No-deal Update

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan]

I always like questions from the noble Lord; they offer a degree of simplicity which perhaps does not always exist in real life.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to be constructive and say that I think it is very difficult to judge what the consequences of no deal will be. One of the reasons for this is that the Commission has put actions in place that will relieve some of the consequences temporarily. Also, we do not know with what rigour our one-time partners on the other side of the Channel will implement border controls, so there are uncertainties. Does the Minister accept that there will be consequences and that we will end up having to talk to Brussels about them? As a result, does he not think it very important that, if there is no deal, we adopt the most constructive approach possible to relations with our former EU partners? Does he therefore accept that threats of withdrawing the money—our financial obligations under the withdrawal agreement—are exactly counterproductive to what the Government will need to do with our partners, should there be no deal?

[Lord Callanan]

I thought I would be able to agree with everything the noble Lord said, for a change. I completely agree with the first part of his question. That is why, under our arrangements, we look at reasonable worst-case scenarios, because of course we do not know what the precise attitude of partner countries on the other side of the Channel will be. My colleague the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster visited Calais last week and had extremely positive discussions with the French local and regional authorities. It is certainly not their desire to cause unnecessary disruption. However, the noble Lord is also completely correct that we will need to have discussions and make agreements with our European partners either before or after our exit. We have said this. We have a constructive relationship. We hope that the Commission might want to talk about some of these issues before we leave, but if it will not, there is nothing much we can do about it.

On the financial settlement, the financial offer in the withdrawal agreement is effectively a political agreement. We accept that there are some legal obligations; we are a law-abiding nation and we will meet these. However, if the withdrawal agreement is not passed and agreed, then the obligation to pay £39 billion will fall away—some of it has already been paid, of course, because of our extension. We will need to have discussions about precisely what our legal obligations are.