United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 18th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the compelling speech of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson. I have added my name to Amendment 10 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Lord Anderson of Ipswich, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles of Berkhamsted.

As I said in Committee, it is essential that all the nations within the UK can pursue effective policies on public health, which is my particular interest. Last Friday, the Public Services Select Committee, of which I am a member, published its first report on the lessons from coronavirus for public services. One of the key recommendations to the Government was that there is an urgent need to recognise the vital role of public health in reducing deep and ongoing inequalities exacerbated by Covid-19. Unamended, the Bill makes that task more difficult.

While the committee welcomed the Government’s commitment to extend healthy life expectancy by five years by 2035, and to narrow the gap between the richest and the poorest, we also recognised that this would be tough to deliver. We called on the Government to wait no longer before publishing their strategy to achieve this manifesto commitment and their response to the Green Paper Advancing Our Health: Prevention in the 2020s, which was due in January this year.

Why is this relevant to these amendments? Currently, the internal market within the UK has the flexibility, through exclusions, to allow different parts of the UK to move at different speeds on public health. England was able to lead the way on restricting tobacco displays in shops; Scotland and Wales are currently ahead on policies such as minimum unit pricing for alcohol. However, the internal market Bill may limit future innovations, as the exclusions are both narrow and narrowly applied to only part of the market access principles.

While policies similar to those I just mentioned might be allowable, it is not difficult to identify future public health policies that would not. For example, in the Explanatory Notes to the Bill, the Government describe how these rules would allow a packet of crisps produced in or imported into any part of the UK to be sold in any other. However, this leaves little space for Governments within the UK to pursue future legislation that aims, for example, to restrict the salt content or size, or even to improve the labelling, of crisp packets. The justification for this is unclear, as articulated in a blog by the Institute for Government.

My view is that leaving the EU should not remove the ability we currently have for different parts of the country to move at different paces. This has meant that we have not had to move at the pace of the slowest, and the different parts of the UK can benefit from the experience of the market leader. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, made this point well. The Government have failed to explain why their list of exceptions is so much more restrictive than that of the EU or, indeed, the WTO. While the justifications are unclear, the risks are anything but. Unless the Bill is amended, some of this ability to innovate would be lost. This would be a step back for the UK, not a maintaining of the status quo.

The background over the last few years has been to give Holyrood and Cardiff more autonomy, not less. The Bill conflicts with that trend, helping to increase demands for independence and undermining the devolution settlement. It would not limit the ability of just the devolved nations to act, but that of England too. As part of its obesity strategy, the Department of Health and Social Care will consult on requiring calories to be included on alcohol product labels. The mutual recognition principle could hamper this legislation if alcohol produced in the rest of the UK was not required to display calories. Further, if overseas companies wished to avoid displaying calories, they could simply ensure that their imports arrived in another part of the UK before moving them to England for sale. When other noble Lords and I raised our concerns about this in Committee, my noble friend Lord Callanan, responding for the Government, was unyielding. Indeed, he said that the exclusions from market access principles were

“intentionally narrowly drafted, to ensure that there are no unnecessary trade barriers that would ultimately increase costs to businesses and consumers while reducing choice.”—[Official Report, 28/10/20; col. 339.]

The Government have demonstrated that they are willing to listen to the concerns of the House—for example, with the removal of the Secretary of State’s powers to change the scope of the mutual recognition principle—yet in other parts of the Bill they have suggested a relatively small adjustment, with the need to “consult with” but not “gain consent from” the devolved nations before using these powers. There has still been no movement on the limited nature of the public interest exceptions in the Bill, nor am I aware of any discussions on that, as I called for in Committee. That is why the amendments have been brought forward again on Report.

These amendments are supported by a wide range of health organisations: the British Heart Foundation, the British Lung Foundation, Asthma UK, Cancer Research UK, the Faculty of Public Health, the Mental Health Foundation, the Royal Society for Public Health, Action on Smoking and Health, and the Alcohol Health Alliance, for whose briefing I am most grateful.

I very much hope that, even at this late stage, the Bill might be amended and the Government might reflect the concerns that have been so widely shared on this subject.

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I support the general thrust of all the amendments in this group, and I have added my name to Amendments 10 and 21, which relate to goods. I should also have put my name to the services amendments, because both I and my group support those as well.

As was debated in Committee, we already worked under a more generalised public policy, legitimate aim regime while in the EU, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said, that provided safety valves, which have now been taken away. In Committee, the Minister argued that the UK internal market was different, and for some reason that meant that it needed to be narrower. I cannot understand why—perhaps because we are closer together—we have to have fewer freedoms because we have left the EU. Therefore, I agree entirely with the drafters of the amendments that there are many more legitimate aims that need to be spelled out.

Realistically, differences will not be introduced into the market without a lot of thought. As my noble friend Lady Humphreys said in Committee, Wales is a good size to experiment with. The noble Lord, Lord Young, gave examples of various nations progressing at different speeds. Differences will survive only when they are practical and when matters of good public policy all deal with specific problems within a particular area, but they should be allowed to be put to a proper test and should not be undermined from the start by immediate get-arounds.

These are important amendments, and I hope that the Government will consider carefully why it is necessary for the Bill to undermine the freedoms currently enjoyed. That is not how Brexit was advertised, whether you were for or against it.