European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 21st February 2017 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow a friend of over 50 years. Even Brexit will not divide us.

The Prime Minister’s foreword to the White Paper says that we are “a great global nation”. Few would quarrel with that. What concerns me today is our responsibility to that globe. Have the Government considered properly the effects of our proposed withdrawal on developing and post-conflict countries in particular, including Commonwealth countries and our own overseas territories? The noble Lord, Lord Morris, has just reminded us of Gibraltar. I have tabled an amendment because even the White Paper is silent on this.

Ironically, before last June’s fateful decision, David Cameron had presided over some of the higher moments relating to our global responsibilities, most notably the new dawn of the new sustainable development goals. Today the more vulnerable countries, which value their relationships with the UK, fear that our leaving the EU also means a downplaying of our international relations and our many commitments to help them. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said a lot more about that.

I start with the effect of Brexit on post-conflict countries in eastern Europe, having just returned from a visit to Kosovo, a country which we have championed and were the first to recognise. The Government can hardly deny that leaving the EU must mean giving up on enlargement, one of the cornerstones of our European policy. I have had reassurances from Ministers that we “remain committed to European security”, but what about the civilian CSDP programmes in Ukraine and Kosovo? The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, made strong points on security. I expect the Minister will say something definite about this.

NATO will remain the principal channel of security in eastern Europe. However, Russia has always feared and exaggerated Europe’s influence on its own former protégés. The EU’s projection of ideas can have an implicit political impact and the Commission may have overreached itself in Ukraine. Surely, however, we must stand firmly behind the Copenhagen principles of human rights, democracy, transparency and the rule of law that underlay membership of the EU. The noble Lord, Lord Balfe, reminded us that we were behind many of these principles from their origin. I assume that they continue to apply post-Brexit, not just for two years but well beyond the time of our departure. They may be difficult to apply in some countries, but we must resolutely stand by them. I fear that leaving the EU could weaken that resolution.

The European Union also brings these ideas to the poorest countries. In Africa the UK has been prominent in EU programmes, such as those to defeat piracy and to rescue trafficked migrants from the Mediterranean. We need to know how we are supposed to continue these operations other than in partnership with the EU. Will the Minister comment on that at least? In Mali and Niger the UK has played a small part in the EU missions against terrorism which, on the whole, have been successful in containing al-Qaeda, especially in the north of Mali.

Trade is another major area that brings considerable uncertainties. Once we leave the EU, we will need to negotiate separate free trade agreements with all 78 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries that currently enjoy tariff-free entry into Europe. This will not be an easy process in itself, but if it is left to the last minute some of the poorer, smaller nations could be left high and dry as far as our trade relations go.

On aid, I hope it goes without saying that the UK will continue to join international partnerships devoted to health campaigns against HIV/AIDS, polio and malaria. I expect our leadership role there to be unchanged, but all this will have to be reviewed. We make a huge contribution to health services in Africa, just as health workers from Africa make a vital contribution to our own NHS. Long may this continue while they can obtain visas and rights of residence.

I am less certain where we stand with the European Development Fund and ECHO. The EDF focuses on the least developed countries and the UK is the third largest donor. Our departure will have a great impact. ECHO is the EU’s humanitarian programme. It monitors emergencies on a daily basis throughout the world. Both are programmes of major importance to the poorest and most disaster-prone countries and the ones that are vulnerable to climate change. The EDF is technically outside the EU budget but it is a significant instrument, linked to the Cotonou agreement. Have the Government calculated the effect of our withdrawing from these on the beneficiaries as well as on the programmes?

EU member states form the world’s largest source of development funding, and taken together they currently make a huge contribution to poverty reduction and help to defeat epidemics. The UK’s withdrawal presumably will not mean that we no longer share data with other European countries, yet without partnership of some kind, we will be losing that important connection in international health—just as my noble friend Lord Blair reminded us also happens in policing and with the European arrest warrant. Can the Minister explain how this will work? Far be it from me to present Cassandra-like forecasts of doom, but no one has yet done the homework, and our former civil servants on the Cross Benches are quite doubtful about the cost of the whole process. But what is certain is that by withdrawing, we remove an important pillar from the European structure of aid and development, which we know is bound to hurt our most vulnerable trading partners.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerslake]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Hannay’s Amendment 22. I do so for one simple reason. I have a passionate belief that open government is better government. If we—as those who are in charge, if you like—want people to buy into what we are trying to do, we have to be able to trust them with the information that should be available to them. That is particularly true in relation to Brexit. We know that the referendum campaign was deep and divisive. We reached a point where virtually no one trusted anyone in that debate. That is fundamentally undermining to democracy. There is a growing gap between the governing and the governed, and one response to that is to have transparent government.

We have heard two arguments this evening for why a very simple amendment—to publish the impact assessments that can sensibly be published, which have already been done since the referendum—cannot be made. The first, from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, is that you cannot trust impact assessments. Not every impact assessment is good. I might even have been responsible for a few that were not that good. But if that is the argument we are now making—that we will not publish impact assessments because they might be wrong—that way madness follows. What about trusting the people and Parliament to make their own judgment about the quality of the impact assessments? That is what transparent government is all about. If we cannot trust people to make their own judgment about the information, if we worry that they will be depressed because the impact assessments are too downbeat, there is something seriously wrong with our thinking.

The second argument that we have heard is that it might in some way interfere with the negotiations. It is possible that some information published might cut across them, and there has to be a responsible attitude to that, but I worry that that argument is going to be rolled out time and again to keep Parliament and the public in the dark about what is actually happening through the negotiating period to the point where it is impossible to impact the outcome of the process. We have to have a better system than that. I quite believe that Vladimir Putin does not want to publish his impact assessments, but we are not Russia: we are an open democracy and should trust the people to use the information that is made available to them responsibly. That is why I support the amendment.

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

My Lords—

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Finn]

My Lords, I do not see the need for any requirement for impact assessments in the Bill, because the need does not arise. As my noble friend Lord Forsyth has said, the Bill is not taking us out of the EU but simply enabling the Government to trigger Article 50. There is no impact to assess from that enabling. This is not the place to get into detail over the negotiations or the structures around them, and it is vital that we do not bind the Government, either administratively or legally, in their negotiations, because that will only undermine their ability to get the best possible deal for the country.

I appreciate that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said that my noble friend Lord Blencathra was being cynical about impact assessments, but I dealt with a number of impact assessments when I worked in government and was frequently frustrated by their lack of accuracy. This was in part due to the lack of management information in government departments. Non-executive directors of government departments appointed from outside the Civil Service were often shocked by the poor quality of the information on which decisions were based. My noble friend Lord Maude, who I see in his place, made valiant attempts to improve the quality but I fear there is still a long way to go. Just last week, my right honourable friend Sir Oliver Letwin criticised the quality of advice from civil servants, in particular expressing the concern that not enough of their advice was factually based. My concern is therefore a general one about the utility of such impact assessments.

The other point I was going to make, which I think has already been made, is that impact assessments are inherently driven by a number of assumptions and predictions. I do not want to labour the issue, but various predictions made about the immediate consequences of Brexit—not only by Her Majesty’s Treasury but also by the IMF, the IFS, the OECD and the Governor of the Bank of England—failed to materialise. My concern is that impact assessments could well be of dubious quality and accuracy. On that basis, I urge noble Lords not to press their amendments.

[The Earl of Sandwich]

My Lords, I do not know what the Conservatives are worrying about. I have listened to the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, saying the same thing again and again. We need to have open government, as my noble friend Lord Kerslake has just pointed out. We are helping the Government by moving probing amendments. The noble Baroness, Lady Quin, has given a direct reply and that should surely be satisfactory. I am not going to waste too much time but will speak about developing countries, because I believe we should have an impact assessment relating to the effects on those countries. I have spoken to the Minister and know that he is kindly going to reply to this. I will be as quick as I can and will not repeat what I said at Second Reading.

Amendment 28 reflects my concern about the effects of withdrawal on the least developed countries and countries recovering from conflict. I have consulted the Overseas Development Institute and Traidcraft, the experts in this field. I know one of the answers the Minister will give is that we really cannot tell what the effects will be in numerical terms at this point. It might be of interest to him that the ODI estimates that the least developed countries could lose approximately £323 million annually if current preferential access in the UK is discontinued.

I accept that there will be pluses and minuses. On the one hand we may be sacrificing the interests of the ACP countries that currently benefit from their association with the EU, especially the smaller states and islands that are vulnerable to climate change. On the other hand, some countries—sugar cane producers, for example—will have suffered from the EU’s protection of its own markets and may well want us to abandon fortress Europe in favour of bilateral agreements through the WTO, or a new version of the generalised system of preferences, and I accept that.

But not yet knowing the maths does not mean that we can take no action. The interests of LDCs have not been mentioned in any of the documents relating to withdrawal. The Government must surely undertake a review of some kind and assess whether these countries will be damaged; how we respond to that must be part of the negotiations. We may well have to introduce or reintroduce aid policies to make up for any losses in trade and investment. Aid agencies generally see fair trade agreements as more beneficial than aid, but they fear that Brexit will mean new free trade agreements or EPAs that could disadvantage poorer countries. They would like to see trade policies which are linked to the sustainable development goals, so crafted that they are lined up with those countries’ own objectives. I quote Sir Simon Fraser’s Tacitus lecture. He said,

“these EU trade agreements are vital for their development goals. The UK will no longer be able to champion their access to the EU market as we have in the past. We have a moral responsibility to address the concerns of these countries, which illustrate how Brexit may have unforeseen repercussions well beyond Europe”.

Finally, I mentioned security and enlargement in eastern Europe, another area in which we may need to use our aid programme to make up for shortfalls left behind. NATO membership will not be enough. If we withdraw from the EU the economies in those countries will suffer. We need to know the effect of our withdrawal on aid programmes as well.

These are my concerns and it is not asking a lot of the Government to say that they need to make some assessment. We have a considerable reputation as a trading and aiding nation and we must take care not to damage our relations with countries that respect our values and traditions, both in the Commonwealth and in the rest of the world.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, it is getting late and I will therefore try to be brief. First, I congratulate the noble Lords and noble Baronesses who put their names to the various amendments in this group, because probing amendments are an entirely appropriate part of our process. Every one of these amendments reflects an underlying anxiety that exists in different sectors and in different regions of our country. People engaged in activities, from universities to working with less developed countries, feel that their issues are not being considered by the Government at this crucial time as they choose to trigger Article 50 and that, if those issues are not considered at this time as the Government consolidate their negotiating position, they will never be properly considered anywhere in this process, so I see this as entirely appropriate.