Europe: Youth Mobility

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, on his maiden speech. Our paths crossed a little over 10 years ago when he, as a Member of the European Parliament, and I, as the chair of a committee of this House responsible for justice and home affairs, were doing our best to mitigate the somewhat impetuous effort of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, to remove the UK from all justice and home affairs legislation. I am glad to say that we were successful then, although we were thwarted by the Brexit process. I welcome the noble Lord to this House, where I am sure he will make a major contribution.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans is also to be congratulated and thanked for securing this timely debate on the potential for a UK-EU mobility partnership as part of the Government’s reset of our post-Brexit relationship with the EU, and for his most helpful and illuminating introduction to the debate. This debate is all the more necessary as it provides an opportunity to clear away some of the quantities of disinformation that have swirled around the subject since the idea surfaced in Brussels early last summer, well ahead of the July election here.

To clear up one of those bits of disinformation, the idea has not yet been put to the UK by the EU in any formal sense. It was an idea that the Commission raised with the EU member states, and to which they got a reasonably positive response, but it was not put to us—except by journalists—because there are no current negotiations going on between the UK and the EU, so there was no need to respond to it, positively or negatively. The then Labour Opposition chose to react to it—quite unnecessarily, I have to say—in a way that was interpreted more negatively than was justified.

The second piece of disinformation is that the concept of mobility partnerships for particular age groups and professions is not understood as being as widespread as it is around the world. In no case does it amount to full free movement, and it is often numerically capped. So far as the EU is concerned, the Commissioner who will now be handling the matter in the new Commission, Maroš Šefčovič, made clear last week that any UK-EU scheme would not—I repeat “not”—amount to free movement.

Having got rid of those two main pieces of disinformation, it surely makes sense for the Government to consider carefully the pros and cons of such a mobility partnership. I hope the Minister will say that they will now do that, so that we are in a position to engage constructively if and when the idea is raised with us in the reset negotiations.

So far as your Lordships’ European Affairs Committee is concerned, the idea was studied in the process of preparing the report we made to the Government and the House in April 2023. I was serving as a member of the committee at the time, and we concluded that the idea made a lot of sense and would be in the UK’s interest. When the then Government reacted to our conclusion, they did not agree, but they were a different Government. Our report, which was subscribed to by a committee of all parties and none, is surely therefore worth looking at again now.

Since the time of that report by your Lordships’ European Affairs Committee, I would suggest that the case for giving positive consideration to a UK-EU mobility partnership has become much more compelling. Following our departure from the EU almost five years ago to the day, the opportunities for those in this age bracket to be likely to be covered by any mobility partnership have shrunk dramatically on both sides of the channel. Brexit has deprived them of many of the openings they had when we were a member of the EU.

School visits have virtually collapsed; access to the ever more successful Erasmus scheme, to which other non-EU countries belong, has lapsed; knowledge of other European languages in this country has continued to slide; the activities of performing artists of all kinds have been hit hard; and young professionals in a whole range of specialisations have ceased to have easy access to jobs on both sides of the channel. That is a pretty sorry litany, and I could go on. Moreover, the sign of interest in a mobility partnership with us, which we have heard from Brussels, means that there is a good chance that such an approach would fulfil one crucial characteristic for success in negotiation: mutual benefit to both sides.

The time has surely come to stop sucking our teeth, to stop repeating constantly the mantra “We have no plans for a mobility partnership”, and to give the whole idea a thorough and open-minded consideration. After all, we might discover some help there for the Government’s top priority of stimulating growth.

Finally, on a more general point, it does not make sense and is not in our national interest for us to debate every idea for improving the UK’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU as if it was a rerun of the damagingly divisive debates we had between 2016 and 2019 over the principle of our EU membership. The debate we are having today is not part of that and should not be treated as if it was.