International Road Passenger Transport (Amendment) (Northern Ireland) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw the Minister’s attention to the report published this very day by the Select Committee sub-committee that I chair on road, rail and maritime transport post Brexit. I will of course allow the noble Baroness a day or two before we get the official government response, but it has a chapter on the Irish dimension, covering not only bus and coach travel but also road haulage and rail.

I will focus on these regulations. Since the Good Friday agreement, and in some cases before the Good Friday agreement, bus operators have operated across the border and have improved the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic in a positive way, with people moving for work and for other reasons. The fact that that whole arrangement is now subject to some doubt is a serious problem, which goes well beyond the details of any transport regulations, frankly.

While our report focuses primarily on the possibility of moving to an agreement with the EU, it nevertheless has regard to the possibility of no deal. With no deal, as my noble friend has just underlined, as of Halloween we will be faced with a situation where the present propositions from the European Union will last only between then and New Year’s Eve. That is not a satisfactory position for any mode of transport. In particular, it is not a satisfactory understanding for a mode of transport by which individuals move to their work or families and which they have relied on for a decade or two to operate in a regular way.

I appreciate that my report—our committee’s report; I must not be so egotistical as two members of the committee are sitting here today—raises a number of issues related to Ireland. I hope that the Department for Transport in London is apprised of the situation in Northern Ireland, because there are some serious difficulties there. My noble friend raised the question of the decision to extend the Interbus arrangements to cover scheduled transport. That is unlikely to take place before the end of October—or, indeed, between the end of October and the end of the year. That will place a number of those routes in Ireland in doubt. I hope that the Minister and her department—in conjunction with the appropriate officials in Northern Ireland, since at the moment it does not have a devolved Assembly—will be able to resolve this issue in a way which, at least temporarily and in default of any longer-term agreement, will ensure that such services continue to operate. In the meantime, I commend the totality of my report to the Minister—no doubt her officials are studying it already.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I will start by underlining the gratitude we must feel to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which has yet again done an excellent job in recommending that this SI be upgraded to an affirmative instrument and in referring these regulations to us. Although they seek to ensure that current access rights for EU bus and coach operators in Northern Ireland remain as they are at this time, in practice the picture is complicated, as other speakers have already made clear. The situation of Translink is much more important and fundamental to the daily way of life of people in Northern Ireland than that of coach and bus operators going abroad from the rest of Britain.

The Minister mentioned 900,000 journeys a year. I am grateful to her for the statistic; she will find more in the report that the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, has just referred to. The evidence to the committee, of which I am a member, underlined the significance of the Translink service—and of the similar service coming from the Republic of Ireland to the north—to everyday life in Northern Ireland.

The Government’s attempts to overcome the problem by joining the Interbus agreement are obviously sensible, but I recall that when we discussed this in relation to the original SI for the rest of Britain there was some issue about the speed with which signatories were signing the extension of the Interbus agreement so that it would cover regular and special regular services. So can the Minister update us on how many countries have now signed up to that in the couple of months since we had that debate, which I believe was in March? Is the way clear so that in future we can rely on the Interbus agreement?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in our short debate today. It is an important debate, however, and is vital for the 900,000 journeys made across the Northern Irish border. A number of issues were raised. I will start by discussing how we ended up with this slightly odd mismatched date situation, with the September and December dates, and then I will cover the Interbus agreement, cabotage and what this means for new services in Northern Ireland.

The arrangements for both regular services and cabotage by Northern Irish operators were set by the EU in its contingency regulation on basic road transport connectivity—I think we are clear on that. However, much of the content of the regulation was put in place in Article 50 format, which means that the UK was not in the room at the time this was agreed. We worked hard with our Irish colleagues to raise the importance of access, including cabotage, on the island of Ireland. The date for regular services—the one at the end of September—was set to allow sufficient time for the protocol to the Interbus agreement on regular services to enter into force. The date for the cabotage services was set at the end of September—noble Lords will recall that, at that point, exit day was going to be in March—to enable alternatives to be put in place for cabotage. Now that the date of exit has been pushed back to October, obviously we will work hard with the Commission and member states to make sure that the dates are extended if they need to be.

We need to extend the Interbus agreement to regular services. The EU is one of the four parties that needs to sign the agreement to extend the coverage, and the Commission is the secretariat to the Interbus agreement. In our conversations with the Commission, and specifically with DG MOVE, it has indicated to us that it will be extended. We will continue to work carefully with the Commission and member states to encourage them to sign; I feel that the process that is likely to happen is that the EU will sign and then others will follow. We therefore have confidence that the Interbus agreement will be signed and, if it is not, we will seek to negotiate an extension with the EU or to put in place bilateral agreements with specific countries as needed.

On cabotage, which is the transport of passengers between two places in the same country by a transport operator from another country, the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, asked a question about what limited cabotage was. In this case it is limited because it is only an operation for the six counties in the Republic of Ireland which border Northern Ireland. That is the limitation of this cabotage. The no-deal legislation that we already have in place would allow EU operators to continue such cabotage operations. Under the EU regulation, cabotage is allowed for regular and special regular services within the Irish border counties, as I have noted. I can therefore assure noble Lords that the Government recognise the importance of cabotage, particularly on the island of Ireland, and that we will work closely and fairly rapidly with the Republic of Ireland and the EU to make sure that cabotage can continue.

There was a question about what would happen if neither of those agreements was in place. That is hypothetical—I do not expect that they would not be—but it leads to something slightly more interesting. If we did not accede to the Interbus agreement under the protocol in our own right for regular services, the EU could offer regular services to the UK, but the UK could not, so there would be a mismatch.

Similarly, the EU could offer cabotage, but the Northern Irish or the UK could not. The question is: what would happen if we could not accede to the Interbus agreement or did not achieve cabotage? At this moment, we have something that might be seen as a carrot or as a stick. In the interests of our tourism industry and for other good economic and social reasons, EU operators can access the UK. However, UK Ministers have the power to amend EU operators’ access in future. I am sure we have no intention to do that, but I point out that we have reached agreement on operating in each other’s markets—and I am sure we will in future—because it is not in the interests of anybody for that not to continue.

The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, asked whether a new operator could start a service. He is correct: a EU operator could but a UK operator could not. However, there is only one operator anyway: Translink. I am not aware that a second operator would want to come into the market, particularly in the timescale that we are talking about. If there is concern, we should be very interested to hear it; we have not heard it yet, so I leave it at that.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. I apologise to him for not having read his report. However, it will be on my weekend reading list. It is a very important topic, and I thank him for bringing the report to my attention and for his contribution today about the broader issues that we face.

It is not in our interests that transportation services between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland fail, and we as a Government will strive extremely hard to ensure that they continue. I hope that I have managed to address the points raised. If there are any remaining, I shall certainly write; otherwise, I beg to move.

[Baroness Randerson]

Before the Minister sits down, I wish to clarify the situation. The papers from the Printed Paper Office made clear that no impact assessment has been prepared. I express my concern about that and should be grateful if she would explain why that is the case.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

With apologies to the noble Baroness, I forgot that question. She is indeed right: no impact assessment was published in this case because any impact was deemed to be de minimis, as is normally the custom.