Brexit Readiness and Operation Yellowhammer

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Wednesday 25th September 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

I will thank the Minister for repeating the Statement; but where are the plans for a deal? The Statement has got nothing on them. That is not because they are being kept confidential in order to aid negotiations, as the Minister claimed earlier. It is not even to stop Parliament scrutinising the potential deal. It is because there is nothing to scrutinise.

We need to consider the UK offer before it is consolidated into a deal. This Statement is all about a no-deal departure, despite the Act passed this month to ensure that we do not leave without a deal. So are the Government planning to flout the law again, because they do not appear to have an idea of what deal they and the EU could accept? The Government say that they want to remove the backstop, but to replace it with what? What else would guarantee no hard border within Ireland? The Statement does not explain where these various physical checks will take place. It admits that, with different tariffs, rules and standards across the EU, with a third-country border there simply have to be checks. That is what happens if you are not in the same customs regime. If our immigration rules are different, checks to ensure that people do not fly into Dublin and then arrive unchallenged here imply a hard border, as happens everywhere else between the EU single market and non-EU single market countries.

The Statement says:

“We will allow goods from the Republic of Ireland free circulation into NI”,


but says nothing about EU citizens there coming freely into the UK. Going forward, that would not be in accordance with our immigration policy, which would obviously be different from that of the EU. What plans do the Government have in that regard?

There are 36 days to go. We have not seen the plans for a deal. We have not even seen the complete plans for no deal—a prospect that continues to haunt the car industry, the pharmaceutical industry, transport, exporters, manufacturing and business. And not just business: consumers would pay the price, with WTO tariffs on cars and vans costing the EU and UK industry and consumers almost £6 billion a year. The BMA worries about the healthcare costs of EU citizens. We read that hospitals in Kent are booking hotel beds for staff because they fear that they will be unable to travel on blocked roads after a no-deal exit, and Northern Ireland police are planning to cancel annual leave in those circumstances. But still the Government throw taxpayers’ money at no-deal preparations despite an Act of Parliament which says that that cannot happen unless the Commons agrees it, and we know that the Commons will not agree it.

As the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, who is unfortunately not in his place, wrote after yesterday’s, as he called it, “car crash” for the Tories, the Government,

“may have to reconsider its plans for Britain to leave the EU on October 31”.

The only word of the noble Lord’s that I would challenge is “may”. Surely the Government must abandon this reckless date and start engaging now with all parties to ensure that we put the country’s future first. They must also understand that the Government, having been found not to have been trustworthy over Prorogation, must now earn Parliament’s trust and be clear that they will not undermine the law by failing to do everything possible to obtain an extension to Article 50.

Will the Minister tell the House: what proposals are being put to the EU; when he envisages any negotiated deal will be agreed by the European Parliament; how many clauses are in the requisite Bill to implement the deal that he envisages; when will it be tabled in Parliament; and when we will receive the full, not just the summary, of the Yellowhammer plans?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I am very puzzled by a great deal in this Statement. The optimism on negotiations suggests that the European Union has moved and given way to us on a range of significant areas, and it does not suggest that we have moved at all. If that is the way that the negotiations are going, then pigs are flying the channel every day. Perhaps the Minister would like to suggest whether the British Government have moved their position at all as the negotiations move forward or whether we are expecting, as the European Research Group has suggested, that the EU will have to give way when it comes to the final point and we will not have to give way or change our position at all.

On Northern Ireland, the position has always been entirely clear that an open border without any checks or infrastructure between the EU and the UK after we leave would be open to smuggling, illegal border crossings and a whole set of issues which seem to have eluded those who wanted a hard Brexit when much of that was evident years ago. Here we are, with five weeks to go, and there is a lot of material here about last-minute discussions on issues that were evident after the referendum and indeed were entirely evident when the coalition Government consulted on this. I was one of the Ministers in the coalition Government who took part in a major consultation exercise with representatives from business, justice and others, which fed back detailed arrangements for the Government on what was regarded to be in Britain’s best interests, and which No. 10, by and large, ignored.

I am puzzled that discussions are mentioned here only about relations with France. We have borders and some significant trade with Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Can the Minister assure us that conversations with them about border controls have also taken place?

The Minister said that action will be taken,

“if appropriate mitigations are not put in place”,

but surely all appropriate mitigations should now be in place for something happening at the end of October. The “if” suggests that the Government are simply not ready. When I listened to representatives from major business organisations last week, they expressed considerable dissatisfaction with their relations with the Government, and in the Financial Times yesterday a story about business representatives being “bullied” by Ministers, as the paper put it, confirmed the suggestion that Ministers are resisting the calls that they are getting from business for detailed changes in what is going on. Would the Minister like to reassure us that these stories of Ministers bullying business organisations which do not tell them what they want to hear are untrue, or at least are exceptional and not normal?

I am puzzled by the reference to free movement of labour and the negotiations on the right to work in other countries, as well as visa-less travel. I assume that will be mutual, in which case there will be free movement for EU citizens from all other countries to visit and to work in Britain. That, as the Minister will know well, is of active concern to multinational businesses operating in this country. I can remember British Aerospace saying some time ago that it moves 8,000 workers in and out of Britain a week for meetings and to get equipment, or whatever, and that the complications of moving to any sort of detailed control would undermine its entire business model between Britain and its other facilities in Europe. Will that be mutual and has he yet told the noble Lord, Lord Green, and Migration Watch UK that free movement for work within Britain will be continued after we leave?

Lastly, I must object to the last but one paragraph here, which could have come straight from the Bruges Group rather than the Government. I cannot believe that any civil servant who looked at this accepted the reality that we would somehow be a strong voice for freer trade in the World Trade Organization. The Minister knows as well as I do that the World Trade Organization is in crisis and that the United States Administration is doing their best to undermine the WTO. The idea that we are about to enter a world of freer trade outside the EU, when the US and China are moving towards a trade war, is absolutely pie in the sky. The paragraph also refers to the opportunity to deal more effectively with cross-border crime. All the evidence we had in the balance of competences exercise was that there was no better way of dealing with cross-border crime than the arrangements we had within the European Union. That statement is frankly idiotic and ought to be withdrawn. A number of other statements in this paragraph:

“the opportunity to strengthen our democratic institutions … the opportunity to invest more flexibly … the opportunity to overhaul government procurement”,

are equally vacuous, if not wrong. On that basis, I give a very weak welcome to this Statement.