European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Blencathra Excerpts

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

[Lord De Mauley (Con)]

My Lords, I wonder whether the Labour Party could find room for others in this debate. Even if the noble Lord, Lord Lea, were right that we did not have to go through a process of joining EFTA and the EEA—I do not think that he was, actually—being a member of the EEA means accepting EU laws, as my noble friend Lord Forsyth has said, without any political representation or influence over them. This would, of course, result in less control for the UK over its destiny, rather than more. That is not what people voted for in the referendum. I oppose this amendment for those reasons and because it is directly inconsistent with the White Paper.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, there are those who say that, since voting to leave the EU was the only question on the ballot paper, it is legitimate to argue that people did not vote to leave the single market or the customs union. They are wrong, but we will deal with that in the fourth group of amendments. Those same people also argue that we can join the EEA and benefit from it while still leaving the EU. I believe that that, too, is wrong and misguided. However, your Lordships should not take my word for it: I will quote from the EEA website. After it describes what the EEA is, who are the contracting parties and when it was agreed, it goes on to say in point 4:

“What is included in the EEA Agreement? The EEA Agreement provides for the inclusion of EU legislation in all policy areas of the Single Market. This covers the four freedoms, i.e. the free movement of goods, services, persons and capital, as well as competition and state aid rules, but also the following horizontal policies: consumer protection, company law, environment, social policy and statistics. In addition, the EEA Agreement provides for cooperation in several flanking policies such as research and technological development, education, training and youth, employment, tourism, culture, civil protection, enterprise, entrepreneurship and small and medium-sized companies. The EEA Agreement guarantees equal rights and obligations within the Single Market for citizens and economic operators in the EEA. Through Article 6 of the EEA Agreement, the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union is also of relevance to the EEA Agreement, as the provisions of the EEA Agreement shall be interpreted in conformity with the relevant rulings of the Court given prior to the date of signature, 2 May 1992”.


Therefore, if we join the EEA, we would, in effect, still be in the EU to all intents and purposes, with the exception of agriculture, fishing, justice and home affairs. All the rest of it we would have, lock, stock and barrel. We would not have control of our borders, our laws, our courts or much of our money. We would thus betray the people who voted to leave the EU, and that is why we should reject this amendment.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I will make four very brief points. Will the Minister assure the House that this amendment is actually within the scope of the Bill? The Bill is about notifying withdrawal: this seems to me, as with many other amendments, to be about something completely different. Secondly, it is not within our unilateral gift. Even if the Prime Minister is instructed to remain a member of the EEA on our behalf, she cannot necessarily achieve this on her own. Thirdly, it is not a good idea to tie her hands in that fashion, and fourthly, even if this amendment succeeded—and the same is true of many others—and it became a part of this Bill, as the two years unrolled, it might prove to be inconvenient and an obstacle. There would be nothing to stop the Government simply repealing, or bringing forward measures to repeal, this particular measure, were it to be added to the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I have put my name to Amendment 4, which was so effectively moved by the noble Lord, Lord Hain. Amendment 5, which is in my name and grouped with it, covers some of the matters that have already been discussed in the debate on Amendment 1.

The issue here is vital to much manufacturing industry in the UK and I am grateful to the noble Lord who spoke a moment ago emphasising that. The EU market is absolutely critical for manufacturers. This is generally true throughout the UK, but it is particularly true in Wales, where manufacturing represents a significant part of the economy and where the service sector is somewhat smaller than it is in other parts of these islands. I note the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and I respect them, but those arguments do not carry so much weight in Wales, given where we are now.

That is why the Welsh Government, led by Labour First Minister Carwyn Jones, jointly with the official Plaid Cymru Opposition led by Leanne Wood, have taken the unusual step of publishing a joint White Paper, Securing Wales’ Future, which has been endorsed by the National Assembly for Wales as a body. The White Paper calls for us to have,

“a new relationship with Europe”,

so it obviously accepts that, as a result of the referendum, we are leaving the EU as it is presently composed. That is something that I greatly regret, but it seems to be the reality.

The central theme of the White Paper is encapsulated in the following summary paragraph:

“We believe that full and unfettered access to the Single Market for goods, services and capital—including our key agricultural and food products—is vital for the forward interests of Wales and the UK as a whole and we urge the UK Government to adopt this as the top priority for negotiation with the EU”.


The reason for putting so much emphasis on this dimension is simple. When the old heavy industries in Wales declined as a source of employment, the replacement strategy adopted by successive Labour and Conservative Governments in London, and thereafter by Governments of Wales in Cardiff—and central to the highly successful work of the WDA—was to maximise inward investment to Wales by companies from America and Asia wanting to secure a manufacturing base in order to sell to the EU market.

This approach has been the key strategic element that has helped Wales to build a new manufacturing economy over the past three or four decades. I personally saw the merits of this at first hand, having worked before entering politics with three American corporations—Ford, Mars and Hoover, which was at Merthyr Tydfil at that time—and then having helped to set up a small company, Alpha-Dyffryn, which I chaired for nine years. This company was the sprat that caught the mackerel and secured the Siemens factory at Llanberis, which employs some 400 people and was established to sell to the European market.

What I know about all American companies coming to be based in Wales—companies such as Ford at Bridgend—is that they do so in order to sell to a European market of 500 million customers. If such companies had to overcome tariff or technical barriers, they would think twice before locating in Wales—or, indeed, in north-east England, Merseyside or the Midlands. They would certainly think twice about increasing their existing investment. Such unhampered access is equally relevant to key Welsh industries such as agriculture: 90% of our exports of beef and sheepmeat go to the European market.

The Welsh Government are not blind or deaf to the outcome of the referendum. They recognise that two elements that influenced some, though not all, of the out voters were, first, migration levels from the EU to the UK—although this amounts to only 2.6% of the population in Wales—and, secondly, the wish to avoid what some saw as unnecessary regulation. Those two elements may militate against our continuing full membership of the single market—although we note that, as has been mentioned, this is a price that Norway finds worth paying. Indeed, as has also been mentioned, some of the campaigners to leave the EU argued during the campaign that we would be able to seek a Norway-type relationship.

The Assembly White Paper states explicitly that the Welsh economy,

“will continue to need migration from EU countries to help sustain our private sector economy and public services”.

This is true of the tourist sector, of food processing, of the university sector and of much more. It is in the interests both of Wales and of the EU to reach an agreement that allows barrier-free access to the single market in return for an agreement to allow EU migrants to come to Wales to work. I emphasise the words “to work”. That is the key element in the approach of the Assembly White Paper, which explicitly states that,

“freedom of movement of people is linked to employment”.

That is the requirement and it should be acceptable both to EU countries and to ourselves.

What we ask in the amendments is that the Government commit to such an approach in their negotiations with our 27 EU partners. Equally, with regulations that may be needed to avoid market distortion, it should be possible to agree, and for the UK to legislate, for such regulations as may be needed to maintain a level playing field. In fact, the European Union Committee recognises this in its report Brexit: The Options for Trade, which, in paragraph 43 of the summary, on page 76, says:

“The notion that a country can have complete regulatory sovereignty while engaging in comprehensive free trade with partners is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of free trade. Modern FTAs involve extensive regulatory harmonisation in order to eliminate non-tariff barriers, and surveillance and dispute resolution arrangements to monitor and enforce implementation. The liberalisation of trade thus requires states to agree to limit the exercise of their sovereignty”.


In the context of these amendments, that is a very pertinent paragraph.

What is being sought by the cross-party approach in Wales is neither unreasonable nor impractical. Indeed, the wording of the Government’s White Paper leaves a small chink of light that suggests that they may in their heart be amenable to such an approach. Indeed, in paragraph 8.3 of the White Paper they say that a new negotiated agreement,

“may take in elements of current Single Market arrangements in certain areas as it makes no sense to start again from scratch when the UK and the remaining Member States have adhered to the same rules for so many years”.

Precisely. So why will the Government not accept one or other of the amendments as a token of their sincerity in that approach, or at least table their own amendment along these lines on Report? Industry, business and agriculture would then sleep much more easily—and so would the Government of Wales.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I have no problem in agreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, that a good trade deal, and a fair trade deal, is important for Wales—and, indeed, for all parts of the United Kingdom. My problem with the amendments is that they fly directly in the face of what the people voted for. Since the referendum, many remainers have been peddling the myth that the people voted to leave the EU but not to leave the single market. The single market was not on the ballot paper, they say, so the people could not have voted for it. Apparently they just wanted to leave the EU but to stay in the single market; we heard that point put passionately by the noble Lord, Lord Ashdown, a few moments ago.

Remainers have accused my right honourable friend the Prime Minister of “opting” for a hard Brexit. I submit that that is nonsense. The Prime Minister is not opting for a hard Brexit, a soft Brexit or any sort of squishy Brexit; she is merely attempting to carry out the wishes of the people to leave the EU. That automatically means leaving the single market, because if we stay in the single market we are still in the EU, to all intents and purposes.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Would the noble Lord respond to the notion that the people decided that they wanted access but not membership? So the 48%—let us get this right—wanted membership of the single market and the 52% wanted access? Was that on the ballot paper, by any chance?

[Lord Blencathra]

My Lords, it would be difficult to respond to that without tying myself in circles, because the noble Lord has got it slightly wrong. But I will come on to the point about people saying we could access the single market. At one point during the campaign, it may have been my right honourable friend Boris Johnson who said, “We could leave the EU and still access the single market”. What happened? All hell broke loose. It is not that we were shot down but the Government and their advisers dropped the equivalent of all their bunker-busting bombs on us. “No, no”, said the then Prime Minister, the Treasury and the BSE campaign. “If you vote to leave the EU, then you are out of the single market. You are out of the customs union. You can’t have one without the other”, said all the government spokesmen. “You can’t have your cake and eat it”, they said. On that occasion that is what the Government said. Opposition Members have quoted various leave spokesmen who have said, “Oh yes, we want to be in the single market and leave the EU”, or, “We want to access the single market and be in the EU”, but the response from the official BSE campaign, the Prime Minister and the Government was, “No, you can’t. Leaving the EU means leaving the single market too”. On that occasion, the remain campaign was not economical with the truth.

[Baroness Kramer]

I just make the point that the argument that leave made was that the remainers were exaggerating and they were wrong. To their credit, people believed them and voted on that basis. So if you were a leave voter and you had listened to Daniel Hannan, if you were a leave voter and you had listened to Boris Johnson, if you were a leave voter and you were at any one of the many hustings that I went to, you would have heard the leave campaign saying absolutely clearly that you would have identical access; indeed, you would be in the single market even if you voted leave. That happened over and again and there are witnesses to it throughout this House.

[Lord Blencathra]

If the leave campaign tried that early on in the campaign, it was certainly shot down by the Government, the Treasury and all their spokesmen very early on.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Is not the point a very simple one which the noble Lord does not appear to appreciate—that every country in the world has access to the single market? The issue was whether one was a member of the single market, which would mean that all businesses—that is, 90% of the businesses in this country—would be bound by these rules and regulations, which would apply to exporters. That was the distinction made.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Blencathra]

My noble friend, as an expert in these matters, is absolutely right. He puts it very succinctly. Please correct me if I am wrong—I am very happy to be shot down on this point—but is it correct that if we stay in the single market, then we have to accept what the EU calls the four fundamental freedoms, including open borders? Is it true that if we stay in the single market, we have to pay into the EU budget to a certain extent? Is it correct that, if we stay in the single market, we have to let the European court rule over us? Is it correct that, if we stay in the single market, we have to accept laws made by a body over which this Parliament would have no say or control? That is not leaving the EU, and those who advocate staying in the single market know it full well. It is staying in the EU by the back door, and that is not what the British people voted for.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

Perhaps the noble Lord would explain about the people of Norway who voted to not join the European Union and accepted all the things he said they had accepted.

[Lord Blencathra]

My Lords, the last thing I heard about Norway was in the news last week. I believe that a Norwegian Minister, or former Minister, said, “Whatever you do, don’t join the EEA like we did. It was a terrible mistake”. I am not here to answer for Norway’s decision. I am here to support the decision of the British people—all 17.2 million of them. I was part of the leave campaign, a little junior cog, and after we were successful, some detailed studies were done. Contrary to the public view that everybody voted leave to stop or control immigration, the vast majority of people—72%—voted leave because they said that they wanted to get back control and sovereignty of their country. Only about 23% put immigration at the top of the list. Of course, admittedly, if you are taking back sovereignty and control and putting Parliament in charge, that means Parliament is in charge of immigration and a lot of other things as well. But let us not pretend that people voted leave purely because of immigration or because they wanted to stay in the single market.

I conclude with a comment that I made in my Second Reading speech, when I quoted my right honourable friend Sir Oliver Letwin MP, one of the Government’s foremost remain campaigners, and one of the then Prime Minister’s gurus when thinking about these things. He said in the other place on 31 January:

“I made it … clear … that … an inevitable consequence of leaving the EU would be leaving the single market”,


and leaving the customs union. He continued,

“it seems to me … that the people who voted to leave were voting with their eyes wide open, knowing that the consequence might be our falling back on the WTO”.—[Official Report, Commons, 31/01/17; col. 871.]

The Government made it clear at the time that leaving the EU meant leaving the single market. There is no excuse now to try to build in this amendment to thwart the decision of the British people.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

I support Amendment 4. I do so because what the Government are doing is beyond me with their extreme form of Brexit in taking us out of the single market. Why are they doing it? Above all, why are those on the Conservative Benches who supported remain allowing them to do it? It is true that there was an instruction from the British people that we should leave the European Union but there was not an instruction for us to leave the single market, however much the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, might wish there was. That was for the very simple reason that, as the noble Lord, Lord Hain, pointed out, that matter was not on the ballot paper. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, and other noble Lords on the leave side of this argument can speculate as much as they want about the reasons people voted the way they did, and I can speculate as well. However, the truth is that none of us actually knows. All we know is the instruction that was given on 23 June. The referendum campaign did not help much. The campaign on either side, frankly, in terms of getting to the facts, was not terribly helpful. The noble Lord quoted a number of Conservative politicians. That is part of the problem. The referendum campaign was effectively a factional fight between two wings of the Conservative Party, which did very little to illuminate the facts but, tragically, a very great deal to divide and damage the country.

What we do know—however much those opposite may protest—is what all the mainstream parties promised the electorate at the time of the last general election. It was that we would stay in the single market. That was at a time when the referendum was likely. Indeed, it was a pledge in the manifesto of the Conservative Party. As the noble Lord, Lord Hain, also mentioned, the Conservative Party manifesto could not have been clearer. To avoid any ambiguity it emphasised its clarity. It said:

“We say: yes to the Single Market”.


There was no caveat in the way that people suggest, so it is unclear to me why the Prime Minister has decided—given that she has no other mandate on this matter than that manifesto—that she is saying no to the single market. I have heard the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, and other noble Lords, including some Ministers, argue that the unambiguous pledge in the Conservative manifesto was somehow trumped by the fact that there would be a referendum and the Government would respect the result. You can respect the result of the referendum and withdraw from the European Union without withdrawing from the single market. Deciding to leave the EU does not mean leaving the single market, however much noble Lords opposite would like it to do so.

As has been mentioned, a number of countries are members of the European single market but not members of the European Union. Norway, in particular, was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. Norway sought to negotiate joining the EU at the same time as us in the 1970s. In the end, it had a referendum and voted against but it became a member of the single market. We should be very clear that when Norwegian Ministers were saying it was not ideal, they were not saying, “Don’t be members of the single market”; they were saying, “For goodness’ sake, stay in the European Union”. To suggest otherwise is just nonsense.

It is clear that it is possible to be both outside the EU and inside the single market. The question, therefore, is whether it is desirable. In my very strong view, it is. We know that the issue in world trade increasingly is not tariffs but non-tariff barriers. As the IFS noted in its report on the single market published in August last year, the service sector is particularly important to our economy and to our tax receipts and is particularly vulnerable. The financial services sector is likely to be disproportionately hit by loss of the single market.

For many of us, the decision to leave the EU is a tragedy that goes far beyond economics but it is compounded by the Government’s decision to pursue extreme Brexit no matter the cost to our economy. We have the opportunity tonight to ask them to think again. We should take it.

--- Later in debate ---

In conclusion, I imagine that the Minister will say something like, “Yes, don’t worry. We will consult. We are very much aware of the regional dimension”, and so on, but I would like something more concrete in his reply. I would like to know how the Government will consult, when and how often they will consult, and who will be consulted. If he cannot answer any of those questions, I would like an undertaking that he will come back to us with these details very soon. We certainly need specific answers, as well as kind words. We need clear answers and clear reassurances. I beg to move.

[Lord Blencathra]

My Lords—

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 6, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Quin. I will speak to Amendment 9, which is in my name and refers to all parts of the United Kingdom and not just the north-east of England. This whole group relates to the impacts of Brexit and the need for there to be assessment before the Government go much further.

It is estimated that around 160,000 jobs in the north-east of England are directly linked to our being part of the single market. That is because 58% of north-east exports go to the European Union, against a national figure of 42%. After 2019, with a hard Brexit there will be no automatic access to the single market, which is the largest free trade area in the world. Therefore, what are the economic advantages to the north-east of England or indeed to any part of the United Kingdom of losing that automatic access? I would like the Minister to explain how the Government plan to protect it.

I understand that the Minister met the North East Chamber of Commerce last Friday following an initiative by my noble friend Lord Beith. Will this be the first of many such meetings? I ask that because there are structures in London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for the Government to relate to, but what about the rest of the United Kingdom—the English regions? Regular meetings must be held with those regions to put them on an equal footing with Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London. For that reason, I think that we need regional impact assessments of leaving the European Union. As an example of the problem, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, emphasised, the north-east of England has a net balance of trade, with total exports amounting to £12.14 billion in 2015. No other region does so well in having such a positive balance of trade. The trade surplus in 2015 was £3.4 billion in the north-east—that is, the north-east local enterprise area and the Tees Valley local enterprise area added together.

It would be a disaster for jobs for this surplus to be lost. Chemicals had a trade surplus of £2 billion and the machinery and transport sector had a trade surplus of £2.3 billion. Some sectors had a trade deficit, which accounts for the overall surplus being £3.4 billion. Such a trade surplus is a very impressive figure for a small region in population terms such as the north-east of England. That is why I have concluded that the Government should establish resilience task forces in each part of the United Kingdom to work with the Government on the problems that will arise if we leave the single market and the customs union.

The abolition of government offices in England has not helped this situation and it has resulted in England being treated as a single entity run out of London. England is not a single entity and its differences should be reflected in the Government’s work on Brexit. In terms of EU funding support, we could look at our universities. The north-east universities are receiving £155 million in EU funding in the current funding period, 2014-20. They stand to lose access to much of that funding once we have left the European Union. Will the Government pick up the bill? Will they guarantee equivalent funding after 2020? In terms of structural funding, the north-east of England, including Tees Valley and the North East LEP, is receiving £590 million in structural funding from the EU in the 2014-20 period. Cornwall will receive £476 million, and Greater Manchester and Leeds City Region will receive more than £300 million each. England will receive £5.6 billion and the UK as a whole more than £8 billion. Will the Minister tell us what the Government’s plan is to make this money available after Brexit?

The question matters because it is the poorer parts of the country that voted more strongly for Brexit, but those are the very parts of the country that are in receipt of much higher levels of EU support. This is the challenge for the Government: have they any plans in place, eight months after the Brexit vote, to make those poorer parts of the United Kingdom resilient in the face of Brexit? The danger is that it is these very areas that will fall yet further behind once we leave the EU in 2019. What are the Government’s plans, in the face of Brexit, to generate growth in the poorer parts of the United Kingdom?

[Lord Blencathra]

I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for attempting to get in before him: I had forgotten that other noble Lords had amendments they might wish to speak on. I must warn my noble friend the Minister that I am very tempted to support these amendments, provided he can give me two firm assurances—first, that these assessments will be carried out by the Bank of England, the IMF and the same geniuses at the Treasury who forecast that by 2030 we would all be £4,322.15 worse off; and secondly, that he will send these assessments to Mr Juncker and Mr Barnier. I can think of nothing more likely to completely mislead those with whom we will be negotiating. Better still, he might get PricewaterhouseCoopers to do it, after its spectacular success at the Oscars last night where it could not count up a few hundred votes correctly.

In all seriousness, when have we ever seen an impact assessment attached to a government Bill which was remotely worth the paper it was written on? They are meaningless rubbish and no one takes them seriously. I did take one seriously when I was asked to chair the joint Select Committee on the original draft so-called snoopers’ charter Bill, which some noble Lords and Members of the Commons served on. We went through that impact assessment in detail and tore it to shreds. It estimated about £900 million as expenditure and our committee calculated that the real figure would be about £2 billion to £3 billion. We all know that impact assessments are not very accurate.

On the other hand, let us suppose that the Government did manage to write a proper impact assessment. We could do that on a sector-by-sector basis for each industry. I suppose that we could get the leaders of all those industries and all the other experts to draw up a proper SWOT analysis where Ministers have a pretty accurate assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to that industry from staying in or leaving the EU. Let us say that those SWOTs were spot-on accurate. Does anyone seriously suggest that we should then publish them and hand them straight over to the EU negotiators so that they can spot all the weaknesses in our position and the strengths that we want to exploit? It would be the height of folly to do such a thing. Indeed, it would be barking mad. If we were to do that, why stop there? Let us send Mr Putin a list of all our defence weaknesses and get MI6 to tell ISIL about any gaps in our security. Will Mr Barnier and the EU give us a paper on their strengths and weaknesses? Will they tell us their impact assessment of Britain? Of course not.

I am not being totally facetious. We will embark on negotiations that will determine the future of this country. The EU is reported to be demanding a £50 billion divorce settlement from us. I hope that we will strongly resist that. But if we are so daft as to publish any weaknesses in our arguments against it, we could end up robbing the taxpayer of billions of pounds. Billions of pounds are at stake.

I am not against impact assessments per se, although I prefer the SWOT analysis. Indeed, I hope that our Ministers and the Prime Minister have them. But I also hope and pray that they are keeping them under a top secret cover and keeping them very close to their chest. The last thing we want is to have them published or shared or laid before Parliament, which is probably even worse than publishing them in the press.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I will be slightly less cynical than the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, on the subject of impact assessments. I will speak to Amendment 22 in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Lennie, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and my noble friend Lord Kerslake. I will take a less cynical view about impact assessments.

For the historical record, it might interest noble Lords to know that when we were negotiating our accession to the European Union, the first thing that we tabled in Brussels was an impact assessment of the European budget on the United Kingdom, which of course had not been part of the European budget until then. It was a very long way different from the one tabled by the Commission in return, but we were actually right. The consequence of being right was a very long negotiation in the 1980s under Baroness Thatcher that resulted in the rebate system. My point is that when we were negotiating with the European Union from the outside, we had no hesitation whatever about producing an impact assessment—and thank heavens we did. Otherwise, we would not have got the commitment from the European Union that if things went as we predicted rather than as it predicted, it would adjust the budgetary burden, which eventually it did.

I want to look forward now and not backwards, because this seems quite odd. We are now a little over eight months from the referendum and it defies belief that the Minister and his colleagues have not conducted impact assessments by now. If not, I am not at all sure what they have been doing—but since I know that he is an extremely hard-working person I can assume that they have in fact quite a lot of impact assessments but are not sharing them with anyone else. It was rather odd, when the Prime Minister spoke at Lancaster House, and even odder when a White Paper was published, that there was not a single blooming figure in either of those two documents—not one. That was a trifle odd. It is not what the Government normally do. It is even odder if they do have impact assessments; it could be that they are so awful that they do not want to tell anyone about them. That also would not be hugely comforting.

I would like to play the game by the Minister’s rules. He has argued several times that to publish impact assessments would be to give the game away and give the people with whom we are negotiating some deadly secrets that they would be unable to get from anyone else. Okay, let us play the game by those rules. In that case, there are two impact assessments that could be published which would not have the slightest possibility of doing damage to us. The first is an assessment of where we would be in terms of our economy if we stayed in the European Union. That is not difficult to do, because the previous Government did it. If he looks at the papers that were published last March he will find it all there.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb]

I support Amendment 18. All these negotiations are going to be complex and long and for the Government to expect a respite from parliamentary scrutiny would be quite wrong. If we have a commentary it will also raise the likelihood of Parliament accepting the outcome, because there is nothing worse than something being sprung on you. My noble—I was going to say my noble enemy, but my noble opponent—the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, said earlier that the leavers had actually come round to the thought that if we lost the referendum, we would accept the result, and I think that that is partly because we talked through those things, we actually thought about it. It will be true for the EU negotiations as well that if the Government give as much information as they possibly can then the whole nation is more likely to accept what has happened.

[Lord Blencathra]

My Lords, I oppose this amendment partly on the basis that we do not need to put it in the Bill and partly because I think I have heard my noble friend say on countless occasions that we will have scrutiny after scrutiny in this House and, no doubt, in the other place. We have no legislative requirement at the moment to scrutinise the EU. Does the Minister have at his fingertips, or will he be able to tell us in his reply, how many Oral Questions we have had answered on this? We seem to have one on the Order Paper every day on an EU issue. Half the Order Papers have Written Questions on the EU. We have some excellent Select Committee reports from our Select Committees—we seem to debate one every week—and we have countless other debates. We are having more scrutiny that I think we can cope with.

My worry is that once we trigger Article 50 this House will have nothing much to do next year. The other place will start with the great repeal Bill. All we will have will be the EU retaliating immediately after we have put in our bid and saying, “We are not having any of that nonsense—we want £50 billion, thank you”. We will have German and French elections—the Dutch elections may be over by then—and we will have information coming from Europe which will be from politicians and will not be helpful. All we will have, in the other place and in this place, will be colleagues rushing in, demanding Urgent Questions, putting down Motions here, there and everywhere, demanding ministerial Answers.

[Lord Warner]

If the noble Lord reads my amendment he will see that the Government will actually have a clean bill of health for at least a year before they need to come back to Parliament on any of these issues.

[Lord Blencathra]

Exactly what I was about to say was, if we could have these amendments where we will have an annual report, or a quarterly report, I think I would be happier to have that, in a structured form, agreed between the Government, the usual channels and the Select Committees, so we could have proper, structured debates on good nuggets of EU information, rather than the daily panics we are about to have as colleagues from all sides and in the other place, rush in demanding Urgent Questions on every rumour and scare story which comes from Europe. I do not think that we need to put in the Bill that we are going to have scrutiny: we can do scrutiny at the moment—we may be doing too much of it. Let us try to structure it so as to have sensible debate over the next two years.

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, oddly, I am in the very strange position of mildly disagreeing with the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, but certainly disagreeing with Amendment 18. I commented in my Second Reading speech that I felt that anything that added to uncertainty was very bad news and that uncertainty where commerce was concerned was bad news because that was the root of our prosperity and gave us our services that we need so dearly. I felt that uncertainty for people was particularly bad. We have had lots of uncertainty for people; we talked about the people of Northern Ireland this evening and there are lots of other people as well.

The other thing I said was how powerful our Select Committees are. I sit, as I remind the House, on the European Union Select Committee. We have already delivered, since Brexit, 10 reports for debate in eight months and there are a further seven reports for debate coming along. Tomorrow, I am sitting in a meeting talking about other reports that will come up before the anniversary.

Amendment 18 reckons that there should be one debate every quarter. I cannot believe that that is right. The Select Committees are serving up things for the House at a good rate and we are completely impartial. We are of this House and as and when we identify matters that need to be debated, boy are we down there like a rat down a hole. We make sure that the relevant people come before the House and the full expertise of the House can be brought to bear. Putting in place a structure like this makes the work of the Select Committees more difficult. It makes it more difficult for us to get Ministers, their staff and others before us answering sometimes more than two hours of tough questioning from people who are intelligent and engaged in what is going on. It would shut down opportunity to debate in this House were we to support Amendment 18. We should not fetter the House at all.

It is not only the Select Committees that will keep the Government right. One year after the end of this process, of course, there will be an election. If the Government are not right, they will be flung out. Accordingly, the best way of handling this is not to have formal structures, quarterly meetings or any of the other things in these amendments, but to rely on the strength of our own wonderful system of Select Committees. We should use them and the threat of being thrown out at the next election to make sure that the Government are fully held to account in this difficult process which will require all of us to co-operate.