EU: Customs Arrangements
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Lord True
My Lords, I always travel in hope, and I share the noble Lord’s aspirations. As was famously said:
“Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.”
In every aspect of this great question, all people of authority in every part of the United Kingdom share a responsibility for the overall good of the people of the United Kingdom. Certainly, I want to see good relations right across the border, and I give the noble Lord that assurance.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]
My Lords, we are often told that effective border management requires active co-operation between states on both sides of the border. A number of recent reports suggest that the Dutch, Belgians and French are far better prepared for the new border arrangements than we are. But is it compatible with the British Government’s rather hard interpretation of sovereignty to allow French customs and passport officers to operate on British soil as they have in recent years, or, for that matter, for British passport officers and customs officers to operate on Dutch, Belgian or French soil as they also do? Does that now need to stop to defend the sovereignty of the United Kingdom?
Lord True
My Lords, again, that is slightly wide of the Question. The treaty to which the noble Lord refers is one under which arrangements subsist between the Governments of the United Kingdom and France. That is the position. I hope we will be as well prepared as any nation.
David Frost
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]
My Lords, both the Prime Minister and Michael Gove cited President Roosevelt as the model for this Government’s approach. When I was first a student in the United States, I was invited to seminars given by three former members of President Roosevelt’s cabinet, all of whom emphasised the efforts Roosevelt made to carry cross-party support in both Houses of Congress for his New Deal. Are this Government similarly committed to building support across the parties and in both Houses of Parliament or do they prefer, as Dominic Cummings suggests, to move fast and break the conventions?
Lord True
My Lords, this Government, who have a great public mandate, want to carry the widest possible support and, indeed, increase their support across this nation. I welcome the support given by Sir Keir Starmer to the principle of heavy investment in infrastructure, which the Prime Minister is announcing.
UK-EU Negotiations
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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The Deputy Speaker (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)
The noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, is not with us, so I now call the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]
My Lords, Ministers have frequently referred to the Canadian or Australian models as “oven-ready” recipes for a deal. Can the Minister therefore confirm that our negotiators are including arrangements for the provisional application of such a mixed-competence agreement while we wait for national ratification? The Canadian FTA was signed in 2016 but ratification is not yet complete. Does he understand what the Prime Minister means by the Australian model? The Australian Government website tells me that the seventh round of negotiations on a potential agreement took place last month.
Lord True
My Lords, I am not good at figures but I think that the Australian Government have about 29 different arrangements with the European Union. With regard to the phrase “oven ready”, I am afraid that I like cooking—something that I have enjoyed particularly during the lockdown. Turning to the central core of the noble Lord’s question, the Government are preparing for every eventuality. There is an intense amount of planning on a wide range of fronts, and I assure him that that process is continuing.
Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord True
My Lords, again, I cannot anticipate the composition and focus of the commission. However, I can say to the noble Lord that the Government have already presented legislation on boundaries, which is before the other place at the moment, and we have also signified that we will look at matters relating to the conduct of elections.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]
My Lords, I welcome the Minister’s statement that the Government are taking very careful consideration of the agenda. There is a great deal of expertise on constitutional and political issues in this Chamber. Will the Minister commit to a Lords debate on the agenda and terms of reference of the constitutional commission, either before the summer or at least in our September Session, to inform the process of consideration?
Lord True
My Lords, I had the pleasure of sitting on the Back Benches behind the noble Lord when he was on the Front Bench, and he will know that that is a matter for the usual channels to determine. For my own part, I always welcome discussion with anybody on this important matter.
Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord True [V]
My Lords, in their manifesto, the Government emphasised the need for long-term consideration of our constitutional arrangements, as my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford said. The noble Baroness is correct that this should not be hurried. The Government will bring forward their proposals on how we should proceed in due course.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]
My Lords, in the last few years, there has been a great deal of discussion, particularly from within the Conservative Party, about the need to strengthen the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. If we abolish the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, we will go back to a substantial role for executive sovereignty in the UK. Does the Minister accept that we cannot go backwards by abolishing the Act and that we need to strengthen Parliament’s role in organising its own meetings, terms, Prorogation and Dissolution?
Lord True [V]
My Lords, as I said, many matters will be considered and we will make further announcements in due course. I think the noble Lord would agree that Parliament did not have its finest hour under the aegis of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. That is why, partly to restore Parliament’s reputation, we need clear arrangements that command support.
EU: Trade and Security Partnership
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]
My Lords, the February document that the Government published on the future relationship included a chapter on digital services that sets out that we need to
“encourage regulatory cooperation and a strategic dialogue on emerging technologies”.
I could not find this in the items for discussion in the fourth round of negotiations, nor does any progress seem to have been made on it. Are the Government hoping that we will continue to have regulatory co-operation in this very important emerging industry? As a fallback position, are they discussing with the Americans whether we will converge on American data regulation rather than European regulations if these negotiations break down?
Lord True [V]
My Lords, the noble Lord is right: there is an international dimension to these questions. We expect foreign policy co-operation broadly to be substantial with the EU, as it is with many of our international partners, but we do not think that an institutional framework is necessary to deliver it.
EU: Plans for No Deal
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord True
My Lords, I read with great interest your Lordships’ report on the Northern Ireland protocol. I do not agree with every judgment in it, but it was very valuable and the Government will make a response in due course. I said—I think when I answered the noble Baroness on a previous occasion—that a business engagement forum in Northern Ireland is imminent. A process of engagement with business across the country is of great importance, is ongoing and will be intensified.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Minister in his first Answer said that we are negotiating on the basis of the agreement reached last October. Earlier this year, we had a number of authoritative briefings, presumably from No. 10, to say that the decisive result of last December’s general election in effect sidelined the political declaration and that we were now negotiating on what the Minister also described as a more minimalist arrangement. The political declaration talked about an “overarching” framework and a continuing security, foreign policy and defence relationship, which is a great deal more than Canada or Australia. Have we now abandoned the political declaration, or are we still, as the European Commission would like, negotiating on the basis of that agreement?
Lord True
My Lords, we have put into law a withdrawal agreement, including the NI protocol, and that is the basis of our continuing policy. The Government have published a number of documents which have been laid before your Lordships’ House on our approach to negotiations and, most recently, on the Northern Ireland protocol. That is the basis on which we are proceeding, in good faith and hope.
Beyond Brexit (European Union Committee Report)
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I hope that the Minister can give us some evidence that the Government are concerned to win friends in Europe now that we have left the EU. February’s white paper on the future relationship with the EU left out the references to last October’s political declaration agreeing to an
“overarching institutional framework … for ambitious, close and lasting cooperation”
in foreign policy and defence, cybersecurity, civil protection and health security. I note the unwise omission, in February, of co-operation in health security. Now, the protection of national sovereignty overrides questions of national interests and how we might promote national interests through co-operation.
The declared intention is to turn away from Europe. The Prime Minister told Parliament on 3 February that:
“We are free to reinvigorate our ties with old allies”,—[Official Report, Commons, 3/2/20; col. 25.]
as if EU membership had cut us off from other partners. We are leaving behind our oldest ally in the EU, Portugal, and we are leaving France, with which we now share a significant military deployment in Saharan Africa which the Government have told Parliament little about so far. We are putting political and economic relations with the United States first and foremost, even though we differ from Washington on an increasing number of important global issues.
This Government have no foreign policy. Beneath the empty phrase “global Britain” are buried illusions about a buccaneering Britain in a free-trading world, released from the shackles of a declining Europe. The current Foreign Secretary has made no attempt to build friendly bilateral relations with our European neighbours, nor has the Prime Minister. But the long history of British foreign policy has been centred on conflict and co-operation with our European neighbours. Now, 120 years after the Marquess of Salisbury stepped down as Conservative Prime Minister, splendid isolation is back.
Census (England and Wales) Order 2020
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, both here and in the Commons, there have been some powerful speeches on the inclusion of questions on Cornish identity and Sikh ethnicity, so I need do no more than express my sympathy and support for the cases that have been made. We are moving towards a country of complex and multiple identities, not easily represented by our two-party and first-past-the-post system—but that is an issue for a different debate. I mark in passing that a strong sense of Yorkshire identity is entirely absent from the questionnaire. We face a Conservative Government who resist any recognition of Yorkshire identity in how they approach devolution in Yorkshire, which is to city regions rather than to Yorkshire as a whole, as all our local authorities have stressed.
We are a much more complex society. As the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, remarked, our local authorities often know this about languages and ethnic groups in much more detail than do our national Government. That leads me on to the relationship between local and national data. I am struck by how the Government have approached the pandemic by neglecting the skills and resources of our local authorities, going to outside private contractors for testing and other things rather than reinforcing the strengths of our local authorities.
The Minister said in opening that we should make greater use of data already held by government. A great deal of very useful data is held by our local authorities. As we consider the future of the census, we need to take further the question of how we feed in and out of different government agencies the data which they hold separately, and the safeguards that data mining and data analysis need therefore to have.
There is of course the difficult question, which we will come back to later, of why electoral registration is held separately from other forms of establishing where our citizens live and who they are. Every British citizen and long-term resident should be on the electoral register.
I welcome the statement in the Conservative manifesto last year that:
“We will improve the use of data, data science and evidence in the process of government.”
That is a highly desirable idea, although reading Dominic Cummings’s blog over the years and looking at the antics of what one has to call the Warner brothers, Ben and Marc—one of them in No. 10 and the other working for an outside company which has apparently some very privileged relationships with the Government—I think that we clearly need greater transparency as to what exactly is going on within government as we move through the digital transformation.
I thank the Minister for offering me the opportunity to talk to the Office for National Statistics on my own. However, it would be much more valuable to use the real expertise on the digital transformation that there is on all Benches in the House, and invite us for a number of briefings on how the Government plan to expand and improve their use of data, how the future census may or may not fit in with that, and how they will build in the safeguards which we will need. To comment on what the noble Earl, Lord Erroll, said, the question of data transparency as well of data ownership is an important part of that. I note that in Sweden, for example, the degree of transparency on tax returns is a great deal higher than in Britain, which apparently has a markedly positive effect on not paying some people too much money.
The Minister also talked about the need to maintain the security and secrecy of people’s personal data. That is highly desirable—we certainly need to improve the safeguards on that—but citizens sometimes need to demonstrate to government their entitlement, presence and records. The Windrush scandal, for example, was entirely unnecessary. All those people had, within other agencies of government, records that they had been living in Britain for some time: their tax returns, national insurance records, and in many cases their driving licence. The Home Office did not attempt to look at the metadata to establish whether there were records for those people before it attempted to deport many of them. That is another major issue to which we need to return.
We certainly wish to look at the wider issues here. We were promised last year that the Government would publish a White Paper on their data strategy before the end of 2020. I understand that this has now slipped several months behind schedule because officials have been detached to deal first with the threat of a no-deal Brexit and now with the coronavirus pandemic. This offers opportunities in digital transformation for improving the quality of government policy but also risks individual privacy and liberty. Can the Minister assure us that the Government will do their utmost to carry Parliament and the public with them as they move forward, and that regular briefings for parliamentarians on what is planned and whether a further census should be held in 2031 should be part of building and maintaining public trust?
Beyond this, I simply add that the quality of the data the census provides will depend on how well it manages to record marginal communities and individuals: recent migrants, the homeless, and elderly people living alone. I hope that the Minister will also assure us that the Government will target resources on such groups, who are the least likely to know how to go online or voluntarily and patiently to fill in a long and complicated form on their own.
Budget: Economic and Fiscal Outlook
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(6 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, in last year’s debate on the government statement on economic convergence, my noble friend Lady Kramer said that it was “surreal” to debate the EU framework when the UK was leaving the EU. This year’s debate is far more surreal: we have now left; Boris Johnson has hardened the terms for a new economic relationship; it looks increasingly possible that no agreement will be reached; and the pandemic has disrupted the world economy.
Statements about the UK economy made before the end of February are no longer valid. The OBR warned that the projections it offered would be invalidated if Covid-19 affected Britain severely. Well, since then it has. The Treasury has abandoned its commitment to fiscal restraint—rightly, given the gravity of our situation. None of the statements we are considering placed much emphasis on the UK’s structural trade deficit or the impact on our economy of a further fall in our exchange rate. The collapse of our negotiations with the EU would worsen both.
The four priority states with which the Government hope to sign free trade agreements to compensate for the anticipated decline in trade with our immediate neighbours are the United States, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand? At present, 0.2% of Britain’s exports flow to the 5 million New Zealanders. If we were to double our exports to New Zealand every year for the next five years, that would still leave us exporting less to them than we already do to Poland, Norway or Sweden—countries with which we will find it more difficult to trade in 2021. Is that a rational trade strategy?
Michael Gove has just announced a “customs academy” to train the extra 50,000 staff who will be needed to handle Britain’s trade with the EU after we have crashed out. So much for Vote Leave’s promises that leaving the EU would reduce the burdens on business.
In recent weeks, the Government have rediscovered respect for experts and evidence—at least on health, disease and epidemics—which Ministers from Boris Johnson and Michael Gove down had rubbished. On the economy, the Prime Minister and many of his advisers are still in a fantasy world. Iain Martin, in last Friday’s Times, even resurrected the Singapore-on-Thames illusion that a no-deal Britain could flourish as a service economy, without an important manufacturing sector.
We will not emerge successfully from this acute economic and social crisis unless our Government reconsider their priorities for our domestic economy and trading partners and carry the country with them as they rebuild. So far, I see little sign that they will do so.