United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Monday 14th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for clearly setting out his objections to the last set of amendments. In his closing words he said that the Government view the common frameworks process as complementary to the market access principles. Listening to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, it was very clear that there is a discontinuity—a lack of complementariness—between the two positions. As the noble and learned Lord set out, a central feature of the framework agreement is to come to an agreed process for divergence between the four nations, within which the UK has a major role. That divergence is killed off by the automatic nature of the market access principles. That is the central point that the noble and learned Lord’s amendments address. In doing so, the new versions of the amendments have taken on board the comments that have come back from the other place, having recognised the level of uncertainty that could have been injected by a previous proposed new clause, which has now been removed. The amendments adopt the regulations within the Bill to facilitate that decision, so that it is consistent with the way that the Bill seeks to operate, but also consistent with the principles of devolution that have served this country so well to date.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, perhaps we need to remember why we are here. It is really quite simple. When the case for Brexit was all about “taking back control”, we failed to understand that the Government meant taking control to themselves, even over issues that were fully devolved. However, when the Bill was published—without any involvement from the devolved authorities, remember—we soon discovered that it ran roughshod over devolved competences, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, said, trumping the common frameworks programme.

I have often wondered whether this was deliberate or an oversight, though the lack of prior consultation suggests the former. However, that makes the statement on the publication of the Bill, on 9 September, signed by the Scottish Secretary but not the Welsh Secretary, and by Mr Sharma and Mr Gove, a bit strange in the light of this Bill. It says that the devolved Administrations will enjoy a “power surge” when the transition period ends.

Let us take that at face value. Perhaps the particular construction of the Bill was clumsy—as an oversight rather than deliberate—and perhaps it is right that the Government did not intend to bring back to themselves all the powers long devolved to the other three authorities, but in that case the amendments tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, would rectify the problem. They would simply restrict the market access powers in the Bill, which of course are only about devolved competences, to those where the four-party process failed to reach agreement.

As the Government are one of those four parties, they will be in a very strong position to revert to the Bill, and to Parliament, for the powers they feel are vital for an internal market on areas where disagreement cannot be overcome. That seems, to this side of the House, a simple, clean solution. It would hard-wire in a common frameworks process which the Government themselves described last week in the latest of their three-monthly reports on the frameworks—reports which, I think, we added to Schedule 3 to the EU withdrawal Bill as a requirement for the Government to publish—as

“an agreed approach to ensuring regulatory coherence”

in devolved areas. That is absolutely spot on—coherence, not uniformity—and that is probably where we are trying to get to. The problem is that, as written, the Bill adopts “uniformity”.

The same document, which has just been published, despite having talked about coherence, then asserts:

“Common Frameworks cannot guarantee the integrity of the entire UK Internal Market.”


However, the document does not provide any evidence of why the frameworks will not work. It gives no examples of where, within devolved competences, any agreements might not work. Indeed, the Minister, in introducing the debate, again asserted that it would have to be for Parliament alone to decide when the market access rules would not be used, but he did not explain why the four-party process would not be able to deal with that and why they would come to Parliament only when there was a failure to agree. The same document notes the “freezing power” contained in the withdrawal Act, and it also notes that it has never needed to be used, but it fails to suggest where it might be needed.

Therefore, in the Bill the Government are saying that on the one hand the frameworks are very good and have been able to produce coherence but, on the other hand, the Bill allows the market access principles to trump that process, even if it produces agreement.

We have it said before and I say it again: we on this side of the House want an internal market which thrives and serves the needs of business, the professions, consumers and the environment, but it has to be one that respects rather than dismantles devolution. These amendments seem to us to offer the path to achieve that, so we will support the noble and learned Lord when, as I am sure he will do, he asks the House to vote. I hope that in the light of that vote we can, as the Minister suggested, continue the dialogue so that we can reach an agreed position that would safeguard all that has been going on with the devolution settlements and the common frameworks process but, in the last analysis, would of course come back here.