United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Baroness Randerson

Report stage & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Report: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 23rd November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I speak in support of the amendments. The internal market must be based on high environmental standards, as well as supporting progressive improvement, but there is nothing in the Bill to ensure that this happens—hence the amendment. There is no reference to common frameworks to support higher standards, and there is no non-regressive provision to prevent standards falling. Taken together, this could easily lead to a deregulatory race to the bottom, and have a chilling effect on attempts to improve environmental standards.

It is important to remember that improving environmental standards can be controversial in practice, even though there may be no debate about the science behind them. For example, in the early days of the pandemic, the Government very commendably made money available and encouraged councils to put in place new cycle lanes and pedestrianised areas—a policy which we would all agree is good for our health and for the climate. However, many councils found this very difficult to do in practice, and some backed down in the face of fierce opposition from motorists. Wandsworth council, for example, was one of those concerned.

So in this Bill, while devolved Administrations will not be legally prohibited from introducing new environmental standards, under the market access principles, incoming goods from the rest of the UK will not have to meet these new and higher standards—hence fundamentally undermining attempts at improvement. This is in contrast with EU law, which has created coherent shared mechanisms. The EU also allows countries to go beyond commonly agreed standards to protect the environment, such as by banning particular types of packaging. However, there is no possibility of derogation from mutually recognised requirements in the Bill, as envisaged by the Government.

Amendment 23 refers specifically to environmental standards, but the principle also applies to public health and to standards across the board. That undermines efforts at innovation, a key factor in all successful markets. In Committee, the Minister confirmed that exclusions are

“intentionally narrowly drafted, to ensure that there are no unnecessary trade barriers.”—[Official Report, 28/10/20; col. 339.]

Can the Minister explain how the Government have come to the conclusion that setting higher environmental standards or higher standards of public health creates a barrier to trade?

In the other place, the Government created an exclusion for pesticides, which was not initially in the Bill. Can the Minister explain why this is important, but not other environmental factors? Just as over the decades we have become increasingly aware of the dangers of pesticides, so we have been on a similar journey of discovery over plastics. Well over a decade ago, the Welsh Assembly voted to introduce a charge for single-use plastic bags. The reason was that there was concern that they did not break down in the environment, that they lasted for hundreds of years and that animals died after getting tangled up in them. After some protest, England followed, because it saw the success in Wales of that policy. A decade on, we know so much more about plastic and the microscopic particles that we all ingest, either directly from plastic bottles, or indirectly, for example from fish which have themselves ingested particles.

My point is that yesterday’s experiment becomes today’s norm. Wales wants to ban nine different types of single-use plastic next year, and England—via the UK Government, of course, but the Government for England in this case—seems to be thinking of banning only three. If the Bill is passed without amendment, the efforts in Wales to lead in this field will in practice be totally undermined.

I will finish with another example. Next year the UK Government want to ban the sale of house coal in England. This Bill would mean coal from Wales could still be sold in England and would thus undermine standards that the Government wish to set for England. It is important to remember that what applies to one nation applies to another. I support the amendment.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate for a number of reasons, which I shall come back to as I conclude. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, as she often does, focused on the key issue in play here: where we best situate the balance in an internal market that is as integrated as we currently have, which needs and respects clearly harmonised rules but also allows for joint processes which allow individual parts of the market to develop at different rates in different places. I think we agree that that is the key issue but differ on where the balance must lie and whether it has to be uniform as much as the Bill seems to suggest it will be.

The main interest in this debate has been in focusing our minds on areas that we have not really touched on in recent groups. We have looked at goods and services and at qualifications and how they might be harmonised, and we are coming back to services and qualifications later in our debates this evening. The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, about whether current policy might be adapted because of the impact of this Bill when it becomes an Act need an answer, and I would be grateful if the Minister could respond in particular to that point. Is there a particular hook in this Bill that will cause difficulties across the devolved authorities?

Secondly, on the point made by my noble friend Lord Hain, could it have an adverse effect on current processes so that, for instance, we would lose the local benefit policies to which he referred? Thirdly, on the point raised by my noble friend Lord Liddle, if there are good and valuable initiatives on local growth and support for sectors that are perhaps subsets of the national economy that are appropriate and best organised and run from a local point of view, how will they be affected by the way in which the Bill imposes a straitjacket on the various initiatives that we want to see come forward? I look forward to hearing from the Minister.