European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

David Drew Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 15th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

What about the badgers?

[Mrs Main]

The hon. Gentleman asks about badgers. I have actually been leading some of the campaigning against culling badgers. I hope that the hon. Lady agrees that we will have the ability to raise standards where we are currently forbidden to do so.

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[Caroline Lucas]

The hon. Gentleman makes an incredibly important point. He has anticipated what I was going to say, but he is exactly right. When it comes to such trade agreements, it will be even more important that our standards are absolutely enshrined in law, so that they cannot be bargained or negotiated away in the interests of getting a better deal.

The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has said that he believes this gap should be closed. I very much welcome his support, because this is an important ethical and practical issue. It is of great significance to the UK’s ability to trade freely with the EU27 in the future. As I have said, the UK was the original proposer of the protocol, so we surely have a responsibility to ensure that its provisions are not lost from UK law by our withdrawal from the EU.

[Dr Drew]

On that very point, there cannot be a green group that the Secretary of State has not embraced or an animal welfare group he has not cuddled since he has been in post. Is this not a good test of whether the Government will turn their words into action? This new clause and other amendments need to be added to the Bill, otherwise it is just a case of warm words and no action.

[Caroline Lucas]

The hon. Gentleman’s intervention is spot-on. This is exactly such an opportunity for the Government to demonstrate that there is political will behind their words. Let us hope that, as a result of new clause 30 being on the amendment paper, we can agree it tonight, and then get on with many of the other big issues. I simply say that I am looking forward to the Minister’s response, but if it is not satisfactory, I very much hope to press the new clause to a vote.

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Alongside the drafting of the amendments, which has taken some time, there have been, as we heard from my right hon. Friends the Members for West Dorset and for Newbury, in-depth discussions between Conservative Members, the Secretary of State and key representatives of that green coalition, and those discussions have not just been half an hour here and there.

[Dr Drew]

With that mind, why are the Government even contemplating a free trade deal with the US, which at a stroke would undermine our welfare standards and probably put our exports with the EU at risk?

[Zac Goldsmith]

There are huge assumptions in that intervention. We could of course organise a rubbish free trade agreement with the US which involves lowering all of our standards to the lowest possible level, but that would not be acceptable to my constituents or the hon. Gentleman’s, and the Government are not proposing that. The example that keeps on being given in relation to the lowering of standards is chlorination of chicken, and the Secretary of State answered that question beautifully.

[Dr Drew]

What about hormones in beef?

[Zac Goldsmith]

There are many examples. I have spoken out about hormones in beef often in this House—bovine growth hormones, chlorination of chicken and the use of chemicals that we do not allow in this country, or indeed in the EU. But this will come down to the quality of the negotiations that we engage in, and it is the job of this House to ensure that the agreements we reach honour and respect the standards expected by our constituents.

There is no reason to believe that we will not be able to do that. We have had absolute reassurances and some wonderful statements from the Secretary of State, and long may he avoid promotion—I hope he does not mind me saying so—because I do not want to see him move. Like the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), I do not want to see the Secretary of State bumped upstairs into a bigger job, not that he could not do it; he is doing such a good job where he is at the moment that I want him to stay there, and I have absolute confidence in him.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

David Drew Excerpts

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

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

It is not expensive help. That is quite wrong. As the hon. and learned Lady knows, the £1 billion is less than was spent in Northern Ireland in the last Parliament. It is quite right that a Unionist party should help to form a Unionist Government.

Humble Addresses fell out of favour because they simply could not be got through. We need to look at how the Government responded to the Humble Address. My initial reaction was that the Government had not fulfilled the terms of the Humble Address, because it was not initially clear that the impact assessments did not, in fact, exist. The first indication was that the Government were nervous about producing information —they never said “impact assessments”—that might undermine the negotiating position. That seemed a sensible point to make, but not one that could conceivably override a Humble Address, which took precedence over it.

As the information was presented to the Exiting the European Union Committee, it became clear that the Government had been as helpful as they possibly could have been in producing information that had not, in fact, been requested by the Humble Address, which asked for something that did not exist. I think that technicalities in this field are important, and it is rational for Governments to follow them.

I happen to think that that is a lesson for the Opposition. If they are to call for Humble Addresses, they must make sure that those Humble Addresses are correctly—even pedantically—phrased to ensure that they are asking for something that really exists. I feel that the hon. Member for Sheffield Central was being unfair when he criticised the Government for failing to produce information that did not exist. The Government did as much as they could to produce the two folders—the 800 pages—of sectoral analysis. When we look through the record, we see that that is what the Government always admitted existed. The Government were careful to answer questions by referring to sectoral analyses, even if the questioner asked for impact assessments. That, I think, is where the misunderstanding developed that such impact assessments existed.

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman has been in to read the documents, but by no stretch of the imagination are they an analysis or an assessment. They are purely descriptive. Either they have come from Wikipedia or—I think this is more likely—they are a bad piece of GCSE coursework, which would get a fail if it was supposed to contain analysis.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I did go to see the documents, as a member of the Exiting the European Union Committee. I was lucky; I was not told that I had to hand over my mobile telephone, my secret spyglasses or whatever other kit I might have borrowed from James Bond and brought with me so that I could try to take these secret bits of information out to the wider world. I did not have to suffer the great indignity that some other hon. Gentlemen have suffered. I was allowed to sit down and plough through the documents.

I must confess that on that afternoon, I would have been happier reading a P.G. Wodehouse or a similarly entertaining document. I also confess that there was not a great deal in the bit that I read that could not have been found out by somebody with an able researcher or competence in the use of Google. None the less, the information had all been brought together in a usable fashion in one place, and it was an analysis of the sectors covered. It may not have been exciting, it may not have been the read of the century and it may not have won the Booker prize. None the less, it was a detailed sectoral analysis and it more than met the requirements laid down by the Humble Address, which asked for something that did not exist.

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[Mrs Moon]

I rise to speak in support of amendment 348 and new clause 21.

Today, I took the short and wide pavements over to the Department for Exiting the European Union; what a waste of my time that was. I went because I wanted to read what was written in relation to the workforce impacts for the large numbers of my constituents from Bridgend who work in the Ford engine factory and with Tata Steel. So I went to look in particular at the automotive sector and the steel sector reports.

The Ford engine plant is the largest engine works in Europe, and Tata next door in Port Talbot employs the largest number of people in steelworks in the UK. It was interesting that when I got there—having gone through the whole palaver of not taking my phone with me and being walked up to the Department, being asked to sign myself in and being handed the two big files—I found that the document started off by telling me what it was not: the first page I had to wade through told me that 58 sectorial impact assessments do not exist. So what I had gone there to see did not exist. Instead I was told that the paperwork consisted of qualitative and quantitative analyses in a range of documents developed at different times since—that is an important word—the referendum, so this was going to be new information: it was going to be information and analysis not available before the referendum and therefore, sadly, not available to the voters in my constituency or indeed to Members.

The 38—not 58—sector documents consist of descriptions of the sector, comments on EU regulations, existing frameworks for how trade is facilitated between countries and sector views. In the end, they are sector views, and nothing the Government had collected together was worth going there to read. They did not contain commercial, market or negotiation-sensitive information, as the documents told me, so why on earth could it all not just have been emailed to all MPs? There was nothing there that would upset anybody; all it would have done was insult people, not worry them. Apart from the sector views, it told us nothing that could not be found from a good read through Wikipedia.

There is no Government impact assessment, or indeed any assessment, even in the one part of the document worth reading: the sectoral view. The sectoral view is just there: the Government do not say what they are going to do about it, or even whether they think it is relevant—they just ignore it.

Sir David, what I was greeted with at DExEU would, in all honesty, have insulted us when we were both serving on the Select Committee on Defence; if that had come to us from the Ministry of Defence, we would have sent it back and said, “Do it again.” It was insulting. Members of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly would have been confused by such pathetic information being placed before them. So perhaps that is why we are not making it public.

I read the report relating to the automotive and steel industries. The report admits that automotive is central to the UK economy and a key part of our industrial strategy, so we would think that the Government would want to make sure that whatever they were going to do would protect it. The industry employs 159,000 people, with a further 238,000 in the supply chain. I did like one line, which said that the UK is a global centre of excellence for engine design, and offered the example of Ford; that is us down in Bridgend. Automotive earns us £40.1 billion in exports, and the EU is the UK’s largest export market, so we would think this is pretty important stuff.

What were the sectoral view and the concerns? Again, there was nothing new; my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore) and I could have written this ourselves. In fact, we could probably have written a better sectoral analysis than anything the Government have produced; it was pathetic.

[Dr Drew]

Anyone could have written it.

[Mrs Moon]

I agree with my hon. Friend.

The sector has said that World Trade Organisation rules and current EU third country tariff schedules will bring a 4.5% tariff on components and a 10% tariff on cars; I think we already knew that. We were also informed that Japanese and Ford motor manufacturing make the UK their base because of access to the EU market. There is a major statement and recommendation there: it will be devastating for motor manufacturing in the UK if we do not continue to have access to the EU markets.

We were also told that automotive is a high-volume, low-margin industry operating a just-in-time process. It was said that customs checks would add to administrative costs, delay production and shipments and create the need for increased working capital and that they would increase the cost of production in the UK. Concern was expressed about access to key engineering staff if higher immigration controls were in place, exacerbating skills shortages where a significant skills shortage already exists, with 5,000 job vacancies, especially in engineering design and production engineering.