Progress on EU Negotiations

Vince Cable Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

As I have indicated, I am grateful to my right hon. Friend and to my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) for the work they have been doing on this issue.

In the withdrawal agreement we negotiated a specific reference to alternative arrangements that enables us to work up those alternative arrangements such that they will be, as the name suggests, an alternative to the arrangements for the backstop, or would enable us to come out of the backstop if we had started down that route.

I continue to say to my hon. and right hon. Friends, and to Members of this House more widely, that it is the firm determination of this Government, and indeed it is the determination of the European Union, that we will work to ensure that we have the future relationship arranged and able to be in place by 1 January 2021. It is not the case that there is a sense in which the backstop is automatic. The backstop is not automatic. There are alternatives to the backstop, and the United Kingdom can choose those alternatives. There are pros and cons to those alternatives and, when the time comes, obviously the choice will measure those pros and cons, but what matters is that it will not be the case that the only way to deal with the interim period is through the backstop; it can be dealt with by alternative arrangements, or by an extension to the implementation period.

[Sir Vince Cable (Twickenham) (LD)]

This is essentially an agreement to have an agreement, and it is full of worryingly vague aspirations. How, for example, can the Prime Minister justify paragraph 24, which relates to medicines, chemicals and aviation safety, where we currently have strong agreed co-operative standards? She has managed to negotiate an agreement to

“explore the possibility of cooperation”.

That is pathetically weak, and it will cause great anxiety to millions of people who depend on high standards of safety.

[The Prime Minister]

When we leave the European Union we will cease to be a member of certain European Union agencies. The right hon. Gentleman might have noticed that there is a strong reference to close co-operation in the text in relation to the European Aviation Safety Agency, which already permits a third country to have access to the agency. That is not the case with the European Medicines Agency or the European Chemicals Agency, which is why, as we identified in the White Paper published in the summer, it will be necessary to work on what should be the access arrangements to those agencies. The EASA already has a model that can be used, and the other two agencies do not. In relation to these negotiations, we are not able to put legal texts together until we have left the European Union and are no longer a member of the European Union—that, of course, is what we will be able to do when we leave on 29 March 2019.