Official Controls (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2023

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Wednesday 1st March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, for facilitating this debate. Even though we do not support fatal Motions, it is important that this debate has taken place, as he said.

I will be brief; it is very late, and I do not think that there is any need to go back and repeat the concerns and arguments which have been very clearly laid out by noble Lords this evening. As the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, said, it is important to have a debate on this instrument, which was introduced, according to the Explanatory Notes, to implement either a negotiated outcome with the EU or the system envisaged under the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill. As we have heard this evening, that outcome has now been negotiated in the form of the Windsor Framework, which we have welcomed.

We believe that the agreement of a green lane, which is designed to ease the movement of goods between GB and Northern Ireland and to support the functioning of a UK internal market, will be the subject of much discussion and debate as we go forward with the framework—it has received a lot of debate and discussion tonight. There has been a lot of talk about the paperwork and checks that will come in. I read the submissions to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, and road hauliers were mentioned by noble Lords in the debate, so I know it is important that any checks or paperwork are not onerous, and that trade can continue as smoothly as possible under the circumstances.

We also understand that the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, and his party need the time and space to fully analyse the agreement and the accompanying legal text—that is only right. We are glad that the Government have committed to providing any supplementary evidence that they may request.

The Government have also said that, if the Executive are restored, Ministers will negotiate whether and how this power can be handed back to the Northern Ireland department. Can the Minister give any more information about what assurances or commitments Defra would seek in those negotiations? We know that Northern Ireland businesses want the protocol to work and for disruption to be minimised, so there must be sufficient capacity for checks to be carried out so that they do not become too onerous.

We do not oppose the measure, but the fact that the Government have deemed it necessary is regrettable. I believe that compromise and respect would create a better situation. This is a very complex issue, and I say again that I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, for bringing us the time to debate it. I will listen to the Minister’s response with great interest.

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Benyon) (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by sending the whole House’s best wishes to DCI John Caldwell and his family, following the despicable attack that took place last week. As the Prime Minister set out on Monday, there is no place for such attacks in Northern Ireland or anywhere in the United Kingdom.

I thank noble Lords for their contribution to the debate, and, in particular, the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, for introducing it; I have huge respect for him and his colleagues. I will start and finish my response to the debate on the basis of years spent in Northern Ireland in my early 20s, where I saw some of the terrible things that the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, spoke about—and I have heard others speak in similar ways. I understand, perhaps more than many, the levels of compromise which have been required of him and his colleagues to get to where we are today, and the levels of leadership in the communities they represent, which the rest of us in these islands will never be called on to show. They have demonstrated quite remarkable levels of compromise and leadership, and I fully respect them for doing that.

The instrument which the Motion seeks to annul, the Official Controls (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2023, was laid on 12 January this year. In direct response to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, and the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, I assure the House that, if the Assembly is restored, the implementation of these measures will become the responsibility of the Executive and be delivered through the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs in Northern Ireland. Their purpose is to grant the Secretary of State concurrent powers: first, to allow Defra to construct facilities for the purposes of performing official controls, with the primary purpose of controlling goods travelling via Northern Ireland into the European Union; and secondly, to enable Defra to direct the competent authority, DAERA—the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs—to hire suitably qualified staff to perform these controls.

The Windsor Framework announced by the Government this week establishes a new way forward for Northern Ireland, making substantial changes to the protocol. It addresses the full range of issues it caused, safeguarding both economic and democratic principles in Northern Ireland. It was always this Government’s preference to secure a negotiated outcome, and this agreement, we hope, delivers for all communities in Northern Ireland. I entirely respect the points made by the noble Lord, and his and his party’s wish to really study this: we must be patient with them.

Benefits from the agreement are significant and wide-ranging and I shall provide noble Lords, briefly, with a couple of examples. We have scrapped all unnecessary red tape for internal UK trade into Northern Ireland. We have also permanently guaranteed unfettered access for Northern Ireland goods to the whole UK market, maintaining the integrity and smooth functioning of the UK internal market. The only controls that remain are for a very limited subset of goods, such as endangered species. We have secured an expansion of the green lane for UK food retailers. Supermarkets, wholesalers, hospitality and catering companies, and those providing food to public services, such as schools and hospitals, will be able to use the green lane. We have removed the requirement for costly health certificates for individual food products; and the requirement for up to 100% physical checks is replaced with a purely risk-based and intelligence-led arrangement.

We have also successfully negotiated significant changes on plants. Previously banned seed potatoes and other commercially important plants described by the EU as “high risk”, such as British oak trees, will now be able to move between GB and NI. Overall, the Windsor Framework delivers for businesses, consumers and all people and communities in Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

I now turn from the benefits of the Windsor Framework to this specific SI. As we have explained previously, this legislation was required in all scenarios. I pick up the point made by my noble friend Lord Moylan: SPS checks into Northern Ireland have happened for decades. The whole island of Ireland has been an epidemiological area for these purposes for several decades. The SPS inspection facilities that we are talking about in this SI will ensure that goods destined for the European Union travelling via Northern Ireland are subject to EU checks and controls. These will mainly be goods travelling directly to the Republic of Ireland from Northern Ireland ports. They are necessary checks, as the former DUP Minister for Agriculture, Edwin Poots, acknowledged. They will ensure that checks on live animals are performed safely and with due regard to animal and staff welfare, something that is not possible at the moment with the temporary arrangements that have been put in place. This is a long-standing commitment to protect against disease, given that the island of Ireland is a single epidemiological unit, pre-dating Brexit. They ensure that Irish trucks are not using Northern Ireland ports as a backdoor into the EU without red-lane checks. So, as we said in the Bill and have always maintained, we will need to have the appropriate facilities to carry out red-lane checks.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I want to ask something just for the sake of clarification. My understanding is that the checks that have been carried out for many years relate to livestock and that most people understand SPS checks, which may technically include livestock, as checks on food, seeds, plants and so forth. While I fully accept that there have always been checks on livestock, for good reason, and that they are uncontroversial—I do not think anyone is asking that they be abolished—it slightly overeggs the position to suggest that there have always been SPS checks in the broader sense in which that term has come to be used in the course of the debate following the referendum vote in 2016. However, I am happy to be corrected.

[Lord Benyon (Con)]

I am happy to talk to the noble Lord after this and clarify that point. Time is moving on.

I was talking about an important safeguard for Northern Ireland businesses. It means that they and they alone benefit from being part of the UK’s internal market. Irish businesses are not part of this and should not benefit from the green lane. Indeed, the implementation of the Windsor Framework can give Northern Irish businesses a competitive advantage over those in the south. We will encourage Irish firms to relocate jobs and investment into Northern Ireland.

The improvement of these facilities is also an important part of providing safe conditions for staff and animal welfare. The present contingency facilities were constructed at speed to allow controls to be delivered when we left the EU. Improving the facilities will ensure that consignments, including for live animal movements, move quickly through ports and on to final destinations, which could include Northern Irish farms. These arrangements are needed for Northern Ireland—its businesses and its reputation for high health status and high-quality agriculture and food production.

I turn to questions of timing and procedure for the introduction of this legislation, as raised by noble Lords. This legislation is time critical. As I set out, the conditions of the current facilities are of concern for both animal and staff welfare reasons. We want to ensure that, as above, the benefits of the new green lane are felt only by internal UK trade and that Irish traders are subject to full EU law checks and controls, as we have always said.

On process, although a public consultation was not required for this legislation as it relates to the implementation of an existing commitment and introduces no new policy, my officials and ministerial colleagues have engaged with industry and businesses extensively over the last two years and will continue to do so. Defra hosts a weekly forum attended by, on average, 150 businesses and organisations across Northern Ireland and Great Britain’s food supply chain, where people can raise issues, hear information and share their views. We have engaged with Northern Irish businesses, for which the integrity and reputation of their goods, from farm to fork, is critical to their success and viability. A useful example is milk; 30% of Northern Ireland’s milk is processed in the Republic, and milk and milk products were worth over £126 million in gross added value to Northern Ireland in 2020.

On the implications of this legislation for the devolution settlement, I reaffirm that the Government recognise that the delivery of these facilities is a devolved responsibility. In the absence of a Northern Ireland Executive and Assembly, it falls to the UK Government to be able to take that work forward.

I hope I have reassured noble Lords on the scope and aim of this statutory instrument. We have had a long, wide-ranging debate, but this is specifically about SPS measures that we need to put in place regardless of the changes, welcome though they may be, that have been announced in the last few days. I hope that, as the benefits we will draw from the historic Windsor Framework become apparent, we will put in place this week measures to ensure that we have proper sanitary and phytosanitary facilities in four ports in Northern Ireland. That is what the statutory instrument seeks to do. I hope I have persuaded the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, not to press his fatal Motion.

[Lord Dodds of Duncairn (DUP)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for what he has said and I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate. It is usual to say it has been a wide-ranging debate, and we can certainly agree on that if not much else at times.

I do not want to go back over some of the elements of this debate, but I want to say something in response to the noble Lord, Lord Bew. He ended on a note of challenge to us, saying that we have got what we wanted but are still not happy. I want to make a point, and it is worth putting on the record. He says that we demand a cross-community vote, whether or not we accept the protocol. That is a legitimate request because it is in keeping with the Belfast agreement. That has been changed and I have outlined the reasons why it is unacceptable. He then said that we have got a cross-community vote in relation to the Stormont brake and are still not happy. But the majority vote that has been granted to the Assembly in 2024 puts an end to the current protocol and instigates a period of negotiation for something new. The cross-community vote under the Stormont brake does not veto the law. It does not give the right to the Assembly to change anything, and that is the fundamental difference.

The devil is in the detail. We have heard the grand statements. We heard tonight that SPS checks have always happened between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is exactly right on the facts of that matter. It is easy to make wide-ranging statements and claim wonderful progress when you do not actually look at the details. People are saying that we now have free access between Great Britain to Northern Ireland for all goods coming through border control posts, but as I have pointed out—and nobody has challenged this—even for goods coming from Great Britain to Northern Ireland in the green channel, customs forms will have to be filled in. That is an Irish Sea border. Where else between any country or region of the United Kingdom does anyone have to fill in a customs form to transfer goods, and be subject to checks and to giving all the data and information to the European Union? Where else does anyone have to put goods that nobody can certify for definite will go into the Irish Republic down into the red lane, where the full checks of an international customs barrier are implemented?

We need to get real about this. No one need lecture me about entering and making agreements. I was part of the leadership of the Democratic Unionist Party that sat down and entered government with Sinn Féin, and shared power for years with it on a more stable basis than the Ulster Unionists did previously, when they had the majority. These are people who went out to murder our kith and kin, and who targeted my family visiting a hospital and tried to murder me. My noble friend Lord McCrea’s house was riddled with bullets. We sat down and shared power with them. They still eulogise these terrorists and murderers; they still praise and elevate them. The Minister is right to raise the matter of DCI Caldwell, and we have already expressed our sympathy and wish him well. Sinn Féin stand today and condemn that murder and say it is terrible, but the very same Ministers and leaders of Sinn Féin will stand up and eulogise and praise the murderers of police officers in front of their children—today.

We are still willing to enter government and to move forward with the people of Northern Ireland. Nobody need lecture us about being unreasonable. We agreed the New Decade, New Approach agreement. We agreed the various agreements down through the years. There is no one who should point the figure. At St Andrews, Ian Paisley made that historic agreement with Martin McGuinness. People have this idea that it is no to everything.

We will insist on our rights as British citizens. All we demand is equal citizenship. People talk about not wanting to create a hard border on the island of Ireland. We do not want a hard border. We have never sought a hard border on the island of Ireland. But we will not accept a hard border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. What do we mean by a hard border? What was it defined as by Sinn Féin and nationalist leaders, and by Leo Varadkar? As anything that changed—even a camera was not acceptable. How ridiculous. But for Northern Ireland there is the full panoply of border control posts, and officials jointly responsible to the EU and the UK, sharing data—all the things that are relevant to a third country. Britain is now designated for customs and trade purposes as a third country as far as Northern Ireland is concerned.

These things matter and that is why we are sitting tonight debating these issues—I wish that we could have debated them earlier and we would all be long home, but sadly that was out of our control. However, when we do debate these matters, we feel very strongly about what has been imposed. We will look in detail at all the issues that have been brought forward in this new deal. I hesitate to call it the Windsor agreement because the King was dragged into this whole affair needlessly and wrongly in a somewhat counterproductive, crass attempt to sell it to unionists—the Government should have known better and thought much more about that, as well as the overegging and overselling of it.

We will look at these issues in detail, but what we have seen thus far makes us question some of the propaganda and the claims that have been made. Be honest about it, tell us exactly what is going to happen regarding the equal citizenship of the people of Northern Ireland; do not claim that we are equal citizens and then put in place barriers between our citizenship—between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. We are prepared to make sacrifices to move Northern Ireland forward, but we will not sacrifice our equal citizenship within the United Kingdom.