United Kingdom Internal Market Bill — House of Lords, 2020-10-28
Topic: Environment
John Lawrence Whitty (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, I originally put my name down to speak on this group because I wanted to give strong support to Amendment 52 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. She, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, have made a good case; after all, climate change and the other environmental challenges are bigger issues than Brexit, Covid or even the break-up of the United Kingdom. We need to ensure that nothing we do in this Bill or in parallel Bills diminishes our commitment to meeting our international obligations under the Paris Agreement or our national obligations under the Committee on Climate Change’s proposals on carbon budgets and the commitments we make as a Government and as a Parliament to meet our targets on that front. Amendment 52 would help deliver that During this afternoon—I was not here on the first day of Committee—I have also become increasingly concerned that the Bill is, as the noble Lord, Lord German, called it, twin-tracking different aspects of government policy on the devolution settlements and the way they are going. The two do not meet. The principal commitment here is market access. There are government commitments to standards in the Agriculture Bill and elsewhere, and there is the whole process of common frameworks, many of which are still in very preliminary form With regard to the broad public debate, the Government have managed a great diversionary tactic by banging Part 5 into the Bill and causing public and international outrage. However, there are some fairly profound issues in the lack of commonality or melding in the approaches on market access, common frameworks and the long-term implications for our devolution settlement. They have not been resolved today in the subjects we have discussed. At Second Reading, I expressed some concern that the Bill was not clear in relation to state aid and the internal market, or the role of the proposed office for the internal market. A lot of this needs to be pulled together before we complete the Bill. I have a proposition. We have as a House established a short-term Select Committee looking at common frameworks. That has called for evidence; the deadline is 30 November. Would it not be sensible for the Government and the usual channels to talk to it? I am afraid I have not consulted my noble friend Lady Andrews, who chairs that committee, on this; it occurred to me only this afternoon. It is looking at the role of common frameworks, but in this Bill, which the Government are trying to get through as fast as possible, we are doing something which cuts across some of the commitments on them. Would it not be sensible to ask that Select Committee to look at the relationship between the Bill and common frameworks before we move to Report, or, if that is not possible, at least between Report and Third Reading? The process we normally adopt will not resolve these conundrums in the Bill; we need to find a novel way of dealing with them, and we have a solution at our fingertips with the Select Committee, which has already begun its work. I ask the Government and the usual channels to look at that proposition.