United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Robert Neill and Drew Hendry

Consideration of Lords amendments
Thursday 10th December 2020 Commons Chamber

[Drew Hendry]

I am not going to take interventions. We are very short on time, so I am going to press on; sorry.

Lords amendments 8B to 8L, 13A and 56A require the Secretary of State to seek the consent of the devolved Administrations before exercising the powers, setting a time limit for that and a process if consent is withheld. Lord Stevenson said:

“The purpose of our amendment is to preserve the potential for managed policy divergence that is central to the devolution settlement.”

Again, the UK Government just ignore that. Lord Stevenson also noted:

“The Government have failed to explain properly why their list of exceptions is so much more restrictive than that of the EU—well, we can probably work that one out”. —[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 December 2020; Vol. 808, c. 1268-69.]

Let us not forget that this covers a huge range of effects for people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland:

“environmental standards and protection…animal welfare…consumer standards, including digital and artificial intelligence privacy rights…employment rights and protections…health and life of humans, animals or plants…protection of public health…equality entitlements, rights and protections.”

It has a massive impact on Scottish public society.

Lords amendments 1B, 1C and 1D seek to protect the role of the common frameworks in the Bill. The Minister thanked Lord Hope, but he was the one who pointed out that

“if there really is a will on the Government’s part to make this system work, a solution can be found.”

He also said:

“Traders from other parts of the UK who had no regard for the higher standard could simply ignore it, irrespective of how simple and easy it was to comply with. That is not where we should be going.”

He concluded:

“A balance needs to be struck here, if devolution is to be respected.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 December 2020; Vol. 808, c. 1249-50.]

Time after time after time, Members of the Lords pointed out the massive disrespect and contempt the Government have for the devolution settlement. Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town warned the Government

“to be very careful about clawing back decisions from our now quite long-established devolved settlements.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 9 December 2020; Vol. 808, c. 1256.]

The Scottish Government, by the way, remain fully committed to the common frameworks process, as this Minister knows. I cannot use the language I would like to use in this House about what the Minister repeated, but he knows that the Scottish Government have remained 100% committed to the agreement that was set up to take the process through, and he should correct the record.

This Bill is unwanted and unwarranted and unashamedly undermines devolution. It is an attack on the democratically elected Scottish Parliament and the vast majority of the Scottish public who value it. Since 2014, promises to them have been routinely broken in this place. Their votes and their views have been ignored over Brexit. Now, Scotland will be the only country not to get what it voted for in that referendum. They will in the next one. They know that. The only way to protect their rights and their Parliament is for them to take the next logical step and for Scotland to become an independent nation.

[Sir Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I welcome the fact that the Government have accepted that it was unwise, if I can put it charitably, to have certain clauses in this Bill that might have impugned our international reputation for supporting the rule of law. I welcome the Minister’s approach and that of his colleague Lord True in the other place. The Bill is better off without those clauses. I had sought at the very least to ensure there was a parliamentary lock should such clauses ever be needed, but I hope that through the agreement achieved in the Joint Committee, thanks to the work of my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, they are not needed at all. It is better, therefore, to leave the Bill clean in that way to serve the other important purposes that it does have to achieve.

That is why, with all due respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), I trust that the Minister and colleagues will firmly resist any temptation to try to reinstate such clauses, which would be unnecessary, provocative in more ways than one, and unhelpful to the purpose we all seek to achieve.

I read with care the speeches of two former Lord Chief Justices and the former leader of my party, my noble Friend Lord Howard of Lympne, who himself was a distinguished Queen’s counsel with many years in practice before he came into this place. They certainly were not talking nonsense; they were making legitimate and fair points about areas of concern, even though I perhaps was more content to go with the view of David Wolfson QC, who was quoted by Lord Naseby, that the taking of such clauses into the Bill was not of itself a breach of international law until such time as they were brought into force. We are none the less better off not going down that route, so I hope the Minister will resist any temptation to put anything of that kind back into this Bill or into the Taxation (Post-transition Period) Bill, because that would muddy the waters needlessly, legally and politically.

We are going to require political goodwill on all sides to make the coming days and weeks work. Were it ever to be necessary to take such extreme measures in such extreme circumstances that might occur, immediate primary legislation on an emergency basis could of course be done, and that would give the parliamentary lock that I was concerned should exist, but through another form. It is not necessary for us to go down that route now, because, frankly, to try to reinstate the clauses would be fatal to the progress of the Bill, and that would not be in the interests of the Government or anyone else. I thank the Minister for the way in which he and his colleagues have approached this matter.

Nuclear Safeguards Bill

Debate between Robert Neill and Drew Hendry

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 16th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Drew Hendry]

I am going to make some headway.

In Scotland, we are already showing what can be achieved by renewable energy. New storage solutions for renewables are developing further access to the vast potential from offshore wind and tidal, meaning that an abundance of low-cost, clean energy will be generated. In contrast, this Government continue to chase the folly of new nuclear such as the white elephant that is Hinkley C, leading to exorbitant costs for consumers and leaving yet another burden for future generations to clean up—and that is if there is no more immediate crisis caused by failure or deliberate act leading to nuclear incident. I also wonder what care and attention has been given to people in Wales, as only days ago it came to light that about 300,000 tonnes of “radioactive mud”—a by-product of this Government’s nuclear obsession—is to be dredged and moved to Wales. I will leave that to hon. Members from Wales to debate further.

My constituency is in the highlands, which is not only the natural home of much of our renewable generation and its potential, but home to Dounreay. It is a place where the impact and long-term costs, both financial and environmental, of nuclear are well known. Those costs should not be repeated. The Minister pointed out that the responsibility for domestic nuclear safety resides in the UK, but that does not mean that the UK has a good record, especially prior to EU membership. Indeed, most of us living in the area can recall the various worrying nuclear material scares, and we are well versed on the dangerous radioactive levels recorded on Caithness beaches.

Each scare should remind us of why our membership of Euratom is so important—because while they can never be perfect, agreed EU directives over safety have been essential in ending some of the hair-raising practices in the UK nuclear industry. Who could forget that in 2006 the remains of actual plutonium rods were found on the beach at Sandside, in Caithness? Hon. Members earlier mentioned watertight provisions, but one retired Dounreay worker who was interviewed at the time spoke of a catalogue of errors, accidents and bad procedure, including claims that workers commonly disposed of radioactive material in the sea at night to avoid it having to appear on official documents. He told a reporter that he once saw a man

“using a Wellington boot tied to a piece of string”

to take test samples

“because the proper equipment had rusted”

beyond use. Mr Lyall, the retired worker who spoke out, had been a plant supervisor for many years.

Although the UK Atomic Energy Authority—as it would—denied that Mr Lyall’s claims were true, it did admit:

“There were practices from the 1950s to the 1960s that we would not repeat today.”

Those practices occurred before we were members of Euratom. In the same statement, the UKAEA told reporters:

“Standards have risen in health and safety and environmental protection, and government legislation has also been tightened considerably.”

Our membership of the EU, and especially of Euratom, has had a positive impact on the improvement of the standards that the UKAEA spoke of. In Scotland, although we are working towards a nuclear-free future, we have to maintain safety at existing facilities during that process, and we must plan for a future of decommissioning.

[Robert Neill]

I understand the point that the hon. Gentleman is making, but is not this the rub? He and I would both prefer to remain in Euratom if we could, but since the legal opinion, not just on this side of the channel but in the Commission, is that we cannot—that has not been challenged by any third party—we need this Bill to achieve exactly the laudable objectives that he and I share.

[Drew Hendry]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution, but he highlights the fact that we have not seen that legal opinion or any indication that it is watertight. We should have the opportunity to see it; perhaps it will be forthcoming as a result of this debate.