Lord Purvis of Tweed
Main Page: Lord Purvis of Tweed (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Purvis of Tweed's debates with the Cabinet Office
Northern Ireland Protocol
Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Frost (Con)
My Lords, I very much agree with the thrust of my noble friend’s comments. The proposals that we have put on the table are significant and pretty fundamental in the way that they would adjust the way the trading arrangements of the protocol work. They are intended to be durable and to do something significantly different from what is done now. As I say, we work, in these proposals, with concepts of the protocol; we have not swept it away. We do not agree that the right thing is simply to scrap the protocol and that nothing need fill its place. We believe that the right thing is to work with the grain and use the concepts, but use them to make sure that the arrangements work in a significantly different fashion.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, decisions made by the Boris Johnson Government, not the EU, over the last year have meant that, for the first time in our history, a Government of the UK are compelling UK businesses that trade within the UK to Northern Ireland to register with the Government as an exporter. Any goods from GB to Northern Ireland will have to be separately conformity-assessed and separately labelled and, this month, new parcel and shipping taxes for consumers, set by a foreign power, are now being paid by people, over which we have no representation whatever. There is no mention at all of these in the Command Paper. Does that mean that businesses will have to live with this unacceptable and outrageous burden on UK businesses trading within the UK?
Lord Frost (Con)
My Lords, we have set out in the Command Paper the very high-level elements of the approach we wish to pursue. Of course, we want to discuss the detail with the European Union, including in many areas. What we are proposing is an extremely light-touch measure to allow trade to flow freely within the UK customs union and single market. We think that is a reasonable response to the situation that currently prevails.