Brexit: Food, Environment, Energy and Health (European Union Committee Report)

We have issues with paperwork still. We have no single window to deal with documentation electronically. I find this quite staggering. We have had five years to prepare ourselves from that referendum result and still we have paperwork-based systems. We are still not connected, I understand, to the TRACES system for imports of animal and vegetable products. Groupage is better but still not solved. The noble Earl, Lord Stair, was unable to be with us today but, where he is based in Scotland, he sees some of this with Northern Ireland. He particularly notes veterinary surgeons being used to check details of paperwork while hardly having to bother about animal welfare and animal health. We are having to use that resource in that way.

Then there are the sanitary and phytosanitary arrangements that were not resolved in the TCA. This has been one of the big frictions in the trade in food and animals, and it particularly affects the area that we looked at in this report. Because of that friction, we have had a major fall in trade with the EU.

We have an issue on fisheries the moment. We have, maybe, a certain amount of unreasonableness—I would say absolute unreasonableness—from France and the threats it made towards our Crown territories. Again, we have an issue there that has not been sorted out. We do not have an agreement with Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes or Norway. That affects a number of our fleets, particularly that out of Grimsby. We still cannot export bivalve molluscs and there are a number of other areas that were not really foreseen.

On the chemicals side, we still have the issue of UK REACH. British chemical firms—and, indeed, foreign ones trying to export to our supply chains—are finding much additional cost that in many ways is dogmatic rather than necessary.

Having said that, a number of achievements have happened since then. We have our own emissions trading scheme in the UK, which as I understand it is working well. We now have an Office for Environmental Protection, which is but one week old, with an appointed chair and staff. Some of us might question its independence, but we have it and it will be working. That is good. Replacing the CAP we now have ELMS, which if delivered properly in the way it was meant to be—I hope that happens—will mean we have a much more environmentally friendly form of agriculture ahead of us. We have interconnectors that are still working; indeed, the Norway-UK interconnector has become operational since Brexit happened. On Euratom, many of us were concerned about that relationship and being able to trade in nuclear and radioactive products. That has been sorted extremely well, even with the United States, where we felt the Senate would get in the way. We have a universal health card as well. A number of positives have happened.

However, I have a number of questions for the Minister; perhaps I can just go through them. There are quite a few of them, and it is fine if he wants to reply to me in writing on some of them. Will the UK and EU ETSs, the emissions trading schemes, come together as we want?

I had sympathy for our not doing the EU waters Norway deal, because Norway seemed to get a lot more out of it than we did, but we still do not have a deal in the subarctic area either, and I would be interested to hear from the Minister whether he reckons we will as we move into next year.

On sanitary and phytosanitary rules, the whole Northern Ireland side and EU exports, we could get over this if we agreed to regulatory alignment as opposed to offering equivalence. Why do we not do that? We can withdraw from that whenever we want to. It would solve the short-term problem while we do not have divergence. When will that single window of documentation start?

On chemicals, we are going through UK REACH. What divergence does the Minister predict? Will that happen now?

The noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, was so involved in biosecurity. As I understand it, we are now not going to check goods coming into the UK until July 2022. How will we ensure that our biosecurity is good up until that time?

What has happened to the specialist committees, particularly the sanitary and phytosanitary and fisheries specialist working committees? Have those met yet? There seems to be a silence there.

In some ways most importantly practically, certainly for my region, will we have an extension of the seasonal workers scheme? It seems to me that now we have full control over movement of people across our borders, we can afford to make sure that supply equals demand while the electorate know that it is not going to be for ever and that we have control over it ourselves.

Those are some of the questions in our report that are still there. I will say one or two things as a conclusion. I will not go into Brexit in detail, but the thing that saddens me is the confrontational attitude we still have between the UK and the EU. France is to blame on fishing, but I believe we have had an almost proactively aggressive attitude to the European Union, which does not help any of the constituent parts of the economy that our report looked at. If Article 16 is enacted, I believe that is a threat to the TCA altogether and effectively takes us back to a no-deal Brexit, which is something that no one of any sense wants at this stage.

I come back to COP 26. I never believed the Treasury’s forecasts for Brexit that the Minister’s Government put out at the time of the referendum campaign. However, one area that I did believe was that one of the losses from Brexit would be in our influence on the continent among the other 27. The performance of the EU at COP 26 illustrates that: the EU was seen as not being a good enough player at COP 26 in Glasgow. Why was that? It was because we were not there. Whether it was the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, back in the Kyoto protocol days, Ed Davey under the coalition Government or Amber Rudd under David Cameron, we led that negotiation—we drove it from the European Union point of view. Its relative failure at Glasgow is because we were not there, and I find it unfortunate on the environmental side. We were in that last foursome—but with Alok Sharma, whom I praise along with everybody else for his work at COP 26, at COP 27 in Egypt, which now looks like being equally important, we will not be there in that cabal, or there to make sure that Europe does not backslide on its environmental needs and leadership.

This report is still alive. I look forward to the Minister’s response, and I very much hope that in all these areas we will find a way forward. I beg to move.