Sewel Convention

David Lidington Excerpts

Monday 18th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office (Mr David Lidington)]

I should like to start on what I hope will be a note of consensus by expressing on behalf of the Government and personally my deep sorrow at the appalling news from the Glasgow School of Art over the weekend. I reiterate what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland said at the weekend—namely, that the United Kingdom Government stand ready to help, just as we did when we came forward with assistance after the last such tragedy a few years ago.

I will try to respond to the various points that have been raised during the debate, and I will try to keep to time in doing so. For that reason, I intend to be perhaps less generous than I would normally be in admitting interventions, in order to allow other hon. Members to take part after I have sat down.

It might help us to get a bit of perspective about the subject we are discussing to take note of what none other than Lord Sewel himself said today. He observed that there has been no power grab and that there is no constitutional crisis. The UK Government’s two objectives in the negotiations and the various debates on what is now clause 15 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill have been consistent and clear.

The first is to provide greater reassurance to the devolved Governments and parliamentarians on how returning EU powers will be managed where they intersect with devolved competences. The second is to maximise legal certainty right across the United Kingdom, particularly for the sake of the businesses not only in Scotland, but in Wales, Northern Ireland and England that have been making it clear that they want clarity and certainty about the regulatory framework within which they will have to operate in the United Kingdom after we leave the European Union.

If we look back at October 2017, a meeting of the Joint Ministerial Committee on EU Negotiations, which included Ministers from the Scottish and Welsh Governments, agreed

“to work together to establish common approaches in some areas that are currently governed by EU law, but that are otherwise within areas of competence of the devolved administrations or legislatures.”

The same meeting secured agreement on a set of criteria to establish the need for a UK-wide framework, including to enable the functioning of the UK internal market, to ensure compliance with international obligations and to ensure that the UK can negotiate, enter into and implement new international trade agreements and treaties. To respond briefly to what the hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) said, the communiqué from that meeting, like other communiqués from the Joint Ministerial Committee, was published and is on the gov.uk website to this day. That meeting also agreed that some frameworks, although not all of them, would need legislation.

The original clause dealing with devolution—what was then clause 11—was strongly criticised in this House, in the Scottish Parliament, in the Welsh Assembly and by both devolved Governments. In the months since the debate here, there have been frequent, detailed discussions at both ministerial and official levels to try to meet those concerns. Contrary to what the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) asserted, we have responded to those criticisms. First, we heard that it was wrong to require, as clause 11 did, that all powers returning from Brussels should be held at Westminster until a decision to transfer them to devolved competence had been made. That point was made by the Scottish Parliament’s Finance and Constitution Committee and by the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) during the debate on 4 December 2017. Having listened to those criticisms, we reversed that approach. The Bill now provides for every power to be transferred straight to devolved level unless a specific order is made to stay it at Westminster.

Secondly, it was said that too many areas of policy were covered by the freezing power. Intensive discussions between officials and experts of both the United Kingdom and devolved Governments led to the list of now only 24 out of 153 areas of competence where a legislative framework might be required. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Paul Masterton) pointed out, the long list of new powers going straight to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly is extensive indeed.

Thirdly, there were calls for a sunset clause from, again, the Scottish Parliament’s Finance and Constitution Committee and from the hon. Members for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) and for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock), so we have included one. The power to make a freezing regulation will lapse automatically two years after the Bill receives Royal Assent, and any regulation made under that power will have a maximum term—I stress “maximum”—of five years. Our intention is that they should not last as long as that.

Fourthly, the Scottish Parliament asked for the Scotland Act 1998 and the Government of Wales Act 1998 to be protected, as the Northern Ireland Act 1998 is, from being modified under the deficiencies procedure in the Bill and, again, that is what we have done.

We now have a strictly time-limited power that applies only to a small number of policy areas returning from EU level. Where a framework freezes current powers for a short time, the situation will be exactly the same as it is now. We are not seeking, contrary to some suggestions in this debate, a power to change current EU rules; we seek a power to continue them for a maximum of five years while we sit down together and try to agree a long-term UK framework. As it is the Scottish National party’s declared objective either to stay in or to rejoin the European Union, it is hard to see why SNP Members should object to the continuation of EU rules, with which they are currently content.

In addition to far-reaching changes to the Bill itself, made in response to the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber and others, we have given a binding political commitment, embodied in a formal intergovernmental agreement, to continue to apply the Sewel convention. Again that is something the Welsh and Scottish Governments specifically asked for in the negotiations, and we agreed to make the changes.

The IGA states the commitment of both the UK Government and the Welsh Government to proceed by agreement. It makes it clear that the Sewel convention will be fully respected, and we have made it clear that, despite the fact the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament have so far rejected a legislative consent motion, we will act in our future dealings with the Scottish authorities in the same way as we propose to act in relation to Wales, by observing in full the political commitments into which we have entered under the intergovernmental agreement.

I regret very much that the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament did not agree to the package, in the way the Welsh Government and the Welsh Assembly did. It is pretty fairly summed up by Mark Drakeford, the Welsh Minister who led the negotiations for the Welsh Government, when he said

“the amended Bill, and the inter-governmental agreement that goes with it, does both things we set out to do. It safeguards devolution and it safeguards the future of a successful United Kingdom”.

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port, the Labour party’s Front-Bench spokesman in the other place, said

“everything that could have been done in areas where we have no precedent to appeal to has been done.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 14 June 2018; Vol. 791, c. 1818.]

In answer to the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), work is already under way on the detailed frameworks. My officials and the officials of the territorial Departments are working with devolved Government officials on that task, and of course he is right that we will have to take account of the views of industry, of farmers and of other interests.

I believe we have a good, balanced compromise package available, and what the people in all parts of the UK now expect is that their different Governments and different legislatures will work together constructively to represent them. That is what people expect, and that is what this Government want to deliver.

[Several hon. Members rose—]