European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

Leaving the EU means that we need to convert decades of EU law into our domestic legislation. A Bill that can do that in a timely and effective manner is essential. That is not what this debate is about. The real question is whether the Bill is fit for purpose, and I am afraid that it is not. The Government claim it will restore sovereignty to Parliament and secure certainty post-Brexit, but that is not the case. It transfers huge powers to Ministers, not to Members of the House, over issues vital to people’s lives, such as maternity and paternity leave, holidays, environmental standards and a range of other issues. I fear that the Bill could increase uncertainty, including the likelihood of legal challenge and judicial review, because the powers in it are so broadly drawn.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) and the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) have forensically exposed the reality of the key clauses in the Bill. Clause 7 gives Ministers the power to change EU-derived law that has failed or is deficient, without any definition of what that means; clause 9 could be used to amend the powers in the Bill after it is enacted; and clause 17 gives Ministers sweeping powers to make changes that they consider appropriate in consequence of the Act.

The Brexit Secretary claims, of course, that the Government will not use the powers to make major policy changes, which raises the question: why include them in the first place? Many people, myself included, fear that the powers will indeed be used to water down or remove workers’ rights and environmental standards. Some Government Members have tried to brush these concerns aside. Often they are the very same Members who have railed against the use of delegated powers in the past. For years, the Brexit Secretary argued vociferously against the

“trend from representative democracy to presidential oligarchy”.—[Official Report, 22 June 1999; Vol. 333, c. 932.]

Oh how times have changed! The right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) has strongly criticised the use of delegated powers, and let us not forget the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), who in 2011, his pre-Brexit and pre-leadership contender days, said:

“It is the perpetual, almost the eternal, job of this House to try to keep the Executive, Her Majesty’s Government, under check”

and urged Members to take

“tough decisions to hold the Government to account”

even

“when it is a Government whom we support”.—[Official Report, 5 December 2011; Vol. 537, cc. 57-60.]

I think that consistency in one’s political values and beliefs is vital, however difficult the circumstances, and I urge Government Members to remember the courage of their previous convictions.

As I said, a Bill is necessary to achieve Brexit, and as always I want to be constructive. I urge Ministers to bring forward measures to circumscribe more tightly the powers that the Bill delegates and to strengthen the scrutiny procedures for the most widely delegated powers. If they bring forward amendments along those lines, they will have support across the House.

Brexit presents us with a Herculean task. It encompasses not just transferring half a century of EU law into UK legislation or even agreeing the initial article 50 deal, but finances, the rights of EU and UK citizens, and Northern Ireland, which is already proving a huge challenge for the Government. It is about defining the future relationship between the UK and the EU for years to come.

Yesterday, the Brexit Secretary said that no one pretended this would be easy, but that is precisely what they did. Before the referendum, the Environment Secretary claimed:

“The day after we vote to leave we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want.”

Just last month, the International Trade Secretary said that a free trade agreement

“should be one of the easiest in human history”

to agree. Such comments are not just misleading but deeply misguided. They will not build respect or trust with our negotiating partners, and they will not bring Britain together. I fear that we are as divided now as we were at the referendum. Remain voters are angry that their views are being ignored; leave voters are frustrated at progress and worried that we could be tied up in knots for years. We need more honesty about the challenges we face and the inevitable trade-offs and compromises that will have to come. That is the leadership Britain now needs. The Government should step up to the mark.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 7th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Keir Starmer]

I am going to make some progress, because I barely got through two or three sentences before taking interventions. I do not think anybody could accuse me of not giving way.

In the end, there is stark choice for the House. If we are to have a vote, it will be either before the deal is concluded, or afterwards, in which case it will be a fait accompli. This concession appears to suggest that it will be before it is concluded. I recognise that there are other issues that flow off the back of that timing, but that is critical, because the sequence of events at the end of the exercise is extremely important to what the House can meaningfully say or do about the agreement that is put to us for a vote.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

Does my hon. and learned Friend agree that we must consider not just the timing of the vote but what happens if the House declines to accept the deal that the Government have put forward? The Prime Minister said on 25 January:

“If this Parliament is not willing to accept a deal that has been decided on…with the European Union, then, as I have said, we will have to fall back on other arrangements.”—[Official Report, 25 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 295.]

That does not guarantee that this House will have the final decision on our future relationship with the EU.

[Keir Starmer]

I am grateful for that intervention. I think the exchange that my hon. Friend has referred to is the cause of the concern about the vote being held before the deal is concluded. We will need greater clarification about the extent of the vote.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Monday 6th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Chris Leslie]

We should have the time, the space and the opportunity to discuss the consequences for my hon. Friend’s constituent, but we will not. My hon. Friend will have to tell her constituent that we did not have enough time in the House of Commons. Fingers crossed, there might be time for the House of Lords to do some of this work and put their concerns to Ministers in the other place.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is doing an excellent job of trying to scrutinise the implications of this Bill, yet we have less time on the Floor of the House to debate it than we would have in Committee for much less important Bills. Does my hon. Friend agree that while we want all these issues to be sorted out within two years, that might not happen, which is why we need transitional arrangements as well as a vote on the final deal, so that this House can see whether the Government have done their job properly and truly got the best deal for Britain?

[Chris Leslie]

Exactly. We need to use the two-year negotiation period wisely. We shall come on in Committee tomorrow to some of those particular issues.

Article 50

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Tuesday 24th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

I take my hon. Friend’s point, and I will seek incisive brevity.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister said that

“no deal…is better than a bad deal”,

but ending up on World Trade Organisation rules could be the worst possible deal, hitting businesses and families hard. May I press the Secretary of State: will there be a vote in this House at the end of the trade negotiations—not just the article 50 process, but the trade negotiations—so that Parliament can decide what is in Britain’s national economic interest?

[Mr Davis]

I will correct the hon. Lady slightly: there will not be a simple trade negotiation. The European Union pretty much always insists that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, so justice and home affairs, security matters and a whole series of other issues will be tied into it. But, yes, there will be a vote at the end of it. We have already agreed to that.

Parliamentary Scrutiny of Leaving the EU

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

There have been many passionate speeches about Parliament’s role in holding the Government to account for their Brexit decisions in the months and years ahead, but we must also focus on the here and now. This morning, the Bank of England released data showing that sterling has reached an historic 168-year low. The pound is now worth less than it was in the 1976 sterling crisis when the International Monetary Fund had to bail us out; in the aftermath of black Wednesday, when sterling left the exchange rate mechanism; and at the height of the financial crisis in 2008.

Sterling goes up and down, and foreign exchange markets are not always the most reliable measure of what is happening in our economy, but when currency markets move so sharply and for a significant period, the Government should pay attention, yet so far Ministers have not. The pound has fallen by around 20% over the past year. About half of that happened well after the referendum result as the Government’s position on Brexit began to take shape. The moves in the currency markets are backed by billions of dollars. The markets are saying that UK domestic assets look less valuable; that the UK seems to be a less attractive country in which to invest; and that the UK’s growth prospects look set to be weaker.

The fall in sterling matters to every single household in the UK. It is not just that foreign holidays are more expensive; it is that the costs of everyday goods that are made abroad, such as fuel, food and clothes, are rising too. British households are more dependent on imports than before, with imports now representing about 30% of our GDP. The pound in people’s pockets has been devalued. If prices rise faster than wages, people will be poorer.

It may be that a devaluation in sterling will make our exports more competitive. If exports rise and imports fall, our large trade deficit could decrease, helping to rebalance our economy. However, this has not happened after previous sterling crises, at least not on a lasting basis. An improvement in Britain’s trade position may be even harder to achieve now if Brexit reduces access to the EU single market and alternative export markets take years to open up.

There is another important consequence of the falling pound, which has so far received far too little attention. In her recent party conference speech, the Prime Minister said that while monetary policy has provided

“the necessary emergency medicine after the financial crisis,”

super-low interest rates and quantitative easing

“have had some bad side-effects”.

People with assets have become richer, but those without have suffered. People with mortgages have found their debts are cheaper, but those with savings have found themselves poorer. What the Prime Minister has failed to recognise is that the falling pound is yet again benefiting the asset-rich. Shareholders in FTSE 100 companies, which make most of their profits abroad, or those with foreign assets, have seen yet another extraordinary windfall. While the already asset-rich benefit from the falling pound, the asset-poor suffer as costs rise and the price of everyday goods imported from abroad go up.

The Government rightly intend to respect the will of the people and to do the best to make Brexit work, as do I. They must recognise, however, that the falling pound means that the British people could become poorer than they were before the referendum, at exactly the same time as real incomes have finally started to recover from the sharp squeeze after the financial crisis. The Government must acknowledge this and act if they want to make good on their promise of an economy that works for all and not just a few at the top.

Exiting the European Union

Liz Kendall Excerpts

Monday 5th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his question. I promise him that I will take no lessons in organisation from the Labour party.

[Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)]

May I press the Secretary of State on the issue raised by the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry)? Japanese companies employ 140,000 people in the UK, and the Japanese Government say that these companies need to maintain tariff-free trade, consistency of regulation between the UK and the EU, passporting rights for financial services, and continued access to EU workers. In order to minimise uncertainty for these vital companies and their employees, is the Secretary of State going to prioritise any of those criteria? If not, which ones will he pursue?

[Mr Davis]

I have already made this pretty plain. All the issues that the hon. Lady names, such as passporting and access to markets, are being looked at and evaluated in terms of where the real risks are. Let me take passporting as an example. I have consulted a number of people in the City on passporting, and I get very different views. The City is not a single business but a sort of ecosystem of businesses, and one gets different views from each of them. Some of them have different solutions too, such as “brass plate” arrangements and so on. We have to assess all that before we decide exactly how we organise the strategy. It is pretty straightforward. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) pointed out, it is straightforward, but it is complex to calculate and complex to work out, and we will do that.