Marking of Retail Goods Regulations 2025

Lord Empey Excerpts

Monday 30th June 2025 Lords Chamber

As I mentioned, the Federation of Small Businesses produced a report just this month. I recommend that every noble Lord and noble Baroness takes time to read it, because it injects a dose of reality into what we are talking about when it comes to the Windsor Framework. We have set out many times our constitutional and democratic objections to the Windsor Framework, but this strikes a dagger through the heart of the trade and economic arguments for the Windsor Framework. Noble Lords should read and digest that report. I hope that Government Ministers will respond to the FSB and come back to it with clear answers about the many issues of concern that its businesses are facing, particularly on things such as trader support services, where hundreds of millions of pounds have been wasted. Businesses in Northern Ireland report, in overwhelming numbers, that they have no trust in trader support services, that they have been given contradictory advice, and that they cannot get that advice in writing—it is a joke, according to one of the businesses. The Government need to take these matters very seriously indeed.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, we need to think of the Minister’s welfare. I am quite sure that she probably needs counselling, coming to these debates. We see the array of people on the Benches beside me here and the degree of interest there is in this. But that should not undermine the significance of what we are discussing.

We have been talking about the labels. Labels cost money; it costs money to change the production lines. That can end up only with an increase to the customer who is buying the goods—nobody else is going to pay it. Look at the amount of money that has been put into this whole performance: £200 million to erect border inspection posts, and hundreds of millions of pounds on the trader scheme, and that is only going round the edges of it.

There needs to be some political reality about this. We are paying for the mistakes that were made in the run-up and subsequent to the referendum. Some people could see a mile away what was going to happen. Those in the other place who were so keen to “Get Brexit Done” did not give tuppence about Northern Ireland. We were just a nuisance, and they would fix it later. Well, they are still fixing it now, because who could have believed a decade ago that we would have border inspection posts in the Port of Belfast, the Port of Larne and the Port of Warrenpoint? It would be unbelievable, but it was entirely predictable because the United Kingdom conducted the worst statecraft negotiations with the European Union that I think have ever taken place in history. Before they even sat down at the table, they agreed what money they would pay. That is like saying, “I’m going to buy your house; I haven’t seen it, but I’ll pay you so much for it.” Who would do that? What responsible Government would do that? Then, of course, the Irish question was brought up and that was separated from trade and made a political commitment rather than being part of the major negotiations. It was awful stuff, and it was conducted, I believe, in a very sleekit way, with people talking out of both sides of their mouth at once.

That is how we got into this mess. It is nothing about what is happening today. The minutiae might be unexpected, but the principles are not unexpected. They were written on the wall. You could see them. I have to say to the Minister seriously: she must realise just how preposterous all this is. We have heard about the situation regarding supermarkets. Sainsbury’s are in the same boat, and it does not have any stores in the Republic—a big supermarket like that. People come across. If you look at the car parks in Strabane, in Enniskillen or in Newry, you see that they are thronged with people from the Republic. This has been going on for years, and they are taking their toxic baked beans back to County Louth to cause enormous damage. The ripples will flow right across the European Union, rattling the cages. It is all absolute and complete nonsense; it is costing a lot of money; and it is, potentially, leaving a serious political situation behind it.

We have bureaucracy colliding with common sense. I cannot believe that we cannot do better, but there is one interesting point. This phrase keeps coming up again and again: “full and faithful implementation” of the protocol and the Windsor Framework. It was in the Safeguarding the Union document, and it was repeated by the Secretary of State when he came to your Lordships’ Northern Ireland Scrutiny Committee last week. The Minister just read it out.

The angle is this: because other Governments are deemed to have broken faith with the European Union, our Government—or Governments—are doing their best to show that they are the well-behaved boys in the class and we are going to do exactly what is involved in that, in hope that we will gain some concession at a later stage in the negotiations on the reset. Let us be fair, the reset is not going to have any impact on this whatever for at least a year. Even then, the small print will be the test as to whether there is any improvement.

I have asked the Minister in other debates, and I raised it again with Minister Thomas-Symonds in the committee last week, about the negotiations for the co-operation agreement which are to take place next year. What are we doing about that? Have we got a shopping list? Have we got solutions? Have we got ideas that we can put forward? We know that the European Union will want to narrow the scope of that negotiation, but it is an opportunity, it is in the agreement, and it should be worked on and incorporated in our negotiations with regard to the decisions flowing from 19 May.

We look at things such as the FSB report, which has been referred to, and Marks & Spencer; our committee has had numerous pieces of evidence in the last few weeks—some of it shocking even to those of us who are reasonably familiar with these things—because we have been engaging with people on the front line who are actually moving and trying to sell the goods. The other thing that came up at the committee’s visit to Newry, which we had not picked up on before, was fraud. It is being perpetrated with regard to some of these cross-border activities. I hope that we highlight that when we finalise the report, but we were not familiar with it before. A whole lot of significant things are going on out there.