European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill

Debate between Lord Wigley and Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard continued) & Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard continued): House of Lords
Thursday 16th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley]

My Lords, the objective of Amendment 41 is to require the Minister to present, both to Parliament and to the devolved legislatures, an economic impact assessment of the potential outcomes of negotiations so that we may know where we are heading.

First, over the past three years, numerous prophecies have been made as to the economic implications of Brexit, most of which were based on guess-work at the time as to what would be the outcome. All those guesstimates are now largely irrelevant. We now know three basic dimensions of our way forward. We know that we shall be leaving at the end of this month and that the implementation period will last until next December.

Secondly, the Government, presumably, know exactly what they want in any agreement reached with the European Union. They therefore will have made their own assessment of the economic impact if they get their way. The House and the devolved Governments have a right to know the detail of any such assessment, as well as a right to know the implications for each of our four nations and for the standard regions—in the amendment this is covered by virtue of a reference to the NUTS areas.

Thirdly, the Government have made it clear that, if they fail to reach and to achieve their negotiating objectives, they will choose to leave without a deal. Again, they have presumably estimated the effect of any such course of action. The implication could be disastrous for manufacturing, exporters, hill farmers and many others. However, surely the Government have, at the very least, a duty to make known the detail of any such estimates. Anyone in the world of trade, agriculture, manufacturing, industry or finance will clearly want to know, at the earliest time possible, what are the official forecasts for these implications, for the basic reason that they are quite fundamental to making any future investment decisions.

If the Government have their own estimates, they are surely duty-bound to share them, and if they do not, they should step back from negotiating a trade deal until they have the basic tools needed to make such a major and far-reaching decision, and to have those tools and the information on a logical and quantified basis. I beg to move.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, perhaps it is a symptom of the way that Brexit has been handled that the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, even needs to table this amendment; we would have hoped that all this work had been done, published and debated well before any decisions were made. Indeed, I think reference was made yesterday to the Room 101 experience we had when we were called to be shown in secret the so-called sector-by-sector analyses of the impact of the withdrawal. They were of course no such thing—they were A-level descriptions which could have been got from published documents. Now we find that the Government want to head into negotiations on the future of the UK and its constituent parts with no prior appraisal of the impact of a range of outcomes, either on sectors or on geographical areas, and importantly, with no debate with either the industries concerned or with elected representatives of the geographical areas. Yet as we heard in the debate yesterday, important trade-offs and difficult judgments are going to have to be made as we struggle to find a workable trade relationship with the EU.

This should not be done in the dark. We should have full knowledge of the likely impact of each possible approach. The Government should have done this work, but I have little confidence that they have, which is why the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, is so relevant.