Queen’s Speech

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 28th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, said that we must be alongside but not inside the EU, but the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, whom I welcome to her new position, stated absolutely clearly that there will be no single market for the UK and no customs union. I should like to explore a few of the consequences of that from the transport point of view.

Let us look at the frontiers—at Dover and the Channel Tunnel, as well as Holyhead and so on. About 15,000 trucks a day go through Dover and the Channel Tunnel together, and about 400,000 a year on the Holyhead route. In the future, with this new arrangement, we will have to look at tariffs on goods, the customs arrangements, immigration and, of course, the security that happens at the moment. Some things may be able to be done electronically, but at the moment that does not work very well for immigration. HM Revenue and Customs has stated that it is not confident it can deliver any new electronic system on time. As my noble friend Lord Adonis said, the traffic jams on the M20 and the M2 will go somewhere north of London. Where is all this going to go?

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Switzerland talking to people about logistics. Everybody knows that the Swiss model is half in, half out, and that they have transit arrangements for rail and road freight through Switzerland, but if you want to import goods into Switzerland you have to go through the customs and tariff procedure, which involves very long queues at the frontiers. That is what we will have. No matter how we solve this, the fact remains that the costs of transport are going to go up pretty dramatically. The other question is: where are we going to get the truck drivers from? Around 80% of the drivers that come across the channel are non-UK, EU citizens.

There is a similar question on the railways. Will manufacturing companies in this country be able to sell their equipment on the continent, and vice versa? Will they operate to the same standards, as they do at the moment after us struggling for about 20 years? It is going to be quite a challenge.

Having listened to much of the debate, I have heard a lot of messages about Brexit, job losses, lack of credibility and the economies of many sectors—we have heard about them all. Can the Minister say which sectors, if any, support a Brexit in which we do not have a single market, to which about 45% of our exports currently go, or the ability to recruit, welcome and keep the many people we need, as we have heard tonight, to keep these industries going? Which sectors will grow after Mrs May’s hard Brexit and her obsession with immigration?

I conclude by supporting what my noble friend Lord Soley said about the need for peace and the politics of Europe. I lived in Romania for several years in the 1970s when there was a communist regime. I saw the real pain of people who did not have liberty. The one thing we have brought and that we have encouraged is the free movement of people within the EU to travel, to work, to have relationships or whatever. It has contributed to the peace and understanding that we have, and I hope we can continue it. Surely we ought to be doing this and not separating ourselves out by even more barriers. I support a cross-party agreement to ensure that we retain some or all of these benefits, and I certainly support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Adonis.