European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Will Quince Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Monday 6th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Carmichael]

I gently say to the hon. Gentleman, with whom I have worked in the past, and who I hold in some regard, that, bluntly, it is invidious to play the interests of one group of desperate people off against the interests of another group, and there is a danger of that emerging from what he is saying and the terms in which he puts it. As the right hon. Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn), the Chairman of the Exiting the European Union Committee, on which I also serve, reminded us, this was the evidence that we heard from British nationals currently living in other parts of the EU; this is what they want us to do, because they see that it is in their interests that we should do this. They see this move as the best, most immediate and speediest way in which their position can be given some degree of certainty.

The real importance of this move is the atmosphere that it would create. We cannot ignore the atmosphere that we have found in many of our communities since 23 June, and the spike we have seen in hate crime; and we must also think about the atmosphere in which the Prime Minister is going to open the negotiations after the triggering of article 50. The atmosphere will be so much better—so much improved—if we are able to say, “We enter this as a negotiation between friends and neighbours, and as such we offer you this important move for your citizens as a mark of our good faith and our good will.”

I also want to deal with one matter that was raised in the Select Committee, and which has been touched on today: the opportunity of EU nationals to secure their position by means of the permanent residence card. I say to the Minister of State, Department for Exiting the European Union, the right hon. Member for Clwyd West (Mr Jones), that he should be talking about this to his colleagues in the Home Office, because there are enormous difficulties with it. [Interruption.] I see the Minister for Immigration is sitting on the Treasury Bench, too, and he will be aware that some 30% of the—expensive—applications that are necessary for permanent residence cards are currently refused. The evidence brought to the Select Committee was that this involves, I think, an 85-page form. The sheer volume of supporting documentation required for these applications is enormous. The level of detail that is asked about the occasions over the past five, 10, 15 or 20 years when people have left the country even on holiday and then returned, and the evidence required to support these dates, is unreasonable and is putting an enormous burden on those seeking this small measure of reassurance in the short to medium term. This needs to be revisited.

The unfairness of the situation came home to me when I saw a constituent on Friday, who brought to my office the letter she received in 1997 from the then Immigration and Nationality Directorate. She was told:

“You can now remain indefinitely in the United Kingdom. You do not need permission from a Government Department to take or change employment and you may engage in business or a profession as long as you comply with any general regulations for the business or professional activity.”

Nobody told my constituent in 1997 that 20 years later she was going to have to produce tickets to show that in 2005 she took a two-week holiday in Ibiza, or whatever, but that is the situation in which she now finds herself if she is going to achieve that small measure of security for her and her family.

The challenge facing our country at this point is how we go forward in a way that allows us to bring the 52% and the 48% back together. Our country faces an enormous challenge, and it is one that we cannot meet with the support of only half our population; we need all our people to be able to pull together. This would be one small measure that would allow the Government to bring the two sides together to get the best possible deal for all our citizens, whether they are British by birth or British by choice.

[Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), although he might not entirely share the sentiment once I have finished my contribution. I promise that it will be a short contribution, in the interests of time and the number of Members who wish to have their say. I rise to speak against in particular new clauses 56 and 134.

There are some in the House who have said that the referendum result should not be respected because the people did not know what they were voting for. They are determined to find confusion where none exists. They say that the public voted to leave the European Union, but not the single market or the customs union. Members are arguing through these amendments that we in this House need to debate whether or not we leave the single market. I disagree.

The majority of voters who took part in the referendum said that they wanted to leave the European Union. Many of those who contacted me said that they wanted to restore our parliamentary sovereignty and sovereignty over our courts, to regain control over our immigration policy, and to strike out in the world and forge new deals with countries across the globe. Those aims are incompatible with remaining in the single market or in the customs union.

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[Caroline Lucas]

I do wish that the hon. Gentleman would not rewrite history. I have some lovely quotes here. The present Foreign Secretary said:

“I’d vote to stay in the single market. I’m in favour of the single market.”

The right hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) said:

“Only a madman would actually leave the market”.

That one speaks for itself. Arron Banks stated:

“Increasingly the Norway option looks the best for the UK.”

What the hon. Gentleman is saying is simply not the case.

[Will Quince]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, but those were selective quotes, taken out of context. How could it not have been clear what the public were voting for?

[Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

Is my hon. Friend honestly saying that the good people of Colchester sat in a variety of places where they might go to enjoy themselves mulling over the finer points of the single market?

[Will Quince]

I think my right hon. Friend underestimates the intelligence of the people of Colchester.

I would be more sympathetic to those tabling the new clauses if they had not voted in favour of holding the referendum. However, they supported it. They agreed to entrust this question to the British people. I remember when some on the other side of the House, namely the Liberal Democrats—although I question that name in the context of this debate—were calling for a “real referendum”. Well, we had a real referendum—the biggest exercise in democracy in our nation’s history—and we have been given a result. Those hon. Members just do not like what they heard. We should respect the instruction we were given by the British people. We were told that we were going to leave the European Union and the single market, and leave we should.

The Prime Minister has been absolutely clear that we are leaving the single market. Those on the Opposition Benches tabling these new clauses should perhaps listen to the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, the noble Lord Ashdown, who said that

“when the British people have spoken, you do what they command”.

We do not need this debate. It is simply an attempt to obfuscate and delay the process. That is why I cannot support new clauses 56 or 134, and I encourage colleagues to oppose them.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth. I should like to speak to new clauses 29 and 33, tabled in my name and those of other right hon. and hon. colleagues.

The Secretary of State—who is not here for this debate—said with his usual braggadocio that he would produce a Bill that was unamendable. Today, we have a list of amendments that is 145 pages long. The ratio of lines in the amendments to lines in the Bill 580:1, which must be an all-time record. It is certainly a tribute to the productivity of hon. Members on this side of the House. However, the chutzpah of the Secretary of State was exceeded by the civil servant who wrote paragraph 14 of the Bill’s explanatory notes, which states:

“The impact of the Bill itself will be both clear and limited”.

No. The effect of the Bill is not clear and it is certainly not limited. The fact that hon. Members have tabled so many new clauses and amendments demonstrates why this debate on parliamentary scrutiny is so important.

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Colchester (Will Quince), whose constituents voted leave in the referendum. Mine did too, and his speech was the perfect introduction to my own. I want to describe why it is also in the interests of those who voted leave that we should have proper parliamentary scrutiny. The referendum campaign was won on the slogan of taking back control and bringing back parliamentary sovereignty. We cannot do that without having proper parliamentary scrutiny.

New clause 29 is perfectly simple and straightforward: it proposes a quarterly reporting system during the negotiations. That would give the House a structured approach. The right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) complained about new clause 3—which was ably moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook)—saying that it would create problems of justiciability. I hope the right hon. Gentleman will agree that the requirement to produce a report once a quarter is not such a high or complex legal bar, and that it would not lead to extremely long litigation. It is a simple, practical measure.

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[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

I support the new clauses and amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Stephen Gethins), and I will particularly address new clause 51, in the name of the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith).

In particular, I support the argument for a White Paper that includes details of the expected trajectory for the UK’s balance of trade, gross domestic product and unemployment. A number of earlier contributions explained precisely why we need that. My hon. Friend said that Vote Leave failed to provide detailed answers to any of the key economic questions before the referendum and, of course, he is right.

The right hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), who is no longer in his place, demonstrated incredibly ably the confusion at the heart of Vote Leave and why taking a decision today is incredibly difficult. He effectively said—I have spoken to him, so this will come as no surprise to him—that no one in the leadership of the official leave campaign ever argued that we would join the EEA or have an EFTA-type agreement. It might be that the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), or one of the other senior figures, never quite said that, but to argue that the leave campaign did not suggest it, and suggest it strongly, is simply wrong. The leave campaign Lawyers for Britain said:

“We could apply to re-join with effect from the day after Brexit… EFTA membership would allow us to continue uninterrupted free trade relations”.

That was still on the website only a few weeks ago.

The former ambassador and Brexit supporter Charles Crawford appeared on “Newsnight” to argue that an EEA option may be the first step of Brexit. Roland Smith, the author of “The Liberal Case for ‘Leave’”, wrote an extended paper titled “Evolution Not Revolution: The case for the EEA option”, so I suspect that there were many people who, indeed, voted for Brexit believing that we were not voting for a hard Tory cliff-edge Brexit and that we would maintain membership of the EEA, EFTA or an equivalent. Given that that now no longer appears to be the case, it is absolutely right, as new clause 51 makes clear, that we have details of the expected trajectory of the balance of trade, GDP and unemployment. Those are not abstracts; they are at the heart of the measurement of our economy, of wages, of living standards and of economic growth. They are the platform for tax yield, which pays for our vital public services. All those words and concepts were almost entirely absent from what I will generously call the first White Paper.

I gently observe that it is not good enough for the Government to produce, after a referendum, a White Paper that is little more that the Prime Minister’s Lancaster House speech dressed up with a few pictures and a couple of graphs. That is not the basis for the economic plan necessary to mitigate the huge potential damage to the economy from a hard Tory Brexit. Make no mistake, that is what we are facing.

[Will Quince]

Did the Government leaflet, at great cost, not exactly make the point that single market membership was not an option and that access would be the result of a leave vote in the referendum?

[Stewart Hosie]

Many things were said, which is my point. Some might argue that being in the EEA or a member of EFTA precisely gives one not just access to but membership of the single market—one could call it access if one likes. There was deep, deep confusion in the messaging of the no side, which must be rectified now with proper details on the trajectory of the key economic numbers before more decisions are taken.

I say that we are facing a hard Brexit, and let us understand what has been said. The leaked Treasury document last November suggested that the UK could lose up to £66 billion from a hard Tory Brexit and that GDP could fall by about 9.5% if the UK reverted to WTO rules. I accept that that is a worst-case scenario, but if the circumstances that lead us to that catastrophe occur and we do not have a plan to mitigate it, the guilt would lie with the Government for failing to plan. The final part of that—the “if we revert to WTO rules”—is key, because the Prime Minister has said that a bad deal is worse than no deal. That is very twisted logic, because no deal is the worst deal; it means we revert immediately to WTO rules, with all the tariffs and other regulatory burdens that that implies.