United Kingdom Internal Market Bill — House of Commons, 2020-09-22
Topic: Foreign Trade
Robert James MacGillivray Neill (Conservative, Centre-right): The first point is that there have to be professional qualifications in order to recognise the people qualified. The Bill does not seem to cause any difficulty about that. I was also making the point that the carve-out on legal qualifications accepts that there are legitimate areas of difference, but there are many other areas where it is entirely legitimate for us to try to work together as a single UK market. I would have therefore thought that the Bill was balanced and proportionate in that regard. I cited services and the importance of the financial services sector, both north and south of the border, as a key example of that. I hope that after the transition period we will also continue our good links with the financial services sector in Dublin, where a number of English legal and professional firms have bases because of those links. The Bill is not malign in any of those regards Although the Bill does not and need not cover this, I hope as we go forward that we will see what can be done to help other parts of the broader British family that would desire access to our new internal market—for example, the Crown dependencies, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. Many of their financial sectors— their trust arrangements and their banking fund arrangements—are importantly and closely linked to the City of London and the UK. The Justice Committee has oversight of the Ministry of Justice’s work on the relationships with the Crown dependencies, and I think there is a great desire to see how we can strengthen the access between them and the UK. The aspiration for the Crown dependencies to have free and unfettered access to the UK market is something we should look to explore with them on a reciprocal basis That particularly and specifically applies to our British territory of Gibraltar—as you know, Ms McDonagh, I have the honour to be the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Gibraltar. It is a well expressed intention of the Gibraltar Government, supported by all parties in Gibraltar’s Parliament, to have access to, in effect, a free trade area with the United Kingdom. I hope the Minister will take that back to his colleagues in the Government, because it ought to be a no-brainer as we go forward. It causes the United Kingdom no difficulty, and it would be of considerable reassurance to the people of Gibraltar, who despite having voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union, none the less trumped even that and asserted their membership of the British family and the desire to remain with the United Kingdom and not to be coerced, sometimes, by their neighbours. Supporting them by making sure they have full access to the internal market ought to be a high priority, both practically and morally, for the United Kingdom Government Finally, there is one area that we can perhaps simplify. I am not generally in favour of simplifying or lowering food standards, and I am certainly not in favour of lowering environmental or food standards as we leave the EU or in any future free trade deal, but there is one area, ironically, where leaving the EU may give us something we can turn to our advantage, and that relates to public procurement and, in particular, local authority procurement As a number of hon. Members know, I served in local government for many years before I came into this House, and I was local government Minister for the first half of the coalition. One of the genuine complaints I had from councils of all political complexions was about the complexity of going through the OJEU—Official Journal of the European Union—process, where contracts over a fairly basic level had to be advertised through a pretty bureaucratic process. That had the no doubt laudable objective of ensuring that firms across the single market could access those contracts, although, in practice, doing a contract in Bromley, Merton or wherever was not likely to be attractive to a small-sized firm of builders in Poland or the Czech Republic.