European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Angela Smith and Chris Leslie

Committee: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Leslie]

I know that the Minister will answer all these questions as soon as he sums up this debate. He has the answers in his pack and he is not one to shilly-shally; he will give us specific and detailed responses to these questions.

[Angela Smith]

May I turn my hon. Friend’s attention to Ireland? Freight traffic to Dublin has enjoyed a growth rate of 700% since the establishment of the single market, but the control zone of the terminal is no bigger than it was in the 1980s, thanks to the fact that it has enjoyed the dismantling of customs control and port health control. Is he aware of any preparations or investment to deal with this potential problem if we do abolish the customs union?

[Mr Leslie]

No, and preparations would be needed for all sorts of other checks, including sanitary and phytosanitary checks. This would be for every port around this country, and I think that more than 1 million containers come in through the port of Southampton alone.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Leslie]

I will come to the US situation in a moment. I have to tell the hon. Gentleman that the inward investment figures are massively inflated because of mergers and acquisitions data. When we consider the buy-outs of some of the large technology companies—[Interruption.] Well, I do not believe that the hon. Gentleman should necessarily interpret the stripping out of British ownership of such companies as a great British success. If he digs beneath the statistics, he might see a slightly different picture.

Our mythology about the UK’s potential to strike a great and bountiful set of trade deals if we could only rid ourselves of the shackles of the customs union is becoming a bit of a joke across the British economy.

[Angela Smith]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Leslie]

I will give way in a moment. Our justification for leaving the customs union has to be more than simply to keep the Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade in a job. My hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith), who is keen to intervene, took evidence on some of these questions this morning.

I think that the potential United States deal that the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) referred to is being kiboshed as we speak. The US would want an agricultural basis for any trade deal with the UK, but there is a reason why the Americans dip their chicken in chlorine: they have entirely different and lower animal welfare standards than do the UK and the EU. If we were to do an agricultural deal with the US on the basis of those lower standards, it would undercut our farmers, abattoirs and food producers, who would have to chase each other down to the level of the lowest common denominator. It is contradictory to hear the Environment Secretary saying that he does not wish in any way to reduce safety standards or animal welfare standards, and he may well be killing off the idea of a US trade deal with his pronouncements.

[Angela Smith]

My hon. Friend is being generous in giving way again. This morning, the Secretary of State further entrenched his position, which will make it very difficult to complete a US trade deal involving food and food products. The other evidence that we have received in the Select Committee has indicated, week after week, that many parts of the agricultural sector believe that the UK Government over many generations—not just this Government, but previous ones—have never done the political or diplomatic brokering work necessary to build our export trading position with third countries outside the European Union. What on earth makes us think that we can now pull off this magic trick of building trade around the world to replace that which we have had with the European Union?

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Angela Smith and Chris Leslie

Committee: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 12th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Leslie]

My hon. Friend has done important work as Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee on some of these questions. These are not small matters; they are important functions that over the years we have developed and grown to expect. Some of them are provided by EU agencies, but they should not be able to be abolished simply by order—by the sweep of a ministerial pen—without reference to this place and without the House of Commons having some ability to decide.

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government might well find other ways of delivering these functions, but the key point is independence? We need the authorities that deliver these safeguards and regulatory activities to be independent of Government and to be accountable to the people.

[Mr Leslie]

Indeed, and there are good arguments for having independent provision of many of these assessments. We might feel that many regulatory activities currently undertaken by EU agencies need to be undertaken by our regulators here in the UK, rather than being brought into a Government departmental function, to give them that further arm’s-length independent status. I want to talk about some aspects of that shortly.

I want to make reference, too, to the Procedure Committee’s set of amendments that the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) and others have tabled to try to deal with what could be thousands of negative statutory instruments—orders by Ministers that do not automatically come up for a vote in the House of Commons. I totally respect the work of the Procedure Committee, and it is important that it has gone through this process, but I do not believe that the proposed committee would be an adequate safeguard. I do not believe that it would fulfil the concept of what a sifting committee ought to be.

We need a Committee of the House that can look through the hundreds of statutory instruments that are currently not for debate and be able to pick them out and bring them forward for an affirmative decision. The Procedure Committee’s amendments would not quite do that; they would simply create a committee able to voice its opinion about the designation of an order as a negative statutory instrument. That could be overruled or ignored by Ministers. Indeed, if a Minister were to designate such a negative statutory instrument as urgent, it would not even need to be referred to that committee. That is a pretty low threshold, and a pretty weak concession.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Angela Smith and Chris Leslie

Tuesday 31st January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Chris Leslie]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in a moment.

That is why we should look carefully at what this Bill says. This Bill says, grudgingly, that Ministers will come and get permission from Parliament for the notification, but then they try to yank it right back to the Prime Minister, so that it is entirely, 100% back in the hands of Ministers alone to determine our fate outside the European Union. That is why I just cannot bring myself to vote in favour of this Bill: there are so many issues, so many ramifications and so many questions surrounding our withdrawal from the European Union that it is our duty—it is what the Supreme Court insisted we should do—to ensure due diligence and look at all the issues surrounding this question.

That is why I have decided to table a few, very judicious amendments to the Bill, to try to cover off a few corners of the questions that I think it needs to address. What will happen, for example, in our relationship with the single market? What are we doing for potentially tariff-free access or frictionless trade across the rest of Europe? Will we be able to have such advantages again? These are the questions that were not on the ballot paper, which simply asked whether we should remain in or leave the European Union. The ballot paper did not go into all those details, which are for Parliament to determine. It is for us as Members of Parliament to do our duty by performing scrutiny and ensuring that we give a steer to Ministers—that we give them their instructions on how we should be negotiating our withdrawal from the European Union.

I personally do not have faith in the Prime Minister’s vision for a hard Brexit—because it is a hard Brexit. We may currently be falling very gently through the air, like the skydiver who has jumped out of the aeroplane—“What seems to be the problem? We’re floating around”—but I worry about the impact. I worry about hitting the ground and the effect not just on our democracy, but on our constituents and their jobs and on the growth that we ought to be enjoying in the economy to keep pace with our competitors worldwide.

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is giving an excellent speech. Will he confirm the view, which is held quite widely on the Opposition Benches, that absolutely critical to a successful Brexit will be membership of the single market?

[Chris Leslie]

Absolutely, and it beggars belief that we will not even be given the opportunity to debate that in this legislative process—a process, by the way, that the Government are so afraid to go into that they have given it a measly three days in Committee, an eighth of the time given to scrutinise the provisions of the Maastricht treaty. If they were not so frightened of debate, they would allow the House to go through all these questions. What happens to EU nationals? Will they have rights to stay? It should be for Parliament to determine these things. Are we going to have a transitional arrangement, so that we do not fall off that cliff edge when we get to 1 April 2019? What about visa-free travel? What happens to the financial services trade? It may not face tariffs; it may face a ban on trading altogether in various different areas.

For the Prime Minister to have already accepted the red lines of the other European Union 27 countries—for her to have thrown in the towel on single market membership without even trying to adapt free movement and find a consensus, which I think would be available—is a failure of her approach at the outset. For her to accept the red line that we are not allowed to have parallel discussions and negotiations—that we can only do the divorce proceedings in these two years and then maybe talk about the new relationship—is a failure of the negotiations.