denied, and then for another vote on granting an LCM to be taken and passed at a later date.

Although, as readers of The Daily Telegraph will be aware, I have a number of issues with the Bill, by far the biggest concern regarding devolution is clause 11. It is my view that if we can fix clause 11, most of the other issues regarding the Bill’s impact on devolution will fall away. On Second Reading, I said that I would not allow legislation to pass that undermined the Union or the devolution settlement, and that remains my position today.

There are 111 powers currently exercised at EU level that do not fall within reserved competence under the Scotland Act 1998 and are therefore, under the scheme of the Act, devolved. Clause 11 will effectively hold those powers at Westminster level. Although that is a sensible interim measure, as the Scottish Affairs Committee heard in evidence during its enquiry, the interim phase has given rise to the “power grab” melodrama that we have heard from the SNP.

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

Would the hon. Gentleman like to tell us how interim interim is?

[Paul Masterton]

If the hon. Lady will bear with me, I am coming on to talk about that.

Clause 11 provides that the 111 powers that I have mentioned will be released to Scottish Ministers on a case-by-case basis once UK Ministers are satisfied that it is safe to do so. There is no timescale for that, and the process is unilateral. Under clause 11, the powers, once repatriated from the EU to the UK, are for UK Ministers to exercise or to devolve, as they see fit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Gapes]

Having listened to this debate for seven hours and been in the Chamber for most of it, I can say that occasionally it was like watching paint dry. I want to comment on something that the Minister just said: that the Government cannot accept changes that would undermine the UK internal market or businesses. That seems a little ironic on the day the Prime Minister has shown how strong and stable she is and when we are in such a crisis over Northern Ireland and the issues relating to the Good Friday agreement.

Sadly, Democratic Unionist party Members seem to have gone AWOL; I assume that they are out discussing how to spend £1 billion. They, of course, were not part of the negotiations that led to the Good Friday agreement and were not happy when we brought in the institutional frameworks established as a result of the 1998 legislation. I had the pleasure of being in Mo Mowlam’s team during those negotiations. I was a very minor person in the process—as the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Political Development Minister, my good friend Paul Murphy—but it was a great achievement of our Labour Government.

As Tony Blair has so eloquently put it and John Major has also said, today the Good Friday agreement is in danger. Those of us who have looked at these issues understand that the agreement has three strands. One is the internal political situation in Northern Ireland, which is clearly not going well. The Assembly and Executive are not functioning and the civic forum that was supposed to be established under the Good Friday agreement does not exist.

Then there is strand 2, which is the Irish dimension, the North South Ministerial Council and the implementation bodies; it is supposed to cover agriculture, education, transport, the environment, health and EU programmes. Strand 2 is going to be undermined by the decision to leave the single market and the customs union.

Then there is strand 3, which is the east-west British-Irish Council and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference. We now understand that the Irish Government are right to express concerns about the position we face. I was in Dublin three weeks ago with the Foreign Affairs Committee. We also went to County Cavan. We drove along the road that goes from one side of the border to the other, and back across, through County Monaghan. The only way anyone knows they are in Northern Ireland is that there is a building with a “Fireworks for sale” sign. Fireworks cannot be sold in the Irish Republic, but they can be bought in Northern Ireland—that is a bit ironic, but we will not go there.

The reality is that we have fields on both sides of the border, cows that move backwards and forwards, farmhouses that are divided and institutional structures such as the veterinary organisations. We have the milk that is taken from cows in the south and cows in the north, put together in the same factory, mixed together with whiskey, and comes out as Baileys, which is then marketed as an Irish whiskey derivative, and there is an all-Ireland trade arrangement on that basis. Similarly, with tourism, Northern Ireland and the Republic are promoted together globally.

We are putting all this in jeopardy—putting it all at risk. We have to understand how difficult it was to get the Good Friday agreement and how not necessarily just the reality of the economics but the symbolism of the politics will come back, and people will have to think about their differences rather than what unites them. At the moment, there are many Irish citizens living in Northern Ireland because one can have either a British passport or an Irish passport—it does not matter. Will the European Court of Justice apply to those people living in Northern Ireland? Will they have protection even though they are living in the UK? These are interesting and complicated issues.

The Mayor of London, the Welsh Government and the Scottish Government have all said that we need to stay in the single market and the customs union, but above all we need to listen to the voices of the people of Northern Ireland, who want us to stay in the single market and the customs union. Although they claim the contrary, Democratic Unionist party Members do not speak for Northern Ireland—they speak only for one part of Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland voted to remain. Northern Ireland wants to be in the single market. Northern Ireland, collectively, wants to keep the institutions of the Good Friday agreement.

It is fundamentally important that we recognise in this Bill that there are special circumstances relating to Northern Ireland. When I intervened on the Minister—eventually he gave way to me—he did not respond to my point, which was that there is no specific understanding of the differences in Northern Ireland. The all-Irish Good Friday agreement—Belfast agreement—institutional framework is crucial and fundamental, and we have to preserve it and keep it. We will break up the United Kingdom and we will cause dangers and conflict again on the island of Ireland. We will damage relations with our closest neighbour and best friend. We have such a good British-Irish relationship, as we saw when Her Majesty the Queen went to Croke Park, and as Mary McAleese told us when she was the Irish President at the time. That is at risk, and we must not let it happen. Please, please support the continuation of the Good Friday agreement.

[Alison Thewliss]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), because that was an absolutely perfect speech. It had to be made and I am glad that he did it.

We have talked in general terms today about lots of the things to do with the new clause and what it might mean, about clause 11, and about the 111 things that require some attention. I want to look at how issues of waste are dealt with within the EU. The EU waste framework directive flows into the Waste (Scotland) Regulations 2012. The European landfill directive, the European packaging and packaging waste directive, and various other EU directives are currently implemented by the Scottish Government. The EU sets the rules within those frameworks and directives, and the Scottish Government have flexibility, as do the other devolved nations, on how they implement them.

Without any certainty over what happens on the day of Brexit, we can have no deal, no certainty and no regulation of those matters. In Scotland, we have developed a circular economy strategy and made a lot of progress towards the implementation of the EU’s circular economy action plan. We have made more progress than the rest of the UK has, and we have made different progress. The directives have given us the flexibility to take a different road. Were the matter to come back to the UK Government, we could not be guaranteed the flexibility we need to make progress with the plans that we have already embarked on.

The Local Government Information Unit recently produced an excellent briefing on waste disposal and Brexit. The briefing raises specific concerns about the future UK directive, which could well be less ambitious than our plans. We have heard a lot from various Tories in the past about cutting red tape and regulations, but doing so could have a serious impact on the interesting and important issue of waste collection. Scotland’s zero waste plan is award winning and ambitious, as we are on climate change. We should have full control over it, and we should not have to drag behind the UK if it does not wish to step forward as quickly as we do.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady says that the plan is ambitious, but, in practice, waste from Scotland is simply being transferred into England, and there is very little enforcement of the so-called zero waste plan.

[Alison Thewliss]

I would take issue with that, and our plan is ambitious. An awful lot of our plan depends on the existence of a European market for waste. Lots of waste goes backwards and forwards to Europe for processing.

There has been no clear detail from the Government about what they mean by an interim period or a temporary period before further powers are released to the Scottish Government. We already know that the market for waste exists, and taking that market away will create uncertainty. Businesses face huge uncertainty, because there is a big private market in waste; I have a large processing facility in my constituency, for example. The Confederation of Paper Industries has said that its members need to be sure which regulations they will have to operate under. If paper is going into European markets, it needs to meet the standards required by those markets, so we need the regulations in place to allow that to happen.

Hon. Members might not know that paper is a £6.5 billion industry. The UK is the world’s largest net importer of paper, and the industry is doing quite well out of the Bill, which is producing huge amounts of paper. The regulations determine our participation in the paper market, and certainty is important. We need clarity, so that we can make progress on recycling and other things that we have started on. If our ability to work under directives is taken back to the UK Government, who do not share exactly our environmental ambitions or links to European markets, where does that leave Scotland?

There is uncertainty as well for local government. If we do not have the rules or the framework, can we just throw our waste in the street and the council is no longer obliged to collect it? Those things are underpinned by EU waste directives about the processing and treatment of waste, and without them there is no framework at all.

I want to speak briefly about where the power lies in another area. The hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Ross Thomson) and a couple of hon. Members who are no longer in their places mentioned food and food labelling, a lot of which is dealt with by the European Food Safety Authority. Of particular interest to me is the labelling and marketing of infant formula. I am fairly sure that the Scottish Government may wish to act to regulate infant formula further, but the UK, as has been evidenced in questions that I have raised on the issue, may not wish to do so.

The UK has long used EU law as a means to get around the full implementation of the international code of marketing of breast-milk substitutes. If we are no longer in the EU and we can set up the frameworks ourselves and make progress on the issue, why should the Scottish Government have to lag behind? Why should we have to wait while those powers are held at Westminster for an indeterminate length of time—it has been described as temporary and interim, but how long it is we do not know—when we want to make progress on policies?

The hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) made a very good point about organ donation and presumed consent in that, when the Welsh Government had such powers, they made progress and had a good policy, which has led the way in the UK. In Scotland, we have had the smoking ban and other progressive health policies. If action on such policies is wrapped up in frameworks or EU directives, how can we be certain—in the context of clause 11 and of this Government not accepting any amendments that would give the devolved Administrations competence in these areas—that the devolved Administrations will be able to take the action we actually want to take, and how long will we have to wait for Westminster to give us back our powers?