European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Madeleine Moon Excerpts

Committee: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Leslie]

Again, when is an assessment an opinion? In some ways, it diminishes and slightly denigrates the professionalism of our civil service to suggest that its output is merely conjecture or opinion. There are some things in this world that are facts, from which we can draw conclusions and which any rational observer would not really question.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Leslie]

I give way for the final time.

[Mrs Moon]

May I read my hon. Friend the steel sector view? It says that

“it will be a lengthy and potentially very costly process for UK manufacturers to break into new markets…Returns on sales to new markets will frequently be poorer than from existing contracts with customers in neighbouring countries.”

Is not that something that the British people need to know?

[Mr Leslie]

That is the level of analysis and assessment that deserves to be shared and that was not available to the public prior to the referendum. It should not be dismissed but made more widely available. Members, and beyond them voters, can weigh up the different opinions. Some Members might rubbish representatives of the steel sector and say, “What do they know? I know better,” but we can weigh these things up and bring them into balance. We have the opportunity to debate transparency. Let us allow sunlight to flood over this issue and make sure that we are better informed going forward than we were before the referendum.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Solicitor General]

I think it must follow that when there is no Executive functioning in Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Office is carrying out functions as a substitute for the Executive, the duty will apply to that Department. I assure the hon. Lady that when we introduce statutory instruments, there will be explanatory memorandums from one source or another. Various Departments will have different responsibilities for the drafting and publication of the statutory instruments, and it will be their duty to produce the explanatory memorandums for Members to consider. I cannot envisage an exception being made. Northern Ireland will be covered in the way in which the hon. Lady wants it to be.

Paragraph 1(4) of schedule 5 enables the Queen’s printer to make arrangements to publish documents that may be considered useful in connection with anything else published under the schedule. That, I think, allows for the approach that the hon. Member for Nottingham East is requesting. We are committed to ensuring that the law remains accessible and comprehensible after exit day, and on that basis, I ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw the new clause, which I think he said was a probing measure. He will have noted my comment, and I understand his position.

Amendments 76 and 77 have been addressed in particular by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West. Amendment 77 seeks to place the power for a Minister to make provision about judicial notice and the admissibility in legal proceedings of specified evidence of certain matters into the Bill. Judicial notice is a term that covers matters that are to be treated as already within the knowledge of the court, and are therefore not required to be “proved”, as other evidence would be, in the usual way. Amendment 76 would remove that power from schedule 5, while not replacing the provisions that clarify the scope of that power.

The power in part 2 of the schedule covers a limited, technical area, and the affirmative procedure will apply. My worry is that, with the removals that amendment 76 would make, we will lose clarity on how those powers are to be applied. I imagine that the intention of those who support the amendments is that those clarifying provisions would be inserted underneath the power, but I think that we achieve greater clarity by putting them in this schedule in the way that we have, so I respectfully ask the hon. and learned Lady and the other Members who have tabled the amendments not to press them.

Finally, I will deal with amendment 348. It is tempting for me to plunge into the debate about impact assessments and regulatory and sectoral analyses, but this is an amendment about this Bill, of course, and I remind all Members that an impact assessment for this Bill was published when it was introduced. That is in line with the general practice of Governments of different parties in recent years of publishing impact assessments alongside legislation. We want to continue pursuing that approach, but it must be done in a proportionate and appropriate way.

Amendment 348 would impose an open-ended requirement on the Queen’s printer to publish impact assessments, and could, I fear, create a duty it could not meet. The Queen’s printer does not have a responsibility to decide what should be published alongside legislation; it merely publishes what the Government ask it to, and quite rightly so, we might think. At the same time, Ministers have a specific responsibility, endorsed by Parliament, not to release information that would expose our negotiating position. This amendment would risk doing precisely that in a way that would put the responsibility on to a non-ministerial department—the Queen’s printer—which, with respect to it, is in no place to know what analysis is being undertaken, or to make a judgment about what can be published appropriately, safely and proportionately.

In the context of those remarks, I ask the hon. Member for Nottingham East to withdraw the new clause, and I support the passage of clause 13 and schedule 5 and beg that they stand part of the Bill.

[Mrs Moon]

I rise to speak in support of amendment 348 and new clause 21.

Today, I took the short and wide pavements over to the Department for Exiting the European Union; what a waste of my time that was. I went because I wanted to read what was written in relation to the workforce impacts for the large numbers of my constituents from Bridgend who work in the Ford engine factory and with Tata Steel. So I went to look in particular at the automotive sector and the steel sector reports.

The Ford engine plant is the largest engine works in Europe, and Tata next door in Port Talbot employs the largest number of people in steelworks in the UK. It was interesting that when I got there—having gone through the whole palaver of not taking my phone with me and being walked up to the Department, being asked to sign myself in and being handed the two big files—I found that the document started off by telling me what it was not: the first page I had to wade through told me that 58 sectorial impact assessments do not exist. So what I had gone there to see did not exist. Instead I was told that the paperwork consisted of qualitative and quantitative analyses in a range of documents developed at different times since—that is an important word—the referendum, so this was going to be new information: it was going to be information and analysis not available before the referendum and therefore, sadly, not available to the voters in my constituency or indeed to Members.

The 38—not 58—sector documents consist of descriptions of the sector, comments on EU regulations, existing frameworks for how trade is facilitated between countries and sector views. In the end, they are sector views, and nothing the Government had collected together was worth going there to read. They did not contain commercial, market or negotiation-sensitive information, as the documents told me, so why on earth could it all not just have been emailed to all MPs? There was nothing there that would upset anybody; all it would have done was insult people, not worry them. Apart from the sector views, it told us nothing that could not be found from a good read through Wikipedia.

There is no Government impact assessment, or indeed any assessment, even in the one part of the document worth reading: the sectoral view. The sectoral view is just there: the Government do not say what they are going to do about it, or even whether they think it is relevant—they just ignore it.

Sir David, what I was greeted with at DExEU would, in all honesty, have insulted us when we were both serving on the Select Committee on Defence; if that had come to us from the Ministry of Defence, we would have sent it back and said, “Do it again.” It was insulting. Members of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly would have been confused by such pathetic information being placed before them. So perhaps that is why we are not making it public.

I read the report relating to the automotive and steel industries. The report admits that automotive is central to the UK economy and a key part of our industrial strategy, so we would think that the Government would want to make sure that whatever they were going to do would protect it. The industry employs 159,000 people, with a further 238,000 in the supply chain. I did like one line, which said that the UK is a global centre of excellence for engine design, and offered the example of Ford; that is us down in Bridgend. Automotive earns us £40.1 billion in exports, and the EU is the UK’s largest export market, so we would think this is pretty important stuff.

What were the sectoral view and the concerns? Again, there was nothing new; my hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore) and I could have written this ourselves. In fact, we could probably have written a better sectoral analysis than anything the Government have produced; it was pathetic.

[Dr Drew]

Anyone could have written it.

[Mrs Moon]

I agree with my hon. Friend.

The sector has said that World Trade Organisation rules and current EU third country tariff schedules will bring a 4.5% tariff on components and a 10% tariff on cars; I think we already knew that. We were also informed that Japanese and Ford motor manufacturing make the UK their base because of access to the EU market. There is a major statement and recommendation there: it will be devastating for motor manufacturing in the UK if we do not continue to have access to the EU markets.

We were also told that automotive is a high-volume, low-margin industry operating a just-in-time process. It was said that customs checks would add to administrative costs, delay production and shipments and create the need for increased working capital and that they would increase the cost of production in the UK. Concern was expressed about access to key engineering staff if higher immigration controls were in place, exacerbating skills shortages where a significant skills shortage already exists, with 5,000 job vacancies, especially in engineering design and production engineering.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Mrs Moon]

No, I am going to carry on, because others need to get in.

Turning to the steel sector, I found what I already knew: Wales employs 5,000 people in the steel industry, and the knock-on effect on the steel industry in Port Talbot, Neath, Swansea, Ogmore and Bridgend will be devastating if those jobs are affected in the slightest. I did not waste my time going through all the Government nonsense again; I went straight to the sectoral views. The view of the steel sector was very blunt, just like the people who work in it, and I like that. It stated that policies and practices should remain as closely aligned to the EU as possible. Have I heard the Government promise that at any time during these debates? No.

The sectoral view asked that we retain the UK’s existing trade relationship through the EU’s free trade agreement and similar preferential trading agreements. I have seen no promise of that either. It said that this should be a priority over the negotiating of a new free trade agreement. It also said that if we are to minimise the disruption that Brexit will entail, it will be vital that UK trade policies and practices remain as closely aligned to the EU as possible. The sector would not be happy to learn about the bonfire of the vanities proposed under the Henry VIII clauses in the Bill. My local employers and workforce need to know in advance of our exit that the Government have taken into account the economic and financial impact on their lives, their jobs and the future of their children before modifying or abolishing anything.

[Anna McMorrin (Cardiff North) (Lab)]

The Government say that they have carried out significant impact assessments covering the Welsh economy, but they have not been shared with the Welsh Government. What are they, and do they actually exist?

[Mrs Moon]

I took that intervention from my hon. Friend because she is a Welsh colleague, and she and her constituents will also be affected by these job losses in automotive and steel. This was nothing to do with rejecting an intervention from the Conservative Benches; it was about giving the Welsh voice prominence in this place, just for a change. Welsh workers are deeply affected by these industries, and it is appalling that the Welsh Government have not been given the information that they need to do what they can. It is equally appalling that we as elected Members are not being given the information that we need to work to protect the people we were elected to protect. The typically patriarchal attitude towards the workforce revealed by the impact assessments that have been done so far is deeply worrying. I do not think that any in-depth analysis of the financial impact has been done.

Interestingly, I was in the USA last week at a defence conference, during which the question of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and a potential free trade agreement with the UK came up. A very senior member of the Trump Administration told us that the US had an ambition for access to all services in each other’s markets and that it was particularly keen to have access to the UK’s financial services. We were told, however, that it would not be as keen if the US was subject to the European Court of Justice, because it would not want its companies to have such judicial oversight. I think that tells us everything we need to know about the importance of our remaining in the customs union and the single market and being subject to the European Court of Justice. That is how we will protect not only our workforce but the consumers who buy the products that they produce.

[Richard Graham]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon), who has spoken so well today, and indeed throughout these debates. This is the first time that I have risen to speak on the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill, and I do so because I wish to add a little to what has already been said about amendment 348. I do not intend to revisit the arguments put forward in the previous Humble Address, or the decisions taken by our Select Committee. That issue has been dealt with, but since the shadow Minister hinted that the Opposition would come back to it, I want to focus on the substance of the amendment and on why I disagree with it so strongly.

It is my belief that what amendment 348 seeks to achieve is without precedent in the history of negotiations by our country. It would require the Government to publish their economic impact assessments of the policy options for withdrawal from the EU. However, the missing words at the end are “during our negotiations on withdrawal from the EU”. Those missing words matter, because this is a particularly important negotiation for our nation—nobody is any doubt about that—and because this is a particularly delicate time. The Government start negotiations on the implementation period and on our future relationship with the EU soon after the new year. On the other side of the negotiating table, the EU has made it absolutely clear that it will not be publishing all its research. We will therefore certainly not see any published analysis, let alone any impact assessments relating to, for example, what no deal would mean for specific ports in northern Europe, or to any potential drop in GDP for the town of Calais.