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European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Warner
Main Page: Lord Warner (Crossbench - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Warner's debates with the Department for International Development
(4 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, the Government have done an amazing amount to look after EU citizens in this country. I cast my mind back to the early days of the May Government when there was great pressure to unilaterally make steps to ensure the position of EU citizens living in this country. At that stage, the Government resisted the pressure because they said that this should be part of the negotiations. It should be reciprocated by the EU: it should do the same for our citizens in the EU. As far as I can make out, that has not happened. We have made a generous, unilateral gesture towards EU citizens in this country and there has not been reciprocation from the EU. Does that not mean that the Government have been rather mistaken to make this generous offer? Surely we have an obligation to our citizens in the EU and we should look to it to reciprocate anything that we do in this country. Will my noble friend address this problem when she sums up? As I understand it, British citizens in the EU do not, at the moment, have any freedom of movement between one EU country and another and there are certain problems with EU citizens in this country travelling to and from their country of origin in Europe. This has not been a very satisfactory outcome in the negotiations. Perhaps we would have been better not to have made this extremely generous, unilateral offer.
My Lords, I support these two amendments. I do so as the roommate of my noble friend Lord Kerslake, who sends his apologies for not being here but has strengthened my arguments for supporting the amendments. I speak as someone who, after the 1997 election—oh glorious days—spent two years in the Home Office and saw every submission of any significance that was made to the then Home Secretary. I always shuddered a little when we got submissions from the immigration part of the department. They sent a quiver through my soul, because of reliability. I remember a former Conservative Home Secretary briefed us shortly after that election. He said to the then Home Secretary: “You have to remember that there are always 500 people in the Home Office who can ruin your political career. The really scary thing is that none of them actually realises that they can do it.” The Windrush exercise demonstrated rather well the wisdom of those remarks.
The important thing about these two amendments is that they do not in any way disturb significantly what the Government want to do. They provide legal certainty, about which I think we will hear more later in Committee. They also provide some very practical stiffening of the arrangements around these new Immigration Rules. I went to one of the Home Office briefings for parliamentarians on the new scheme, at which everybody, MPs, Peers and members of MPs’ offices, made the point to the Home Office that in the real world a lot of people expect someone to produce hard-copy evidence, whether it is the landlord, the GP or whoever. I can speak from personal experience, having helped a number of people get permanent leave to remain here, and not that long ago either. These people had had experiences of having to produce some written documentation that they were entitled to live here.
I am sorry to interrupt the Minister’s flow, but how many people who have already registered have sought hard copy or physical evidence of their registration and status?
If you apply and are successful for either pre-settled status or settled status, you will receive a letter. That is not in itself proof of your status, because your status is a digital one, but you will receive a letter to confirm the success of your application.
I am sorry, but that is not my point. How many people have applied for a document saying that they have settled status, which they can show to a GP or a landlord?
I do not have the numbers for how many people have applied for a document that confirms settled status, but I can find out. The fact that 2.5 million people have been successful should partly satisfy noble Lords that the system is working well. Also, there have been only five rejections on the system so far. I will come to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, later, but that is quite a decent statistic when you think about the—
The point I am making is that if you have a physical document which outlines everything, people have access to everything. When people go into banks, they do not necessarily know which documents to bring. Under the digital status, employers and landlords are entitled to see only the data which they need to see.
Before the Minister moves on, sticking with this issue, I am totally confused—more than usual. The Minister said earlier that, if I have been sent my letter from the Home Office describing my status, I can then apply for another document of some kind that I can produce to other people who want the other document. That seems to be an alternative to the code. Will the Minister explain what is the difference between the letter and the other document that I can apply for, which apparently I can use to satisfy someone that I am entitled to something?
Before the Minister gets up, I do not think I heard her answer the question about whether the settled status database is going to be available outside the Home Office, within government and to third-parties outside government. Will she answer that very precise point?
I shall start with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Warner. The letter is confirmation that you have been successful. It is not evidence of your status, but it is there for anyone who wishes to have a physical document to say that they have been successful.
On the digital status—this comes to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford—if you want to rent, it could be accessed by the landlord. There is access to the data for people who need to see it for the purposes for which they need to see it.
Regarding the document that I apply for after my first letter—the Minister is saying that there is a second document—why would I apply for something that I already have?
My Lords, you automatically get a letter confirming that you have been successful. There are not two documents. You have online status and you get a letter confirming that you have been successful. There are not two documents.
This is rather a critical issue. Is the Minister saying that the document I have can be used? It apparently cannot be used to satisfy landlords and GPs, so what is the person going to do if the landlord, the GP and everybody else is not satisfied with the Home Office document?
My Lords, the document that the noble Lord refers to is a letter confirming that a person has been successful. Anyone who is successful in obtaining the status could show that letter to a landlord and say, “There. Go and look online to confirm that I have the status”. However, it is not a proof; it is a confirmation. Does that help the noble Lord? I see that it does. Thank goodness.
European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Warner
Main Page: Lord Warner (Crossbench - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Warner's debates with the Department for Exiting the European Union
(4 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberPerhaps I might make a brief interjection. Following on from yesterday’s discussion on immigration, many of us were left a little uncertain as to what the Government were going to do with their new immigration system. So it is very important that we come back to the detailed legislation on immigration as quickly as possible.
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Jones was absolutely delighted to sign this amendment. I know that she, before I arrived in this House, did a great deal of work on many of the Bills referred to here. Your Lordships will all remember to some degree being a student at school, university or college, and that last-minute rush to write the essay. I am afraid that we have seen far too much of that kind of operation from the Government. Under normal conditions, the timetable here in this amendment would be a huge rush, but what we are saying is, “Let’s not have an even bigger rush than this provides.” These Bills have appeared in three Queen’s Speeches; surely they are oven-ready by now and we could have them very soon. They are going to be big meals that require lots of digestion. Please let us have a timetable that is clear, so people know where they are going.
My noble friend Lady Jones asked me to mention the latest reincarnation of the Environment Bill. We need to know when the environment enforcement body will be established. We have been told that it will happen as soon as possible; surely that has to be now.
My Lords, I had not intended to speak on this amendment but, on further reflection, I thought that I should, as someone who has worked in the Home Office and seen how important our easy access to these European systems is for the public’s safety. It is worth us reminding ourselves that a primary purpose of any Government, of whatever political persuasion, is to keep the citizens of its country safe. Clearly there will be challenges for our security services, the police and our criminal justice system if we come out of these systems and do not have comparable or equivalent access to them and their information.
The problem is even more serious than the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, outlined in his extremely comprehensive and well-argued speech. The Government recognise that our criminal justice system faces a lot of challenges and has considerable inadequacies; they want an independent review of it. The Government’s acknowledgement of the system’s weaknesses in keeping our citizens safe makes it even more important that they should be busting a gut—if I may put it that way—to ensure that the UK keeps the kind of access to those systems that it has now, despite the criticisms currently made of how we have used them. It follows that any inability to have that access, or equivalent access, will weaken the Government’s capacity to keep their citizens safe. That will not be a good story to tell the electorate at any future election.
We must treat this area rather differently from how we treat some of the others in the Bill. It is up there as one of the top issues for the Government to tackle in the next six to nine months. The noble Lord, Lord Paddick, and his colleagues deserve much credit for bringing this matter forward now, and I hope that if he is not satisfied he will push this matter to a Division next week. I entirely support Amendment 33.
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, for moving Amendment 33, which has provided an opportunity to discuss an aspect of the future relationship that rarely receives the attention it deserves. As my party’s Treasury spokesman in this House, I recognise that our future trading relationship with the EU is of vital importance. However, it is not the only future relationship up for negotiation; nor is it the relationship that will keep British citizens, and our streets, safe.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Warner, that this is a vital area, in which we must do well, and which we must all understand. The political declaration includes a commitment to agree a
“broad, comprehensive and balanced security partnership.”
However, we should remind ourselves that although it is referenced in the withdrawal agreement, that declaration is non-binding. As well as lacking legal force, it is short on detail—largely, we understand, at the Government’s request.
Although Mrs May was misguided to threaten the withdrawal of security co-operation if the EU refused to grant us favourable trading terms, her Administration did at least provide an indication of what a future security partnership might look like. We have not had the same indication of what a Johnson-led Government wish to negotiate—and it seems that the Bill, which strips out the original requirement for proper engagement with, and scrutiny by, Parliament, means that we are unlikely to find out any time soon. If we do not know, it is highly doubtful that our police forces or security and intelligence services can be any more confident that the Government will preserve UK participation in the EU agencies and data-sharing protocols that are so important in their day-to-day work.
In the Commons, my Labour colleague Nick Thomas-Symonds outlined the risks that we face from any loss of access to EU databases, such as the Schengen Information System, meaning that
“information that today can be retrieved almost instantaneously could take days or weeks to access.”—[Official Report, Commons, 8/1/20; col. 509.]
Modern crime, whether cyber or terrorist attacks, requires quick decisive responses. As we have seen time and again in recent months, organised crime increasingly takes place across borders, taking advantage of any vulnerabilities that exist. Those vulnerabilities are best identified and addressed by working alongside our neighbours.
To lessen our degree of co-operation with our EU neighbours would be reckless. But, given the Government’s determination to conclude both our economic and our security relationships with the EU in just 11 months, it feels almost inevitable that there will be a diminution of the benefits that this country and its security agencies currently enjoy. I hope the Minister will be able to provide at least some of the detail so sorely lacking to date. I repeat my support for the principle underlying the amendment. If the Minister’s response is lacking, we may return to this issue at a later stage.
My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment. I wish to say something about services since this amendment in significant respects covers their operation for UK workers living in this country and in Europe. I feel that we should be moving on from making the case to considering the details of the solution, yet services is an area that right through the Brexit debate has not been given the proper attention it has deserved, and continues not to be given it. Services are 80% of our economy, account for 40% of our exports, and most services go to Europe.
This is urgent. We are, for example, already losing large numbers of jobs in tourism in Europe, and Carolyn Fairbairn, director-general of the CBI, referred in May of last year to:
“Creative and tech firms that should be the foundation of our future economy moving their headquarters to Europe.”
This is before the transition period has even started. As I said last year in the debate on a similar amendment to the Trade Bill that the noble Lord, Lord Fox, mentioned, services are the canary in the coal mine. The problem is that the free movement of people is integral to the success of services, because so many individual citizens, including freelancers, not only drive these industries but are in many respects the product itself.
It is not just the financial industries—which the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who is not in his place, singled out in his reply to my Question last week on this area—but creative, IT, translators, tourism, and many more. I ask the Minister whether any impact analysis has been done on the effect of Mr Johnson’s Brexit deal on our trade in services with the EU. The sense from industry is that unless a mobility framework is put in place, the result is going to be devastating for those industries. As one IT worker put it this week, “A deal without a mobility framework for professionals delivering services in person will mean enforced redundancies and loss of income for thousands of people.”
Many of the sectors that will be affected have many of the same or similar concerns. What consultations have the Government had with relevant sectors to list and compare requirements? How much have they talked to the creative sector, to IT, and so on? There has been a lot of discussion about transparency and consultation today. In many ways it has been the theme, but those working in services currently feel that they have no idea what the Government intend to fight for on their behalf. EU companies do not know either.
A solution needs to be found that neither discourages European employers or clients—as indeed is unfortunately already happening—nor is impractical or costly for UK workers. More fundamentally, even at this stage, the Government need to look more closely at the effect of the loss of free movement on our hugely important services. For their continuing success, UK and, through reciprocity, EU workers urgently need an appropriate mobility framework.
My Lords, I want to add a couple of words to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, in his amendment. As far as the NHS is concerned, if the Government do not allow more people to come in and work in a highly labour-intensive industry, then they will not be able to spend the money that they are promising to put into the NHS in a way that is useful to patients. But that is not my main point.
My main point is to emphasise the extent to which there is continual movement between the UK and European countries, as part of big research projects in medicine, science and technology. People can freely move around Europe for six weeks, a month, a week or a weekend, and many of these projects have EU money, which has come to this country to be used to set up and run projects, but not all the work is done here. The work may be done with partners in other parts of the EU, and there is a constant flow of people. If we put barriers in the way of that movement around Europe of expert people—and many are not highly paid professors but PhD students who have come to this country—working on joint research projects, not only for basic research but for translational research, we will get ourselves ostracised. We will not be a partner that people want to play with, because it is difficult for people from other countries to move around Europe as part of those projects. We will cut off our nose to spite our face. We need something like this amendment to ensure that mobility and a mobility framework get the attention that they need for the future.
My Lords, the Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who is now not in her place—spoke earlier about our seeking reciprocity with regard to children. I assume that the same is true as regards reciprocity for UK citizens abroad and EU citizens here. Thus far, the Government have singularly failed to negotiate successfully to secure the same rights for UK citizens as they have now to work, live and move across the EU. It is true that they can continue to live and work where they are at the moment at the end of the implementation period, but UK citizens will then lose their current right to move elsewhere across the EU—something that is, as we have just heard, at variance with the right of other EU citizens. Therefore, they will be disadvantaged compared with their fellow workers who are EU citizens already here, be they researchers, as referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Warner, artistes, mentioned by the noble Earl, translators, interpreters, freelancers or a number of other specialist staff who tend to move around because of the nature of their jobs. Under the agreement so far reached, they will only be able to live, stay and work in one of those 27 countries but will lose their freedom to move elsewhere.
Therefore, it is vital that we raise this matter higher up the Government’s negotiating aims. This is urgent as well as important. It is time that the Government did more to defend their own citizens’ interests rather more robustly than they have succeeded in doing thus far.
That is my pleasure. Proportional representation has its place but it may not be applicable everywhere.
I am very surprised that the noble Lord has sought to require the Government to adopt his amendment seeking a level playing field with the EU on workers’ rights and environmental and consumer standards. Is he not aware that it was a manifesto commitment of the Conservative Party, to which all Conservative candidates signed up, that the Government would get a proper Brexit done and that we would leave the customs union and the single market? It is essential that we do that to have the flexibility we need to develop and maintain our own independent trade policy, and to negotiate free trade agreements with third countries.
The noble Lord’s amendment requires close alignment with the EU single market, underpinned by shared institutions and obligations. “Shared institutions” sounds to me as though we could still be regulated by EU regulators even after we had left. The EU will seek to export its regulatory framework and standards to us in return for providing market access. Dynamic alignment on workers’ and consumers’ rights would completely subjugate us to the EU, ruling us out as a potential trade partner for others and denying us the benefits and upside of Brexit. We know that the noble Lord does not want to leave the EU but surely he understands that, given that Brexit is going to happen anyway, we should make sure that we can play on a level playing field at the global level. That means freeing ourselves from EU strictures, such as the noble Lord’s amendment would make worse.
I am sorry to interrupt the noble Viscount’s flow but I cannot resist asking him, even at this time of night, whether the Prime Minister’s new best friends in constituencies in the north of England and the Midlands will welcome his robust approach to workers’ rights at the next election.
I believe that the policy which my right honourable friend the Prime Minister used to persuade his new supporters in the north of England and elsewhere to support is one that will produce more prosperity for the United Kingdom and a brighter future for all, and that those who voted for him in the north of England will see that it is in their interests to continue to vote for him and his successors, because his policy will have so clearly worked. Furthermore, since we will be free of the cash drain and the regulatory strictures of the EU, which have progressively stunted the United Kingdom’s voice in global fora—I speak as someone who has spent a large proportion of his working life outside the UK, looking in—the new supporters of the Conservative Party in the north will, I hope and trust, wish to continue to support it.
The noble Lord, Lord Fox, talked a lot about regression and standards. He is always trying to bind the Government not to resile or retreat from the high standards set by the EU. But standards are not about high and low; they are about what is proportionate, what properly balances the interests of the innovator with those of the consumer, and what sufficiently but properly protects the consumer against risk. EU regulation in many fields relies so much on the precautionary principle that it has a very negative effect on innovation. That places at risk the UK’s position as the best country in the world in which to conduct medical and scientific innovation, so for all those reasons I would resist the noble Lord’s amendment.
My Lords, I am moving Amendment 36 as my noble friend Lady Jolly cannot be in her place tonight, given that the arrangements for today changed at very short notice. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Warner and Lord Davies of Stamford, for supporting the amendment.
As a member of the European medicines regulatory network, the UK enjoys a wide range of benefits, including access to a vast network of expertise and the ability to draw on specialists from across member states. It is particularly important in the recruitment of participants for clinical trials, especially for rare diseases. As a lone state we would not have a large enough patient population to carry out meaningful research and produce meaningful evidence. Within the EMRN, the shared reporting of side-effects means that NHS clinicians have instant access to important data regarding the safety of medicines they prescribe to their patients. These benefits cannot be recreated outside this network and if we are to continue to benefit from them, the Government must negotiate continued participation following the UK’s departure from the European Union.
The European Medicines Agency has already relocated to Amsterdam. If we leave the EMRN we will be leaving a body that constitutes 25% of the global pharmaceutical market to be a stand-alone country that makes up only 3% of that market. Pharmaceutical companies will have to submit separate applications to the MHRA to gain UK marketing rights. Evidence shows that countries such as Switzerland, Canada and Australia all receive applications for drug licensing after the EMA, with an average delay of six months. The sad fact is that the UK will not be seen as a priority, and patients will inevitably see delays in accessing new medicines.
There is no way for the Government to replicate the expertise of the EMA and the power of the single market. Therefore, it is essential that the Minister commit to the UK negotiating the MHRA’s full participation in the EMA marketing authorisation on a similar basis to EEA countries’ regulators. Will the Minister confirm that the Government will commit to making this a priority in negotiations? The United Kingdom’s departure from the EMA will damage patients in the UK, who will be collateral damage of our leaving the EU. This is not something that the UK public ever voted for.
Given the discussion on Amendment 34 on more general reciprocal rights, I ask the Minister a further question, of which I have given her advance notice, on the lack of mention of reciprocal health arrangements after leaving the EU. The European Union Committee report, Brexit: the Revised Withdrawal Agreement and Political Agreement, which came out on Friday, notes the lack of any mention of reciprocal health arrangements and says, in the section on mobility on pages 56-57, that clarity is needed on how this will work. Specifically, paragraph 252 says:
“There is no reference in this section of the Declaration to reciprocal healthcare”.
Paragraph 257 says, in bold type:
“We are concerned at the omission of any reference to reciprocal healthcare, including the European Health Insurance Card, as a means of facilitating mobility. We call on the Government to set out, as a matter of urgency, its plans for maintaining reciprocal healthcare arrangements in the context of the future relationship.”
In paragraphs 173 and 174 there is also specific reference to reciprocal healthcare in Northern Ireland and the Republic. I will not repeat it now, but it makes the point that that is vital.
Can the Minister explain why there is no mention of reciprocal healthcare in the Bill and confirm explicitly to the House that the Healthcare (European Economic Area and Switzerland Arrangements) Act 2019, which many of us worked on, provides for such reciprocal arrangements? Perhaps most importantly, can she confirm that the Government will stand by that Act and not amend or repeal it? I beg to move.
My Lords, I support this amendment, to which I have given my name, which has been moved so clearly by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. I do so as a former Life Sciences and Pharmaceuticals Minister who has stayed in touch with this sector since my time as a Minister.
The UK life sciences ecosystem has thrived, with an EU pharmaceuticals regulator based in this country and a strong medicines research base working closely with other European researchers. Over the years a strong pan-European research collaboration has grown up, which has benefited UK jobs and NHS patients. Every month, 45 million packs of medicines move from the UK to the EU and 37 million packs come the other way. The pharmaceuticals sector invests more in R&D than any other—20% of all UK business R&D. This is an industry with an annual turnover of £60 billion and exports of £30 billion. It employs 63,000 people, of whom 24,000 are working in high-paid jobs in R&D.
I say this because all of this is now at risk of lasting damage, particularly if there is not enough time to agree a well thought out deal during the transition period. There is now the prospect of a very clunky regulatory system, with companies having to deal with two regulators—the EMEA and the MHRA—if they want market authorisations in both the EU and the UK. The Government are saying that they want the UK market authorisations to be obtained first, but the EU is the bigger market and some companies think that they may end up with shorter IP protection in the larger market if they do what the Government ask. A dual regulatory system is likely to mean higher costs, driving up NHS prices and damaging patient access to new drugs. It will mean fewer joint research projects benefiting from EU funds, and UK-based companies are less likely to find the UK Government replacing the lost R&D funds from the EU. Over time, we may well see fewer clinical trials being done in the UK.
That is why this amendment is important. It offers the possibility of repairing some of the damage done by Brexit to UK life sciences and UK-based pharmaceuticals and biotech companies. We need to do our utmost to restore some basis for extensive collaboration and research work between us and the EU in the life sciences, and we need to do the best we can to make the regulatory processes as smooth as possible if we want people to continue to do pharmaceuticals research in this country. The Government have been slow to appreciate the damage they have been doing over the last three years to this British success story. Passing this amendment would start to repair some of the damage.
My Lords, my two colleagues have made a powerful case for the European Medicines Agency. They are perfectly right. The consequences of getting rid of it—of leaving the EU structure—are very serious. There are two parties involved in any introduction of a new ethical compound to the market. One is a pharmaceutical major—and by “major” I mean household names that the House will be familiar with: Pfizer, Merck, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, Glaxo, Boehringer, Bayer, Sanofi, Roche—I have left out two or three and a couple of Japanese ones, but you can count them on the fingers of three hands or so. The second is a regulatory agency that provides registration, which is of course the key to licensing, prescribing and selling freely a drug in the jurisdiction concerned.
European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Warner
Main Page: Lord Warner (Crossbench - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Warner's debates with the Northern Ireland Office
(4 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, I support the amendment, to which I have added my name. I want to make just a couple of points in support of the very elegant speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Oates.
This is also a matter of government competence. We made it clear in Committee that there were doubts in all parts of the House about whether people going about their business who were legitimately here and had been given leave to remain and settle here would face challenges to that right on a regular basis. That was because there was no guarantee that they would have some physical manifestation to demonstrate to people whom they had to convince that they were indeed entitled to be here. We cited many of the circumstances; the noble Lord, Lord Oates, cited more today. There are landlords; there are schools; there are GPs; there are airlines; there are many things which we all take it for granted that we can do in our daily lives where other people may have to prove that they are entitled to be here in order to do them.
I do not think that the Government convinced many of us in Committee that they really understood this issue. They were still touchingly attached to their idea of giving people a code to get into the Home Office computer, which the person who had to be convinced would then use to see that they could be here. Just spelling that out suggests that there may be some doubts in the Government about their ability to understand how today’s world really works.
There is also the issue of whether the Government could rely on the Home Office computer systems to be working reliably 24/7 for 365 days of the year. I do not know what others’ experience has been but, in the real world, things sometimes go a little awry in the Home Office and not everything works as smoothly as we would like.
My noble friend Lord Oates made the point very well about the risks that now await many of these people in about 18 months’ time. As I recall, in the Conservative Party manifesto there were concerns about the way the criminal justice was struggling, and a need for an independent review of that system. Does it really make a lot of sense to take the risk that, in 18 months’ time, we will criminalise another large number of people who may have to go through that system, which is creaking at the seams? That is the risk that the Government are taking in the way they are going about this exercise.
This amendment does not call into doubt the Government’s right to have new rules on immigration as a result of Brexit. It is about whether the scheme itself will do that effectively and efficiently. It is about whether a lot of people who have proved their right to be here will be put to a great deal of trouble to prove that they have the right to go about their legitimate day-to-day business. I strongly support the amendment.
European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Warner
Main Page: Lord Warner (Crossbench - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Warner's debates with the Department for Exiting the European Union
(4 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberMy Lords, I had not expected to speak to this amendment, and I will be exceedingly brief. I do not want to take attention away from the healthcare issues that have been raised by my colleagues.
In this House we all know that when legislation is passed it is later used as a precedent. We have here a clause that effectively permits the Government by negative statutory instrument to change a huge raft of primary legislation passed by both Houses of this Parliament. If I had described that to a neutral person without mentioning that it was a move by the UK Government I think they would have assumed that it was being moved by Putin, Erdoğan or someone else who sees a democratic structure as a mechanism that they can reshape to assert government control over the general democratic process.
I am extremely concerned by this precedent and its extraordinary scope. It fits in with a pattern of a government approach to this Parliament that is diminishing the other House even more than this House. I think we can see in this, in the attitude towards negotiations, in the Government’s position on devolved assemblies, which we just heard, and in their attitude towards future trade negotiations that they are in a sense patterning themselves after local government, where an executive cabinet can make all the rules, the assembly can scrutinise—scrutiny only: that is its role, and I refer to the other House as well—and raise issues, but the executive can simply ignore it. I think this is an exceedingly dangerous road. This legislation and this cause advance that process, and everyone in this House, regardless of the party to which they are affiliated and which they support, needs to take on board that pattern which is being developed and which Clause 41 underpins. It requires a very serious rethink before we lose what we have had and it is too late to regret it.
My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment for a reason which keeps coming up in our debates: they are all about trust and whether we can trust the Government to behave in a reasonable way. A lot of the amendments that have been put down have been about trying to ensure that—if I may put it as crudely as this—the Government behave well in carrying out these negotiations. We have seen a kind of emotional blindness, if I may put it that way, in the discussions we have had on immigration systems and physical documents that people who have a right to live here can use. This seems to be another piece of work in which we have to table an amendment to try to ensure that the Government behave properly and well in these negotiations.
It is quite extraordinary. Having agreed these reciprocal healthcare arrangements with the EU countries and Switzerland so recently, I cannot understand why we should not just be able to use this amendment to ensure that there are no rapid changes. The Government almost seem to forget the huge number of people who in their daily living move for holidays between the other 27 EU countries and Switzerland, as though that does not matter. This is an important part of people’s lives. They book their holidays assuming the system will not change. Particularly after this recent piece of legislation, no one has told them there is a risk that something may change.
The Government are bringing on themselves a mood in which people will be suspicious of what they are up to. They will raise a lot of anxieties totally unnecessarily. In my experience of government, if you allow rumours to be fostered they spread around quite quickly. What we are trying to do with this amendment is to remove the temptation. The Government would be wise to listen, unless the Minister can give a level of assurance that will remove any suspicion that somehow, because of the way they behave, the Government are up to something.
I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Jolly and Lady Brinton, for introducing this. As they said, we are basically picking up where we left off in Committee. I was not satisfied with the answer the Minister gave about reciprocal healthcare. As noble Lords have now said, nobody really understands why, when we already have legislation that we considered and passed last March, that does not form part of the negotiation that will take place. I read the letter that the Minister sent to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and it is very confusing.
I will take a more cynical view of this. A year ago, when we had in front of us the Healthcare (International Arrangements) Bill, it had in it five or six Henry VIII powers. It gave the Secretary of State the power to make a deal about healthcare with anybody in the world they might choose, without any recourse to this Parliament or any accountability. This House wisely changed that into the Bill we passed, now the Act, which does what the Government had said they would do. They said they would not add to the policy arrangements in any area. They would take up the European Union policy and translate it into a way that worked post Brexit. That Bill we had before us a year ago did not do that; it extended the powers incredibly.
I fear that we are seeing a repeat of what the Government tried to do a year ago, so I really need to know from the Minister what powers the Government may take—not what will happen between now and December, but what will happen in a year. What will it look like? Will there be any reciprocal healthcare arrangements? Will there be 27 agreements, which is what the Minister was talking to us about a year ago when we were discussing international healthcare and looking at crashing out of the European Union? What has happened to those 27 agreements? Where have they gone?
As my previous noble friend Lord Warner said—he is still my friend—it is only a matter of time until people become very anxious about this, because not only are people working all the way across Europe, but they are going on holiday all the way across Europe. At the moment, the Department of Health and Social Care’s website is really opaque. It does not give us any clarity at all about what might happen.