Exiting the European Union (Transport)

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Michael Ellis]

I am so grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point. Of course, everything that I do in the Department for Transport considers these important issues of climate change, and my officials are very alive to this issue.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

Very frequently in the measure, the words “notified body” are replaced with “approved body”. Why is that so common a feature?

[Michael Ellis]

I am going to come to that right now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It’s a strange old world, isn’t it? This must be the strangest Parliament in many years. We are debating Bills that are no more than clauses, in effect, and we now have on the Floor of the House a measure that would normally have been taken in a Committee Room upstairs. It is actually a measure that the Government—or certainly today’s Government—hope they will never have to implement, because they are hopeful that some kind of deal will be done, so that we are not in the no-deal scenario in which this would be necessary.

There is a fundamental complexity in what the Government are arguing. In the explanatory notes, the Government say that the SI’s whole aim is to mirror precisely what the EU is doing. One therefore presumes, as my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) said, that if there are amendments to EU regulations in this area in the future, the UK Government will immediately implement them in the UK. That hardly feels like seizing back control; if anything, it feels more like ceding control to a body on which we will no longer be sitting. If there are to be European-wide measures on ski lifts—because, I guess, lots of people from across the European Union who travel from one country to another will want to know, when they get on a ski lift, that it is safe—one would have thought the UK would want to take part in establishing those rules and regulations.

The regulation has been admirably and beautifully expounded on by the Minister, who has had more than a wry smile, I would say, on his puckered lips.

[Michael Ellis]

I always look like this.

[Chris Bryant]

No, the Minister does not always look quite like that. This proves yet again what many of us have felt for a long time: that Brexit is proving far more complicated than anybody ever thought it would be, and is using an awful lot of our time and energy. Whether it will produce anything more than wind is difficult to know.