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

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords I have one question for the Minister, following on from my noble friend’s more detailed questions about what will happen after 31 December 2019. It is all set out in paragraph 7.3 of the Explanatory Memorandum. Apart from asking what happens after 31 December, as my noble friend did, I note that:

“The EU have agreed a legislative measure that will allow UK operators currently running regular and special regular services to the EU to continue doing so until 31 December 2019”.


My question concerns the word “currently”. If an operator wishes to start a new service this year, they will presumably not be allowed to, because they are not doing so currently. If this legislation continues with the same wording, they will not be able to do so in future. That looks to me to be starting to create a kind of monopoly of existing operators, because new ones will not be able to do it unless they are operating currently. I hope that the Minister can put my mind at rest and say that this does not actually mean that no new ones could start and that it is just a quick and easy way of expressing what might happen—but it is a worry, because at the moment any operator should be able to operate across the frontier, and let us hope that that can continue in the future.

[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?