Chi Onwurah
Main Page: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West)Department Debates - View all Chi Onwurah's debates with the Northern Ireland Office
(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Brandon Lewis
My hon. Friend makes a good point. I have been fortunate in this role to be able to engage with and have advice and recommendations from the Northern Ireland business community through the business engagement forum, which we pull together and which meets regularly. That has been invaluable. I have also welcomed the engagement via the Joint Committee structures with representatives from business and civic society in Northern Ireland, of which more has been committed to. I hope that Vice-President Šefčovič and his team will be able to engage in more of that more quickly; it has been a few weeks since the last one. I think that it is important that we continue to take those meetings forward and that it would be good to have as much business involvement and contribution to this as possible, because that is what informs a perfectly good, really solid understanding of the needs of business for those flows of supplies for the people of Northern Ireland.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab) [V]
The Prime Minister is far keener to celebrate a yet-to-be-built bridge between Great Britain and Northern Ireland than to take responsibility for the barriers that he has put there. Just five weeks ago, he said that the protocol must not
“place… barriers of any kind…down the Irish sea.”—[Official Report, 3 February 2021; Vol. 688, c. 948.]
Will the Secretary of State explain, then, why he negotiated an agreement that did just that?
Brandon Lewis
The hon. Lady may want to have a look at the Command Paper that we published last summer around how the protocol can work. It was very clear about making sure that we had a pragmatic and flexible approach, so that goods could flow cleanly and simply for people in Northern Ireland. We have also always been very clear about building on the SPS checks, which, in one form or another, have been there since the 19th century. That is the reality of recognising the single epidemiological unit of the island of Ireland—we have always been up front and clear about that. We are also clear that we want to make sure that there is not just unfettered access for Northern Ireland businesses to mainland Great Britain, which we have done, but this good, flexible free flow. The impact that we have seen over the last few weeks is why we had to take the decisions that we did last week to ensure that we have time for businesses to adapt and time in other areas to work with the EU to get permanent and long-term solutions.