Northern Ireland After Brexit (Northern Ireland Scrutiny Committee Report)

Lord Murphy of Torfaen Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)]

My Lords, it is an enormous pleasure to follow my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and the way in which he outlined and gave the details of his report. My report and review entirely paralleled the inquiry held by the committee. Much of it is the same. I thank the members of the committee who produced that report. It was not easy. They come from different political backgrounds and have different views on the issue, but the consensus that arose from it was almost completely the same as the recommendations that I eventually made.

I thank the Government and my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for accepting every single one of my recommendations. I will come later to the practicality of that side. I thank the 100 bodies and organisations that I talked to, both in Northern Ireland and here in Great Britain, which gave me great insight into the workings of the Windsor Framework.

As the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said, my review was triggered by the fact that there was disagreement, towards the end of 2024, on what to do about the Windsor Framework. The Assembly voted, but not on a cross-community basis. The result of that was that it automatically triggered the review that I was to undertake some months later.

That reflects, in many ways, the disastrous process that followed Brexit. I make no comment on Brexit itself. I was not in favour of it, but it is not about that; it is about the effects of Brexit on Northern Ireland, which simply were not debated enough at the time. The people who decided these things and those who debated the whole issue of Brexit underestimated the impact that it would have on Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland voted in favour of remaining a part of the European Union, but of course, that does not work, because you go in as a member state or not. My own country, Wales, voted the other way, against my recommendations. The consequence of all this is that Governments have to find a way around this unusual situation. One bit of the island of Ireland is in the European Union and the other bit is outside. Inevitably, as a consequence of what we decided 26 years ago in the Good Friday agreement and whether we should have a hard border, this caused enormous complications.

The other thing that I emphasise to your Lordships is that, in my view, if the institutions had been up and running at the time of Brexit, there would have been a much better resolution of this. I am not saying that it would have been easy, but people in Northern Ireland would have made their own decisions about their own future. One thing that I have learned over a quarter of a century of dealing with Northern Ireland business is that imposition in Northern Ireland is always disastrous and that effective solutions to problems have to come from the people in Northern Ireland through their elected representatives all the time. It did not happen. As a consequence of that, we had a protocol that, strangely and bizarrely, was denounced by the Government who created it. That was not very good. Then we had the Windsor Framework, which was undoubtedly better than that. That is what we are debating today.

One problem that I faced during my review were the very deep feelings about the constitutional impact of Brexit and the Windsor Framework. Unionists take a very different view from nationalists on the effect of the Windsor Framework on the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. That was well beyond the remit of what I was allowed to report on; I am not sure that I would have wanted to report on it, but I would have had a bash, even if I would not have got very far in the end. A fundamental problem with my review was that I could not touch those views that every unionist party or representative made to me about the constitutional impact of the Windsor Framework. I very much accept that it is an issue.

It was also made clear to me that the vote in Northern Ireland to accept the framework was not done on a cross-community basis. As a consequence, it went against the spirit of the Good Friday agreement. I am not completely convinced about that, but I am convinced that it went against the spirit of parity of esteem. Whether you are a nationalist, a unionist or neither, parity of esteem means that your views are regarded to the same extent. I am not sure—in fact I am unconvinced—that the parity of esteem principle has not been overlooked in all this. At the end of my remarks, I will come to why I think that that should be looked at again.

There were two issues from looking at the report, as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said. One was the democratic deficit. I will not go into the detail of the recommendations that I made, to which the noble Lord has referred, but the Democratic Scrutiny Committee did not and does not operate as well as it could. It operates under great burdens: it does not have enough time, staff or expertise. There is insufficient liaison with the Office of the Northern Ireland Executive in Brussels. Great changes can be made to make that work better. Those points were made to me by everybody, whether nationalists or unionists. The Government have accepted the principle of those recommendations, but we need to see them working in practice.

I am not sure that the Stormont brake has got anybody anywhere. It was regarded as being hugely significant. In theory it probably is, but in reality it has not proved to be the saviour of the situation that people expected. We will wait to see what happens on the Stormont brake, but it was certainly a genuine attempt to try to overcome the difficulties. But these are complex mechanisms, which an ordinary voter in Northern Ireland would find hard to deal with.

I had the pleasure of meeting the Democratic Scrutiny Committee, which wrote to me as well and indicated the difficulties that it faced. I also met the Committee for the Economy of the Northern Ireland Assembly. They were both extremely good meetings and the points made by all members from all political persuasions were very valuable.

One point that they all made was that, if you want to influence a decision on legislation, do it early; do not wait until later. It is the same here: if you want to influence legislation in this Government and Parliament, try to resolve it at an early stage. That is why it is important that the Office of the Northern Ireland Executive in Brussels is properly manned by specialists who can deal with this at that early stage and catch problems before they ever get to Belfast.

The other big issue was the enormous burden on businesses that the framework has brought—not on big ones, which have lots of money and can employ people to deal with the complexities of the bureaucracy, but on small and medium-sized businesses, which cannot do that. Interestingly, I just came back yesterday from the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, which was meeting in Tralee. I was talking to a nationalist MLA who was describing to me the problems that her constituents were having, including small businesses. She quoted a women’s hairdresser, who was probably going to pack up because she could not deal with the bureaucracy surrounding all this. That was interesting because the person saying this to me was from the nationalist community; I get it regularly from the unionist side of things, of course.

Probably the most significant recommendation that the committee and I have made is on the one-stop shop. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, made the point that that is so important for Britain, as it is for businesses in Northern Ireland itself. Very often, a British business simply will not bother with the bureaucracy to send stuff to Northern Ireland to be sold. The organisation chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, InterTrade UK, will have a significant part to play in that, to try to explain those burdens to British business.

There is a definite case, for example, to have trusted trader status for the haulage industry in Northern Ireland—that is one of my recommendations, and I hope it is acted on soon. There is a case for the duty reimbursement scheme to be improved so that businesses do not have cash-flow problems. I made some other recommendations regarding Article 2, dealing with human rights.

The electronic travel area—ETA—regulations that operate on the island of Ireland are not part of my recommendations, but I touched on them in the report because of the importance that people felt they had. They are causing severe problems for the hospitality and tourist industry in Northern Ireland. Again, at the BIPA conference in Tralee this week, I asked the Irish Government Minister, and it was a matter of debate.

I will not go into any more of the details, suffice it to say that you could not put a cigarette paper between my report and the report of the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. They say the same things because they are the obvious things to say. I conclude by saying just three things. First, I say to the Government that it is wonderful to have the recommendations agreed, but we now await the action on those recommendations, and the sooner the better, particularly on the one-stop shop.

Secondly, the SPS agreement is absolutely vital. The quicker that happens, the better, because my experience of these things is that Europe is not exactly quick in dealing with various negotiations, and the sooner that happens, the better.

Thirdly, all these recommendations are about making the current scheme better, making it work and helping businesses, but they do not go to the heart of the political disagreement on this. That needs to be addressed too. I am not sure how that will be done because it is not easy—but it is never easy in Northern Ireland. When we drew up the Good Friday agreement all those years ago, who would have thought we could have resolved those enormous issues? But we did eventually resolve them. So, if we can do that, perhaps we can also resolve the issues that surround the Windsor Framework because, as long as they are untouched, it will be a running sore.

In the meantime, we have to be practical and make it better for individual business, better for people and better for Northern Ireland. The sooner we have the Government’s recommendations, the better.