Brexit: Deal or No Deal (European Union Committee Report)

Lord Blair of Boughton Excerpts

Tuesday 16th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blair of Boughton (CB)]

My Lords, as the last Back-Bencher to speak—I am sure you are all deeply happy about that—I thank the Minister for asking to meet me before Christmas, and beg his indulgence and that of the House to go somewhat off-piste from the detail of the report. If I may keep the metaphor going, I will be skiing in parallel, however. Skiing is quite a good metaphor, because there is silence about a particular aspect of the deal/no deal arrangement with which I am very concerned.

Other than a bare-bones comment, there is no substantive mention of anything to do with security, policing or intelligence in the report—I did not expect any. As I and several other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, have remarked in this House in terms over the past 18 months since the referendum, the phrase “deal or no deal” has salience not only to our future trading arrangements with the 27 but to a number of other issues. I want to know how the Government will negotiate or are preparing to negotiate on issues of security, policing and intelligence, as they are obviously, as the report suggests, preparing in some form of transition or implementation period for a future trading relationship.

I reassure the Minister that I am not asking for a detailed answer from him today—that would be unfair. I want to tell him and the House about an experience which has prompted this brief intervention. At their meeting last week, Cross-Bench Peers were addressed by Richard Harrington MP at what I must say was considerable length about the Nuclear Safeguards Bill, which will set out the UK’s approach to counter-proliferation after our withdrawal from Euratom. Mr Harrington made it clear that the Government were preparing a whole set of options along the complete continuum of “deal, what kind of deal, no deal”. If they are doing that—and I commend them for it—I would like the Minister to give me a brief indication of what they are doing about the same continuum for our future relationship with European police forces, Europol, the Schengen Information System, the European Criminal Records Information System, and all the other apparatuses which connect the UK and our EU partners. If the Minister cannot do that in appropriate detail today—I do not expect him to—I ask him to write to me and lay his answer in the Library as to the state of the Government’s negotiations over this issue. Which Minister below the Secretary of State in which department is in charge? Which Minister is involved? Are such arrangements to be caught up in the transition period? Does no deal on security and policing actually mean our current arrangements falling off a cliff?

I take the case of the European arrest warrant. If that ceases to be available in March 2019, no alternative exists. There are no current extradition treaties with France, Spain, Italy or any of the 27—not even with the Republic of Ireland. The paedophiles, the organised crime syndicates and the terrorists win, in 12 months’ time. A previous Home Secretary recognised this when she opted back into the justice and home affairs arrangements. She is now the Prime Minister. How will her legacy of having done so be protected?

I am sorry to have taken time to go off-piste, but the issue is parallel to the debate, and I hope that the Minister will accept that a deal or no deal in the security arrangements for our citizens and the citizens of our European partners is really important, and will write to me as I have asked.