Brexit Opportunities

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, I was slightly surprised by the Statement, which I thank the Minister for giving advance notice of. When I heard that there was going to be a Statement—and we were told only this morning that there would be one this lunchtime—I was quite excited, because I thought it would be on the much-awaited impact assessment showing the economic opportunities for the United Kingdom as a result of Brexit. The Minister’s colleague on the Government Bench, the noble Lord, Lord True, promised me in correspondence two years ago that this impact assessment would happen. But as we heard during Questions to the Minister, it is the fault of everybody other than the Government that this has not happened. Instead of an economic opportunities assessment, we have a shuffling of the legislative rulebook.

Apart from a bit of revisionist narrative from the Minister about some of these regulations that the UK helped design, and then added to when we put them into domestic legislation, there has also been an enormous increase in the bureaucracy and number of regulations as a result of the Brexit process itself. Even during the Questions we just asked the Minister, we saw that the Government have failed to prepare our borders, failed to prepare systems for businesses to be ready and failed to have a system where businesses will even label the goods that are manufactured in the UK. Why do the Government not tackle these urgent issues first?

The Government have indicated that they wanted to end the legislative sausage machine, but by the end of 2020, Ministers had laid around 960 Brexit SIs, with more this year and more to come. Three chairs of committees in this House condemned the use of broad delegated powers instead of policy detail. Will the Government now rationalise the delegated powers they had given themselves to do all of this, where they had indicated that they need new legislative powers to do so, or will the UK legislative sausage machine increase?

The Minister did not mention in his Statement that the EU now has proposals for higher standards on carbon emissions, chemicals, medical devices and copyright protections. Will we fall in line on those areas? Will we update our own legislation to ensure that we are consistent with these higher standards, or will we fall behind?

Why was there no mention in the Minister’s Statement of copyright protection, which is currently being put in place by the European Union? If we do not follow suit, for generated content the UK will have less protection for copyright than our competitors within Europe.

I understand that we will need to review and then replace continuity trade agreements; the Minister did not mention the fact that we have incorporated into many trade agreements the very areas that he said we now want to review. What is the status of all the trade agreements the Government have heralded that we have made up until now?

On the specific areas the Minister mentioned on GDPR, is it still the Government’s position that in the adequacy review from Europe for 2025 we will still seek to be considered to be adequate when it comes to data? Is that a consideration as far as the Government’s position is concerned?

On GMOs, can the Minister confirm that this is England only? There is no reference to the devolved powers. I think the Minister is listening, so can he state that this is England only or will this now be for Scotland too? On clinical trials, is that England only? There was no mention of Northern Ireland in his Statement, which I was curious about. As we heard in Questions and as we debated in Grand Committee, the Government indicated in their Statement today that

“laws agreed elsewhere have intrinsically less democratic legitimacy than laws initiated by the Government of this country.”

However, Northern Ireland will be continuing under many laws from a foreign entity, with no say over them. When I asked the Minister to set out proposals of how the democratic deficit would be addressed for Northern Ireland, he said to me that

“we have set out the issue without proposing a specific way forward”.—[Official Report, 13/9/21; col. GC 286.]

Finally, then, what is the specific way forward? There are many areas that are not present in the Minister’s Statement today, so when will there be a proper debate to allow us to have proper consideration of the Government’s legislative proposals?

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I am encouraged by what I have heard from the noble Baroness and the noble Lord because it seems that they share our ambition to do more in this area and are disappointed by the fact that there seems to be less than they had hoped for. I encourage them to read the full reply to Sir Iain Duncan Smith, which I was not able to do justice to in my Statement.

The noble Baroness and the noble Lord underplay what we have been doing. We left the transition period only a few months ago, and already we have a new immigration system; we have agricultural reform arrangements that are different from the common agricultural policy; we are putting in place a new subsidy regime; we are planning to reform procurement rules; and we have put in place an international sanctions regime. We have plans for free ports and, as I said, for data and gene editing, and for reforms of port services, HGVs, energy and much more. That is not a bad list for a few months. We note the ambition and will do our very best to keep driving it forward. I note only that it is self-evident that none of these things would be possible if we had remained in the European Union, and they would also largely not be possible if we had remained in a so-called soft Brexit or European Economic Area model of Brexit, which so many parties opposite recommended.

We are pushing forward change. A large number of issues were raised and I am quite pressed for time. We are setting out a plan to increase the supply of HGV drivers. As I have said, we are in constant touch with the EU about equivalence and SPS rules, and if we could make progress that would be excellent. We are taking steps to support our agricultural industry—my right honourable friend the Prime Minister touched on that yesterday. Labelling is certainly something that we are consulting on, and we are supporting our fishing industry after Brexit, and so on.

The question of the devolved Administrations was raised. I have written to my opposite numbers in all the devolved Administrations and obviously I can guarantee that we will work very closely with them where these reforms intersect with devolved competence, and we wish to work as closely with them as we possibly can.

On the question of the impact assessment and the effect on the economy, I note that the economy is the fastest-growing in the G7. We have 1 million vacancies in the economy in this country, and this economy and this country are already prospering vastly under the arrangements that we are putting in place.

I had better wrap up, but I just say that we stand for change as a country and as a party; that is what people voted for. We want to make us a high-wage, high-productivity economy with controlled migration. People have to invest in the skills of everyone in our country. We do not want to be a low-wage, low-skilled economy reliant on cheap labour and where parts of the economy are neglected. We are putting in place reforms, a process of constant change and improvement, and rules that suit this country and will make a big difference for us in the future.