Trade Bill

Debate between Lord Lansley and Baroness Kramer

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 23rd January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley]

My Lords, I do not want to go on at length about this issue, not least because I agree so wholeheartedly with what my noble friend Lord Patten of Barnes has already said. I am always loath to do it and I hope to make it a very rare event, but I voted for the amendment to the withdrawal Bill last April. To that extent, I think this House has made its view perfectly clear: it thinks, in the context of leaving the EU, that to retain membership of a customs union with the EU would substantially mitigate what would otherwise be the damaging economic effects of withdrawal.

I do not want to get into a debate about “the” customs union or “a” customs union but, on the face of it, if we are negotiating to leave but we are negotiating to have a customs union relationship with the EU, it behoves us to negotiate without necessarily subscribing to the customs union because the customs union is a product of the treaty. We would no longer be bound by the treaty, so we have the flexibility to think otherwise. That does not turn us into Turkey, because we might choose to do things quite differently. The EU has chosen not to have agriculture within the customs union with Turkey because it is in its own interests not to do so. We have very different interests and we might choose to pursue them differently. Indeed, as one can see from the structure of the backstop, we might choose to have an arrangement with the EU that was, as Ministers are fond of saying, a “bespoke arrangement” for the management of a customs union. And why not? If we could have such a thing under the backstop, surely we could have it without the backstop.

I do not want to go on at length. I hope that those in this House and beyond who are thinking next week about what is needed to make progress from the impasse that we appear to be in at present will read this short debate. While it exposes some of the difficulties in negotiating a future customs relationship with the EU, two things should become immediately apparent. First, many of the negative consequences of leaving the EU—most especially, leaving without a comprehensive agreement in place—will be dramatically mitigated by being in a customs union. When I talk to businesses, that is absolutely at the top of their wish list, and it is true for manufacturers as well. Secondly, I hope people will realise that this does not preclude us having a trade policy of our own. What are trade policies nowadays? They are generally called comprehensive economic partnership agreements because by and large they are not about tariffs; they are about broader relationships. Especially for the UK, given that we are predominantly a services economy, for the future those agreements should be about services. We should be negotiating trade agreements about services, the movement of capital and investment, and indeed we should have a negotiation with India that includes a discussion about the mobility of workers between India and other countries. That is happening in a very powerful way: the Indians are exporting skilled young people all over the world very successfully, and we should have that in mind as part of an economic partnership agreement with other major economies. If that is true and it also gets us out of having a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, but without creating a new border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, why would we not want to do this? That is what everyone is trying to arrive at.

For the purposes of next week’s debate there are, therefore, essentially two questions. First: does offering to be party to a customs union with the European Union, as part of the future political declaration, enable us and the European Union to agree in a way that would—as they say in Brussels—have legal force? Would it enable us to put into the political declaration, and have agreed by the European Council, the kind of language and commitments that would allow it to be said that we will not enter into the backstop, if we go down that path in the future treaty? That is what it is all about: not going into the backstop in the first place. We need some reassurance that that will happen. That will automatically solve the essence of the problem associated with the backstop. If we do not have to go into it, we will have solved that issue. We will also have solved the question of unilateral withdrawal or otherwise. If we are in a customs union, we have a right to leave it. If we go into the backstop, we have no right to leave it—as it is currently constructed— and that is a very unhappy place for many who are against the withdrawal agreement at the moment.

The second question is: can we avoid the Turkey situation? It is a bit like when people talk about entering the Norway situation: we do not want to be in a position where we are simply rule-takers. With a customs union, at least we are not rule-takers on financial services and our service industry, but we are none the less rule-takers. We do not want to be in that position. Can we arrive at a customs union where we genuinely have a shared responsibility? I hope we can.

The trouble is, I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Patten. Nearly a year ago, if only the Government had listened and put into the negotiation—at the time that led up to the White Paper and after it—a discussion about a customs union. Instead they put into the White Paper the suggestion that we could have a customs union, without calling it that, where the rules of origins are effectively waived so that anything that originates in the United Kingdom is treated as if it is European, and anything that originates in Europe is treated as if it is British. This, of course, is a nonsense; the European Union would never accept it. It would never accept that it would raise the money—

[Baroness Kramer]

I am trying to understand the noble Lord. Obviously, the definition of a customs union is quite difficult and I was trying to follow his definition. Does he intend only the narrow definition of a customs union, where it essentially just deals with issues such as tariffs and excise duties, or does he intend it to include the regulatory alignment, as it often does because the terminology gets stretched? If there is not regulatory alignment there still have to be checks, which means we are back to the border problem. Would he explain what he sees as the content of “a customs union” because, if we are not removing the border problem, I struggle to understand his point?

[Lord Lansley]

When I talk about a customs union, I mean—as the WTO would interpret it—where we share a customs territory and an external tariff arrangement, and our tariffs are the same as the European Union’s. A customs union, in my book, does not necessarily imply having the same rules, regulations and standards. If we are in a customs union with the European Union, it does not mean that we do not have a comprehensive partnership agreement with them. I hope we would do and that would embrace everything from data adequacy to having the same standards. Therefore, we would have to work on the basis that we start with and maintain standards at least as good as those inside the European Union, enabling the European Union and ourselves to operate on the basis of open borders. The most important part of that is the absence of a requirement to establish rules of origin, because one is in a single customs territory that allows goods to pass across borders in that way.

I will finish my point. I am losing quite where I was; I think I was just beyond talking about Turkey. We have got to know that we are going to be in a position to be able to negotiate a customs union, that we will be able to withdraw from it in future, and that it will obviate the need for us to have a hard border with the Republic of Ireland. That is a really important position. We need to know these things and we should have had months to negotiate them. As it is, we have to arrive at something in the political declaration in weeks rather than months.