European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Report stage: First Day: House of Commons
Tuesday 16th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

As ever, it is a genuine privilege to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), whose integrity and honesty have shone through every day we have been debating this Bill.

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Forgive me. Before the hon. Gentleman gets under way—I think the Minister is keen to follow—I want to say that a number of Back Benchers wish to contribute. I am very keen that they be fully heard; I do not want the debate to be dominated by the Front Benchers, who I am sure will make succinct contributions.

[Paul Blomfield]

I will seek to live up to that expectation, Mr Speaker; I do not intend to speak for long.

Amendment 4 addresses one of the six key tests that we set out for the Bill before we could support it. Those tests were not set out simply on Second Reading or in Committee, but 10 months ago, when the White Paper outlining the Government’s approach was first published.

The tests drew support across the House, but sadly the Government have made no significant concessions. In Committee, a meaningful vote for Parliament on the final deal was secured, of course—but against the wishes of the Government and only by decision of the House. Our five amendments at this stage address those other tests: facilitating a transitional period; protecting the devolution settlement; protecting workers’ rights; reining in the Henry VIII powers; and, in amendment 4, retaining the EU charter of fundamental rights in UK law.

The objective of amendment 4, which would retain charter rights in UK law and afford them the same level of protection as those in the Human Rights Act, has wide support on both sides of the House. It is part of a sensible and responsible approach to Brexit that respects the referendum decision but does not sacrifice jobs and the economy or rights and protections on the altar of ideology. It is a sensible approach for which I believe there is a majority across the House—one that goes well beyond those who voted for amendment 7 in Committee. It is also a consensus that I think is reflected in the other place, from which I suspect we might see the Bill return with some improvements, as the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield indicated.

The Opposition support amendments 42 and 43, which would enable UK courts to continue to refer matters to the Court of Justice and to consider CJEU decision to be persuasive. As well as amendment 55, we also support new clause 13, amendments 40 and 41, on clarifying the status of retained law, and new clause 16 on enshrining equality rights, which stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous). We also support new clause 7 on animal sentience and new clause 9 on the acquired rights of Anguillans—an indication of the enormous complexity and range of the issues we face with Brexit. We accept that Government amendments 37 and 38 improve the Bill, but we fear that they do not go anywhere near far enough on legal challenges based on the general principles of EU law, which is why we prefer and support amendment 57, which was moved so ably by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy).

Amendment 4 addresses the concerns we raised in Committee around the charter of fundamental rights and provides an opportunity for the Government to think again. Human rights should not be a dividing line between parties in this House, so even at this stage we hope that the Government, either here or in the Lords, might accept our approach in the amendment and perhaps even accept the amendment today and avoid the vote that we will otherwise be seeking. As we said in Committee, the charter has been critical in developing, strengthening and modernising human rights in the UK. To abandon it risks reducing protections for UK citizens and leaving a gaping hole in our statute book.

The Government claim that the Bill is about legal continuity and certainty in what will become the new category of EU retained law, but all of that EU law is interpreted through the charter, so excluding it would leave our legal system inconsistent and incoherent. To avoid defeat on this issue in Committee the former Justice Minister, the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), committed to publishing a memorandum that he claimed would confirm the Government’s case that the charter was unnecessary by identifying where all of these rights could be found in EU retained law or existing domestic law.

Obviously that argument overlooked the main point of the charter, which was to bring all of these rights together in one codifying document, but as an Opposition we were willing to be helpful and awaited the memorandum with interest. We wanted to see a comprehensive document that identified not only the source of each right in the charter but—crucially—how the existing level of effective recourse would be guaranteed. The memorandum was published on 5 December, and it acknowledged that the Government envisaged all these rights being scattered back to their original sources. They are removing the material source of the rights, in the form of the charter, and leaving citizens with the formal source. Now that is a legal way of describing the problem, but I am not a lawyer. It means in effect that it will become more difficult for any UK citizen to assert their rights post-Brexit.

In their defence, the Government insisted that nothing would be lost if we dropped the charter because it created no new rights.

[The Solicitor General (Robert Buckland)]

indicated assent.

[Paul Blomfield]

I see the Solicitor General nodding. On this crucial issue, however, the Government’s cover has been blown. For this, I would like to thank the new Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Fareham (Suella Fernandes) —I am sorry she is not in her place today—because in an article in The Daily Telegraph on 18 November last year she made our case clearly. She expressed her concern about the charter precisely because it provided new rights. She wrote that it went beyond the European convention on human rights by creating “extra layers of rights”, and she went on to bemoan the fact that these extra rights covered

“everything from biomedicine and eugenics to personal data and collective bargaining”.

I appreciate that her thinking on this will probably be in line with that of her new boss, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, because he relied of course on the extra rights provided by the charter when he brought his own court case against the now Prime Minister asserting his right to personal data.

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. In addition to the points he has just made, the Exiting the European Union Committee heard evidence from witnesses who said that something would be lost if the charter was not transferred. Given that the whole purpose of the Bill is to take the law as it is now and make sure it is still there the day after, does he agree that the Government have thus far failed to persuade the House that the one thing that should be left out is the charter of fundamental rights?

[Paul Blomfield]

I agree absolutely with my right hon. Friend, and I hope even at this stage that Members across the House might join us in supporting amendment 4.

I do not often agree with the Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, the hon. Member for Fareham, but I am delighted to say that in this case I do. She is right that the charter does indeed go beyond the European convention on human rights and that EU retained law will be incoherent without it. Our amendment is necessary, therefore, if we are to achieve the Government’s own stated objective of protecting the rights of UK citizens. This is a crucial issue. The chair of the Government’s own Equality and Human Rights Commission, David Isaac, has said:

“The government has promised there will be no rowing back on people’s rights after Brexit. If we lose the charter protections, that promise will be broken. It will cause legal confusion and there will be gaps in the law.”

These are serious concerns. Human rights should not be a dividing line across the House but should be seen as a British value, and I urge all Members who do not want Brexit hijacked and the rights of UK citizens diluted and reduced to support the amendment.

[Mr Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

I want to speak briefly to several of the amendments in this group. In particular, I want to encourage the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) to elaborate on his rather carefully crafted new clause 13, which sets out quite a clever solution to the vexed question of EU retained law. He slightly rushed through his explanation of the new clause towards the end of his speech, but as I understand it, he is suggesting that, rather than treating as a new category of law the whole corpus of 40 years of accrued EU legislation, rights and duties that we all enjoy—or not, depending on how they apply—for the purposes of future amendment or reform of those rights and retained law, certain aspects should be treated as primary legislation and others as secondary legislation.

I think the right hon. and learned Gentleman was saying that issues that fell under article 289 should be treated as primary legislation because they were of greater import, and that if we wanted to amend them again in the future we should do so by Act of Parliament, whereas aspects of retained EU law that related to delegated instruments under article 290 should be treated as secondary legislation, and if there were future reforms of those aspects, Parliament could use the secondary procedure. It would be most helpful if the right hon. and learned Gentleman could give us a little more detail about why he felt that those were the right categories to pursue.