European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts

Report: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 25th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly about Clause 8 but, like the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, I have signed Amendment 47. That amendment would become obsolete if Clause 8 disappears. Like my noble friend Lord Beith, I am perhaps a little suspicious to see an amendment in the names of the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. To see the Government and Opposition Front Benches agreeing makes one a little suspicious but anyway, as my noble friend suggests, perhaps the Government think that they do not need Clause 8.

One of the issues I want to raise briefly is a genuine question because I have read different things by academic colleagues on where we are in terms of the EEA from a legal perspective. Amendment 47 refers to remaining a member of the European Economic Area. Before the Minister shakes his head and says, “No, no, no, we’re leaving the EEA”, there is a question about our membership. We are a member of the EEA as a member of the European Union. All EU members are members of the European Economic Area. My understanding is that we are individually members, not just as part of the EU 28, so do we legally have to resign from the EEA? The assumption is that we are there automatically as a member of the EU. That was my genuine question. A slightly more facetious question would be: given how keen noble Lords who favour Brexit are on free trade, should we perhaps be thinking about going back to EFTA where we started off way back in the 1950s?

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

It is late at night and I cannot resist it. For the Liberal Democrats who were in coalition with the Conservatives for five years to be suspicious about my name on one amendment is a bit rich. On the whole I resist doing this, but I am afraid I was led into it. I thought the Minister would enjoy that.

There are two debates here. On Amendment 43, to which I also have my name, as does the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer—but I hope that does not give the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, too many worries—I associate myself with what was said by the no longer young but, I gather, still irresponsible noble Lord, Lord Kerr. I particularly look forward to the answers to the serious questions raised about Schedule 4, which is referred to in Amendment 104.

I very happily put my name to Amendment 47A. Were any of the things on the international agreement arising out of the withdrawal deal to come to pass, the clause could be in the withdrawal and implementation Bill, which is probably a much better place because it would be much more specific. I am not in favour of wide powers just in case. We have too many just-in-case powers in the Bill as it stands, so the deletion of Clause 8 is an improvement to the Bill.

Since Amendment 47 has been moved into this group, it is probably right that I should say a word about the Opposition’s position on it. Since the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, is an academic and much better read than I am, I am sure she is familiar with the House of Commons briefing on this. It is clear that the vast majority of legal advice, certainly that which I had when I was in Brussels and elsewhere, is that the EEA combines EFTA and the EU—there is an even more expert head nodding. So, it was a nice try, but it is a red herring, and one of the things that we do not want to do is to give people false hope that there is a way out of the mess that this Government got us into—sorry about that.

That is why I shall a word about rejoining EFTA. I worked for an EFTA organisation many years ago. It was a very nice, friendly body at the time, but it was larger than it is now. There is an idea that we could just rejoin and that it would accept us. The Prime Minister of the largest EFTA country has already said, “Ahem. Hang on a moment. This is going to be a little more difficult and complicated than you think”. There are fewer than 14 million people, I think, in the EFTA countries. That is more than in London but not bigger than London and Wales combined. There are serious questions about whether structures that suit their economies, size and way of working in marketing and in other things would suit our economy with 66 million people. I worry that people think there is a nice, easy option. On this side, we are not persuaded that it would be easy or necessarily correct for us.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I support my two noble friends who have spoken to this amendment. I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group and a member of the board of the European Rail Freight Association. They are absolutely right in the worry that these agencies will not be able to accept us after Brexit. I know the European railway agency people very well, and they would love us to stay, obviously, and would love to work with us, but of course they are forbidden from doing so by the European Commission, because that is part of the regulations. But the consequences, as my noble friends have said, are actually very serious. The manufacturing issue is not just about how we are going to take the components back and forward—it is the standards to which they are created and built and the safety certification that has to go along with it, which cannot easily after Brexit cross between us and the rest of Europe.

The issue also occurs on the railways, partly with manufactured items and partly with the operation. We do not yet know whether the train drivers that go across in the tunnel—Eurostar or rail freight—will have to have separate licences. The one good thing that the European railway agency started off doing was to try to get a common standard for red tail-lights across Europe, because each member state had its own standard, and when you got to a frontier somebody had to walk to the back of the train and change the lights. Mercifully, that is a thing of the past—but, unless all these issues are sorted out and the necessary drivers and other staff get the proper training, there will be no trains through the tunnel, and there may not be any flights, if my noble friend’s comments on the air service are correct.

We really need to get on with this. Everybody is waiting for a decision and, if we do not, we can expect to have very little traffic on the railways when we leave the EU. I do not think that the same will apply to the ferries across the channel, but we do not know. How all that affects the transport between the north and south of Ireland and across the Irish Sea, we had better leave to another day—but I hope that the Minister will have some positive response to my noble friends’ questions.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

My Lords, we have been told frequently that this Bill is about providing legal certainty on the day that we leave the European Union. We have already heard from three noble Lords a whole range of issues that will be extremely difficult in the transport sector when we leave the EU. If we cannot stay in the European agencies, are the Government doing to do at least as much as proposed new subsection (2) suggests and establish,

“an effective equivalent within the United Kingdom”?

If we are to have legal certainly, it is not enough simply to enshrine EU law into United Kingdom law. We need to know what the standards will be on the day that we leave. This is not something that is just hypothetical; this is not about widgets—it is about how our transport system functions on the day we leave. So far, we have not had sufficient answers on this, so I hope that the Minister might be able to tell us something that goes beyond the idea that this is simply going to be about the negotiations.

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I look at this amendment and note that it is about the continuity and safety of transport. I have fewer fears than my colleagues about the matter of safety, because the industries concerned were moving towards standardisation decades before the EU was formed. The area where I am very alarmed is the whole issue of traffic rights. I spent 22 years in aviation, 20 of them working for BOAC and British Airways and, towards the end, as the number 2 in British Airways’ marketing department. That was the world pre-open skies and pre-EU, and it was horrific. Literally every city pair had a different agreement about it. All of them had to be agreed. Those were the days when Hong Kong was a colony, which was a golden card in negotiations. The idea of having to start from scratch and do all 134 city-pair negotiations is very difficult to understand.

Similarly, we have the same problem on the roads. The professionals who talk about the port of Dover say that the slightest delays through the port will cause chaos to the point where we have to worry about fresh food getting to our plates. The noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, laid on for interested Peers a meeting with the Secretary of State. He gave a very smooth presentation, which I would précis as, “It’ll be alright on the night”. He justified this by saying that it would be in both parties’ economic interest to conclude sensible and rational agreements. I think he is a bit heroically naive; I have spent most of my professional career in negotiations, and I have always found rationality to come a rather poor third place after emotion and power. The reality of these negotiations is that they will be conducted by politicians and bureaucrats.

The great thing about the EU is that it is refreshingly transparent. Perhaps more people should read what it produces more frequently. From time to time, in this negotiation, it produces guidelines. The first sets of guidelines were more or less delivered as agreed by the Council, and the latest set was agreed on 23 March. A six-page document was published with those guidelines adopted by the European Council at the meeting on 23 March; one paragraph says that,

“the European Council has to take into account the repeatedly stated positions of the UK, which limit the depth of such a future partnership. Being outside the Customs Union and the Single Market will inevitably lead to frictions in trade. Divergence in external tariffs and internal rules as well as absence of common institutions and a shared legal system, necessitates checks and controls to uphold the integrity of the EU Single Market as well as of the UK market. This unfortunately will have negative economic consequences, in particular in the United Kingdom”.

They are very clear about just how firm their position is. One has to recognise that they are representing the EU 27. They are there to meet their demands, and every member has a veto on this agreement. We have left the club: they are not looking after us anymore; that is not their responsibility.

So where do we stand? We have an emotional battle to fight—emotional or political, call it what you like—and we also have a power battle to fight. Do we have any cards? One card that we have with the EU is money, but we more or less agreed that anyway, so that one goes away. The other thing that we used to fight on over the decades after World War II when establishing air rights was reciprocity. That means, “You can’t come to our airfield unless we can come to yours”. The problem with that is that we are a bit of everybody else’s aviation activity. For us, the world is where we need to be and the world, at the moment, is determined and available through the European Union. If we cannot have access to the world, then our industry will be seriously damaged.

I hope that my pessimism is not justified, but I think that getting a better deal than the status quo is, sadly, highly unlikely. I hope that the Minister will be able to assure us that the energy is there to try to achieve the status quo, because otherwise it will damage us and it will damage our EU friends, but it will damage them a great deal less than it will damage us.