United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 28th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, I originally put my name down to speak on this group because I wanted to give strong support to Amendment 52 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. She, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, have made a good case; after all, climate change and the other environmental challenges are bigger issues than Brexit, Covid or even the break-up of the United Kingdom. We need to ensure that nothing we do in this Bill or in parallel Bills diminishes our commitment to meeting our international obligations under the Paris Agreement or our national obligations under the Committee on Climate Change’s proposals on carbon budgets and the commitments we make as a Government and as a Parliament to meet our targets on that front. Amendment 52 would help deliver that.

During this afternoon—I was not here on the first day of Committee—I have also become increasingly concerned that the Bill is, as the noble Lord, Lord German, called it, twin-tracking different aspects of government policy on the devolution settlements and the way they are going. The two do not meet. The principal commitment here is market access. There are government commitments to standards in the Agriculture Bill and elsewhere, and there is the whole process of common frameworks, many of which are still in very preliminary form.

With regard to the broad public debate, the Government have managed a great diversionary tactic by banging Part 5 into the Bill and causing public and international outrage. However, there are some fairly profound issues in the lack of commonality or melding in the approaches on market access, common frameworks and the long-term implications for our devolution settlement. They have not been resolved today in the subjects we have discussed. At Second Reading, I expressed some concern that the Bill was not clear in relation to state aid and the internal market, or the role of the proposed office for the internal market.

A lot of this needs to be pulled together before we complete the Bill. I have a proposition. We have as a House established a short-term Select Committee looking at common frameworks. That has called for evidence; the deadline is 30 November. Would it not be sensible for the Government and the usual channels to talk to it? I am afraid I have not consulted my noble friend Lady Andrews, who chairs that committee, on this; it occurred to me only this afternoon. It is looking at the role of common frameworks, but in this Bill, which the Government are trying to get through as fast as possible, we are doing something which cuts across some of the commitments on them. Would it not be sensible to ask that Select Committee to look at the relationship between the Bill and common frameworks before we move to Report, or, if that is not possible, at least between Report and Third Reading? The process we normally adopt will not resolve these conundrums in the Bill; we need to find a novel way of dealing with them, and we have a solution at our fingertips with the Select Committee, which has already begun its work. I ask the Government and the usual channels to look at that proposition.

[Lord Judd (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, what a powerful team at the end of this very interesting debate. It was great to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, putting her case on standards so strongly; she is absolutely right. I was also delighted to hear my good neighbour and noble friend Lady Hayman—we live in the same ward in the west of Cumbria—speaking with all her authority. She will bring a very important contribution to the considerations of this House. My respect for the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, is continuing and constant, and noble Lords hear it again tonight. What my noble friend Lord Whitty was saying about the useful contribution the Select Committee could make in getting things right should be taken very seriously. We get awfully trapped in patterns of organisation for our affairs and debates. Sometimes we do not look at our assets and the contributions they can make.

I strongly support my noble friend Lord Stevenson’s amendment and I am impressed and struck by the importance of Amendments 52, 53 and 54. They all deal with the essential quality of our existence and the action that is necessary to ensure that we have some sort of quality of existence, and ensuring that we are in a strong position to ameliorate the impact of climate change. These are absolutely fundamental issues for our future.

I sometimes look back on a long time in Parliament and politics and think that we sometimes want to fit things into organisational structures. Of course, the market is crucial and what we are debating is a reform of the market and what we are going to do, but the market is not an end in itself. We should constantly be restating the challenge: in the environment, in conditions of work and workers’ rights and employment conditions, of animal welfare, and of good husbandry of our land and care of it. There is also the whole issue of understanding that this is not just a choice of what we might do; we are dependent upon getting it right. From that standpoint, these amendments are a very important part of our proceedings, and I congratulate all those who have been involved in proposing them.