European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Lords, 2018-02-28
Topic: International Affairs
William John Lawrence Wallace (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I apologise that I missed the first minute of the noble Lord’s speech. I want to stress, first, that the history of Article 174 is one of British leadership. The regional development fund was set up by one of the first British Commissioners, George Thomson, and was designed to help poorer regions in Britain and Ireland in particular cope with the impact of joining the European Union—it is very good that two of Lord Thomson’s sons-in-law are in this House and taking part in this Committee, although I do not see either of them in their place. I recall clearly how he carried that through the European Community, as it then was, in the early 1970s The article as we now have it was inserted into the Single European Act by the British Government as one of its flanking elements, but it was then transformed by Margaret Thatcher because she committed herself to eastern enlargement—one remembers the Bruges speech and the point she made about bringing Prague, Budapest and Warsaw back into Europe. The regional development fund within the European Union became very much part of how we have helped to spread prosperity, and therefore stability, democracy and security, into those new member countries. It is worth noting that Norway contributes to the European Regional Development Fund and that in any conceivable deal which we strike with the European Union after we leave—if we end up leaving—it is likely that we will be asked to contribute in the same way. The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, might say that this is dreadful because the European Union spreads conflict, but I think that the rest of us will agree that the European Union has helped to stabilise the former socialist countries of eastern Europe. One has only to move from Poland to Belarus to see how much difference it has made Now that we appear to be leaving, the question of what happens to this country and what reassurance the Government can give us about the future of regional development in it is important. The Prime Minister said when she came into office that she wanted to bring the country back together and to reunite this very polarised public we have had since the referendum, but let us remember that England has the deepest regional disparities of any country in Europe—the United Kingdom even more so—and that the areas which qualify for and benefit most from the European development fund in Britain are Yorkshire, the south-west, parts of Wales, the north-east and parts of Cumbria and Lancashire. Recent studies have suggested that Yorkshire and the north-east are the two regions which will suffer most from Brexit because our trade is most clearly across the North Sea, from Hull and Newcastle, and the damage will be severe. Can the Minister begin to give us some reassurance that the Government are alive to this issue and that, as they attempt to bring the country back together, as we hope they do, they will have an active regional policy to cope with the impact of Brexit I read the Yorkshire Post—published by a company that used to be called Yorkshire Conservative Newspapers—and the image one gets of views in Yorkshire from our media and gossip are: that we are now governed by a very Home Counties, southern-English Government; that the north is forgotten; that the northern powerhouse is a placard without much behind it; and that the spending in the north on infra- structure, innovation, schools in rural areas and elsewhere falls well behind what is given to government. I should have thought that might leave the Conservative Party very worried. In replying, can the Minister give us some assurance—and feed this back into the Government—that, as we move towards an apparently inevitable Brexit, the Conservative Government are thinking actively about the regional disparities we already have, are taking into account that poorer regions will suffer disproportionately from a loss of European regional funds and realise that compensatory action needs to be taken by the British Government to prevent that?