HANSARD
Brexit: Food, Environment, Energy and Health (European Union Committee Report)
- Motion to Take Note
- Moved by
- That this House takes note of the Report from the European Union Committee Beyond Brexit: food, environment, energy and health (22nd Report, Session 2019-21, HL Paper 247).
- My Lords, I can see that the Opposition are rather outgunned on this report, so it is very useful that we co-operated right across party lines in the committee. It is a bit like a Frankenstein moment, because we are bringing to life a sub-committee that died back in March but one that I found extremely competent in its work. Although the report is now somewhat old, having been produced at the beginning of this year, many of the issues are exactly the same and are live now, as they were then. Many of the questions that we asked of the Government and to which they responded are still there.First, I welcome the Minister to the sub-committee, as it were. I am very pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, in his place. The noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, came in front of us regularly, but, of course, he has moved on to the post of Senior Deputy Speaker.It has been some time since the report came out. I shall briefly go through what has gone on during that time, but one thing we have to say at the beginning, and we say it strongly in the report, is thank goodness there was a trade and co-operation agreement, the TCA. It is there; it was landed. It is as good a free trade agreement as we were going to get given the red lines that we had. Sure, it affects only 20% of our economy but more of the European Union’s so it is rather more biased towards it. I remember many times during the evidence sessions that we had with our farming constituency that its view was that there was nothing worse than no deal, and we have saved that situation. We have a number of other frictions that I will come on to, but we have a TCA there.Since then, of course, we have had rollover deals with South Korea, Japan and Canada and new deals with Australia and New Zealand, which I will perhaps touch on later. There is noticeably no deal with the United States and nothing there on the horizon. There is no practical fisheries agreement with Norway, which is something I also wish to come back to later in this debate.Of the live issues that we still have, clearly, at the top in terms of temperature apart from fisheries—I will come on to that in a minute—is Northern Ireland and the protocol. We still have checks there, which are major frictions to trade within the United Kingdom. We still have not, as I understand it, solved the issue of medicines going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. It may be that we have; I think that is being sorted out at the moment and is one of the areas that should be resolved. We still have a number of prohibited products such as seed potatoes and we are unable to import some chilled products because Northern Ireland is part of the single market for goods.In terms of labour, we did not talk in the report about HGV drivers but they are clearly vital in the supply chain of perishable goods and we have issues there. We have issues still, I believe, with vets, with healthcare—particularly on social services—with butchers and with farm workers. I know from my own experience down in Cornwall and the south-west that we have not cropped all that we have grown because of those labour shortages.