Resetting the UK-EU Relationship (European Affairs Committee Report)

Baroness Lawlor Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lawlor (Con)]

My Lords, the Government’s EU trade reset has failed to achieve its three main trade objectives, on which I will focus. There has been no agreement on the mutual recognition of professional qualifications and no end to the restrictions on UK touring artists, about which we have heard more today. Also, instead of a veterinary agreement, which the Government announced in their manifesto and trailed publicly for two years, they have agreed to reimpose EU SPS law on agri-foods, with dynamic regulatory alignment for the agri-food sector and a role for the Court of Justice of the European Union. The manifesto pledge not to return to the EU, the single market or the customs union has thus been broken.

Moreover, as we have heard today, the Government have caved in to the EU’s demands for long-term fishing access to UK waters and promise to work towards a youth mobility scheme, now called a youth experience scheme. Up to 70 million EU youths could seek to avail themselves of this scheme.

The report follows the Government’s line in seeing the reset as an emerging process—its title is Unfinished Business. There is no assessment of the costs to the UK economy of dynamic alignment for agri-foods, although an assessment from the Growth Commission this week, made by 13 independent economists, suggested that the hit would be £15 billion. Nor is there any analysis of the economic and trade impact of returning to EU regulatory alignment on trade and the economy or on our relationships with other trading partners. We now have, apart from the EU, 40 trade agreements with 70 trading partners.

The SPS sign-up to regulatory alignment will bring legal challenges, because we have changed the basis for agri-foods in this country and the law on them. There is nothing here to consider the repercussions on Britain’s democracy of the breach of a manifesto pledge, at a time when confidence with the established order and politicians is at an all-time low, right across Europe and in this country.

The alternative summary by the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and other co-signatories highlights two failures: the Government’s failure to make the best possible use of their negotiating hand, and the committee’s failure to do its duty to scrutinise and assess that policy and make clear the reality of the reset. The presence of this alternative summary highlights the problems the consensus approach creates for scrutiny. It suggests what I, as a member of the committee from the outset of its investigation, came to consider: that if we had a diversity of views from members and from witnesses, and we tolerated it, we might produce a more useful and critical report. That is our job in the Select Committee: to scrutinise on behalf of Parliament and the taxpayer what the Government are doing in legislation.