Northern Ireland After Brexit (Northern Ireland Scrutiny Committee Report)

Lord Hain Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, as we just heard, the noble Baroness speaks with great expertise and eloquence, as she has consistently in meetings of our committee, of which she is a valuable member. It is a delight to have madam chair presiding over this meeting, and the fact that it is so well behaved must be a consequence of her skills.

I welcome and thank the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, for chairing our committee so ably—it is a very diverse committee in all sorts of ways, as he knows better than anybody else—with the expert backing of his excellent staff, two members of which are sitting here watching. They are incredible in unpicking these detailed memoranda. As the noble Lord, Lord Jay, will remember from his time chairing the committee, this stuff is complicated and sometimes impenetrably boring. It may be boring, but it is still important, and they provide us with the expertise to deal with it.

I want to get one thing off my chest, and it will cause some disagreement. I believe that the enormous problems that first the protocol and then the Windsor Framework have saddled us with—Northern Ireland citizens in particular—are a direct result of the hard Brexit implemented by the Government and supported by a minority of the parties in Northern Ireland. That has left a huge set of problems for Northern Ireland by putting a border down the Irish Sea, dividing Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom and betraying, in my view, the unionist cause. That is my own view. I am not a unionist—I am not anything. I am an honest broker, as a Secretary of State. It has betrayed the unionist cause and saddled Northern Ireland with a number of problems that are almost insoluble in some respects. On that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, who also makes a valuable contribution to the committee. It is the only part of the United Kingdom bound by the rules of the European single market and customs union, yet it is unable to directly influence those rules. That is the fundamental problem that our committee has sought to wrestle with. In his own excellent report, my noble friend Lord Murphy also sought to wrestle with it, and the Government have to manage it.

That set of problems needs to be remedied. The key for me, as an ardent devolutionist, is to empower the Northern Ireland legislature—the elected legislature of the citizens of Northern Ireland—so that its voice can be heard directly through consultation, as the UK’s voice was heard. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, will remember from his time in the Foreign Office that the UK had a very effective United Kingdom representation unit in Brussels, through which the UK’s voice was heard at the earliest possible stage. That was direct representation. The only option now for the Northern Ireland Assembly is to ensure that its voice is heard through consultation.

As a number of people have mentioned, and as my noble friend Lord Murphy stresses in his report, early consultation is the key. You will not be able to influence something once it is formally part of the process. But as I recall, especially having been UK Europe Minister for two years, and in other Cabinet and ministerial posts, you can influence proposals in Brussels if you get in early, and when we had UKRep we had the ability to do that. Well before things are formalised and start getting set in stone, you can influence through early consultation. That is crucial.

The UK mission in Brussels—I think the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, stressed this as well—needs to be strengthened in its Northern Ireland capabilities and capacity. It is too weak at the moment and it needs to have Northern Ireland officials moving to and fro, listening to officials in Stormont and directly inputting their views and the views of MLAs into the heart of the decision-making process. At the early consultation stage, when something is proposed by the European Commission, typically, a proposal is floated and there is considerable opportunity to influence it. Once it is formalised, that becomes much more difficult. Therefore early consultation is vital, and the UK mission, as I say, must have its Northern Ireland capability massively bolstered in order that Northern Ireland citizens, their MLAs and their officials can influence matters affecting them directly.

I would also like to see the Northern Ireland Office strengthened. To be frank, at the moment it is a shop-window office for Northern Ireland, but, welcome though that is, it is inadequate in representing and expressing all the kind of views that we have heard about so far in this debate and which are explained in a very detailed way in our report. Above all, however, the UK mission in Brussels needs to have its Northern Ireland capabilities massively upgraded.

In my view, MLAs—Members of the Legislative Assembly in Stormont—should be offered a channel of consultation with the European Parliament. They cannot have formal representation because we are not a member state of the European Union, but there are various opportunities and mechanisms through which MLAs, and perhaps their committee in other forms, could be listened to in the consultation process with the European Parliament. In addition, remember that the European Parliament has co-decision rights now; that has evolved over the last decade or so. That means that it can be influenced, and it needs to be influenced, by Northern Ireland if these myriad regulations and matters affecting Northern Ireland as a result of this Brexit process are to be influenced.

The noble Baroness, Lady Foster, told our committee—I do not think I am breaking any sort of rules by revealing this—that, as I think she put it, Ministers are seen but not heard properly; she was of course a very able First Minister for Northern Ireland. I think she is indicating that that is an accurate representation of what she said. That is not good enough. In my view, Northern Ireland Ministers should be directly consulted within the Joint Committee process, either by the committee itself or its detailed sub-committees—it is quite a complex animal—so that again, ministerial input can go directly into the process of formulating these rules and legislation where they affect or are intended to affect Northern Ireland.

I just conclude by saying this, which some members of the committee will disagree with: I do not think that this relationship can be fixed or that Northern Ireland’s interests can be protected on an EU-UK basis alone. I know that the Brexit deal was done by the UK Government negotiating with the European Union and the European Commission but, in my view, the elected representatives of Northern Ireland, who are directly elected through their legislature, need to have their voice heard.

I realise that this is a problem for some members of the committee, because they think that the relationship needs to be UK-EU alone. Northern Ireland citizens and their businesses—the small business sector in particular have been terribly affected by this whole set of arrangements—often do not have the capacity to deal with it. Small businesses in Great Britain simply stop trading with Northern Ireland because the complexities are so enormous. Those problems cannot be fixed by a UK Government-European Union arrangement alone; that is too high up and high-level. It can only be really fixed by Northern Ireland’s voice, and that requires its Ministers to start agreeing with each other and working hard—harder than they are at the moment—to make sure that their voices are heard. Members of the Legislative Assembly’s voices also ought to be heard. The Democratic Scrutiny Committee in Stormont ought to operate more effectively, and Northern Ireland’s officials need to bolster their own capabilities and expertise, so that they can be heard with some conviction and some respect in Brussels, in a way that is sadly not happening at the moment. If that can be tackled—and I hope that my noble friend the Minister, in her reply, will make some remarks on this—the whole problem will not be as formidable and almost impossible as it currently is to many small businesses in Northern Ireland especially, and to many consumers and others. If that is fixed, the problem could at least be remedied.