United Kingdom Internal Market Bill — House of Lords, 2020-10-28
Topic: Foreign Trade
James Hope (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I support Amendment 7 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and Amendment 21 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay I shall start with Amendment 7. First of all, I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, that importing and exporting goods is part of the commercial life of this country. That applies across all parts of the United Kingdom, and one can well understand the point that she makes about the importance for the devolved Administrations of maintaining that system with as little interference as possible. However, the point to which Amendment 7 draws attention is a matter of real concern to the devolved Administrations. As she explained, its effect appears to be to deny them any involvement in decisions on the importation of goods from overseas, to which they might wish to take objection. Various horror stories are of course passed around as one discusses this issue, but I am not concentrating on them so much as I am on the simple lack of ability to contribute to a discussion as to whether or not these goods should be imported If one was talking about legislation, I suppose one would say the Sewel principle would apply and consultation would take place, but there appears to be nothing that allows for that. The effect of the way the provision is worded is that something that comes in can take the benefit of the principles and pass without any kind of control to the devolved Administrations, without their having any say. That is of real concern. This is a probing amendment, but it requires some explanation of what place, if any, the devolved Administrations have in trying to resist the importation into, and transmission across borders within, the UK of goods to which, for one reason or another, they might wish to take exception That covers Amendment 7. As for Amendment 21, I was attracted by what the noble Lord, Lord German, said about the dual carriageway—the parallel lines—for a particular reason, which I have not mentioned before but must be emphasised. The common frameworks are living arrangements. There is no point at which one can strictly say that a framework has come to an end, although I confess that my own amendment suggests that it could happen. These frameworks are open to subsequent discussion and revisiting as things change. For example, much of the UK emissions trading system is based on EU law and treaty arrangements that could change. If that happened, the framework would be revisited, and, no doubt, different policy decisions may need to be taken. The same is true of the hazardous substances framework One has to bear in mind these are two living instruments working side by side: the UK internal market and the common frameworks system. The fact that, as the Bill has it at the moment, there is no means by which they can communicate with each other, is a matter of real concern, because it affects the whole structure of how these things co-operate and will co-operate in the future, in ways we cannot yet predict. That underlines the importance of trying to find a solution to the point I drew attention to on Monday of making some arrangement whereby the decisions taken, based on common framework decisions, to legislate in the devolved Administrations are protected against the effect of the market principles, particularly the non-discrimination principle, which has very broad reach indeed The great value of the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, is that it has drawn attention once again to that very real problem. It requires some response from the Minister so that we can have some idea of how he thinks these two parallel carriageways, stretching out into the future, will ever meet and co-operate with one another.