Reciprocal and Cross-Border Healthcare (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2020

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Monday 16th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford. I thank the Minister for setting out what this technical amendment does. As the noble Baroness said, it may be very technical, but it will hit a lot of individuals hard when they suddenly realise that Brexit is about more than sovereignty, taking back control and all the things people talk about. It is one of the first things that people will realise hit them personally.

Brexit has happened and we have to live with it, but it is very disappointing that on something such as this, with only a few weeks to go before the end of the transition period, the future systems have not been sorted out. With the best will in the world, it seems there will be a gap in which existing rights to emergency healthcare and other rights for British citizens who do not live in Europe or fall into the categories that will be protected will be lost. Nobody knows what the future will be.

My first question follows on from the noble Baroness’s speech: where are we with negotiations on future arrangements? Are they part of the discussions taking place now, which are concentrating on level playing fields, fishing and so on, or will they have to wait until those are concluded—either with no deal or with some sort of skimpy Canadian deal or whatever—and new negotiations take place? How long will it be, assuming everything goes well and negotiations take place on a friendly and co-operative basis, before a new system is in place? Does the Minister believe that an EEA-wide system—or perhaps an EU plus British system, or whatever it will be—will replace the present system, or will it be a series of bilateral arrangements between the UK and individual European countries which might be different from one country to another, some perhaps having arrangements and some not? That seems a recipe for chaos. There will be a number of instances where people come up against things that affect them personally in ways they had not expected. This is perhaps the first and one of the most important.

It is important that the impact assessment to the original regulations, which was published in October 2018—it was certainly an impact assessment then—said that the number of uses of EHICs in the EU by UK residents in 2016, which was a few years ago but I do not imagine these things change terribly, was 233,000. That is a lot, although it is concentrated in a few countries. It does not seem to say how many were in the protected categories and how many were just people like me; I once fell down a hillside, went to the local health centre in the Pyrenees, got some excellent emergency treatment and was able to reclaim a substantial amount of the cost afterwards. That is extremely useful. I do not know how many people it affects. It may be that it does not affect all that many, but even if that is the case, it is a very important backdrop.

People living in the European Union, people who organise trips via package holidays, people who visit regularly, semi-residents—of whom there are a lot; people say there are 1.3 million UK citizens living in the EU, and it is fairly well known that the number who live in the EU for at least a substantial part of the year is considerably more than that—regular visitors and people with jobs there are likely to have health insurance over and above their EHIC. They will continue to have that, although, as my noble friend said, it might cost a bit more.

However, many people are going to be at a severe disadvantage: casual visitors; people on shopping trips to Calais, if people are still going to do that; people going for weekends in Paris; those taking long weekends, borrowing a cottage or house from friends; people on short family trips to see students on a gap year or an Erasmus year in Europe; those going to stag parties in Prague, where people go at the last minute; and people who, because they have long-term health conditions, are not easily able to get economical combined health and travel insurance. Even people in the protected categories will be protected only up to the end of this year—after that, they will not be protected at all. The world is going to be very different.

Then there are all the European citizens living in this country who will not be protected if they come to live here after the end of this year. They will be involved in a whole new range of National Health Service bureaucracy. Questions have been asked about how much that is going to cost and nobody seems to be able to give any answers. What I am really asking is this: what is the timescale for sorting all this stuff out? How long will the gap that people are going to fall into be?