Trade in Animals and Related Products (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 — House of Lords, 2019-05-13
Topic: Mixed Topics
John Eric Gardiner (Conservative, Centre-right): I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. I am very much looking forward to the debate; I rather think I am looking at a number of the participants already. I am most grateful to the noble Lords, Lord Browne of Belmont and Lord McCrea, for participating and emphasising that we wish this matter were being dealt with elsewhere. That should be the right way forward—it is the way mature politics needs to proceed—so I very much endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Belmont, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, have said. In my view, the responsibility is really on everyone in the public service to ensure that these talks are productive and successful. Alas, as we all know, we are talking about people’s lives and communities. We want a better time for Northern Ireland—what a great place it is—so, although I should not be doing this, it is a privilege and we are seeking to do the right thing for Northern Ireland My noble friend Lady McIntosh hit on a vein: I think she and many of your Lordships know that I am rather keen on the horse. Obviously, the Government recognise the value of the equine sector to the UK economy. I also know—declaring an interest in that my wife’s family breed horses in County Tipperary—that it is of great importance to the rural economy of Northern Ireland and the Republic. We therefore need to do all we can to ensure the movement of horses between the United Kingdom and Ireland—and indeed France; across the piece—and to ensure that in some way we can continue what was the tripartite agreement. We need to work on some arrangement to ensure the free movement of horses, particularly bearing in mind biosecurity. We do not want any future arrangements to jeopardise something that is absolutely crucial, particularly in that thoroughbred end—racing—where pest diseases, viruses, et cetera, are absolutely kept to a minimum by high biosecurity How to find an arrangement to best succeed the tripartite agreement is something for negotiations. We all recognise—the UK Government and, I think, the Irish and French racing interests as well—that what we had was of value, and we need to see how we can work. This is why the British Thoroughbred Industries Brexit Steering Group is collaborating with Defra officials. We absolutely need to see what we can do for a very important part of the rural economies of the Republic and our country The noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, rightly raised a number of points about the resource implications and so forth. My understanding of the sort of numbers under a new regime is that the five inspectors would need to be increased to 11—a doubling. All consignments of regulated—that is, high-risk—plants and plant products currently imported from the EU under the existing EU passport system would require pre-notification, to be accompanied by a phytosanitary certificate and subject to remote documentary checks in the event of exit without an agreement. This plays into a point that I emphasised and that the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, acknowledged: this is precisely because neither we in this country nor the Republic want to have checks at the border. We think there are ways in which these matters can be checked. As we said in the previous debate, we should not be nervous of thinking about the best ways of heightening biosecurity. Making this the responsibility of a country’s plant health authority has that strength and imprimatur. If we import something from Italy, say, it will be the Italian plant health authority that has to signify the phytosanitary certificate. We should not be fearful of some elements of this new arrangement because they are about what we increasingly need to look at.