Postal Packets (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2023

Considered in Grand Committee

Moved by

That the Grand Committee do consider the Postal Packets (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2023.

My Lords, this statutory instrument will provide United Kingdom authorities with powers in relation to postal packets—parcels—moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. It does nothing more or less than that. It does not itself put in place the wider Windsor Framework arrangements.

These powers are part of delivering what we promised for consumers and businesses in Northern Ireland. They are necessary to ensure that we can implement the Windsor Framework and remove the burdensome regime that the old Northern Ireland protocol would ultimately have required. I am aware of some misunderstanding about what the Windsor Framework requires in respect of parcel movements, so I will attempt to address that also in my opening remarks.

Had it been fully implemented, the Northern Ireland protocol would have required international customs processes for all parcel movements from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. On the new arrangements, it is worth dealing up front with some of the issues where there has perhaps been a misunderstanding about what will be required in future under the Windsor Framework. In short, I would like to provide some reassurances to noble Lords in that regard.

First, someone in Great Britain sending a parcel to their friends and family in Northern Ireland will not need to engage with any customs processes under the Windsor Framework. Nothing will change for those movements, compared with today. Similarly, Northern Ireland recipients of parcels sent by their friends and family in Great Britain will not need to engage with any customs processes. For example, a grandson in Liverpool sending a package to his grandmother in Belfast will not need to do anything new to send the package and his grandmother will not need to do anything new to receive it.

British businesses in Great Britain selling to Northern Ireland consumers will not need to complete customs declarations, international or otherwise, and Northern Ireland consumers buying from sellers in Great Britain, including via online shopping, will not need to engage with any customs processes. They will buy from the seller in Great Britain and receive their goods without doing anything new.

I emphasise that this means the Windsor Framework explicitly removes one of the most onerous requirements on goods being sold to Northern Ireland consumers and, of course, on goods being sent to friends and families. There will be no routine checks or controls applied to parcels, with interventions only on the basis of a risk-based, intelligence-led approach. This means that the overwhelming majority of parcels will not be subject to checks.

I turn to parcels sent from a business in Great Britain to a Northern Ireland business. These will be treated the same as equivalent freight movements: they can be moved through the new green lane where eligible when it is introduced from October 2024. As with freight movements, the green lane will ensure that eligible goods will no longer require international customs processes. They will instead require only the provision of routine commercial information. Movements via the red lane, including goods destined for the EU, will be subject to the customs processes required by the EU, as noble Lords would expect.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for outlining the purposes of the regulations before us. As noble Lords probably know, just the other day this was a matter of some heated debate in a Delegated Legislation Committee in the other place, and was subject to a vote in that House yesterday evening. Some consternation was expressed in the other place about the manner in which the Government had removed Members from that committee and replaced them with those who would vote these regulations through, but that is a matter for another day and it can be followed by reading Hansard on those committee proceedings.

The Minister said probably the most significant thing at the very end of her speech: these regulations facilitate the Windsor Framework. A lot of the debate is about the benefits of the Windsor Framework compared with the protocol as originally agreed, but the regulations before us are not about implementing the Windsor Framework; they are purely about creating the border for parcels between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. After that, we come on to the Windsor Framework, which is all about the EU law in which it decided, after discussions, to reduce the requirements that would normally be in place to move parcels into the EU for Northern Ireland.

But that is not what is before this Committee. Before this Committee is purely the creation of the parcels border. Whatever the EU then decides to do, whether by agreement or unilaterally, is facilitated by that border. It is our job as parliamentarians to examine the actual regulations before us, not necessarily today, although we can comment on them. The Windsor Framework proposals, which are in EU legislation, are separate, but I will reference them and no doubt they will be referenced by other speakers in this Committee.

The regulations treat Northern Ireland as if it is a foreign country for the purposes of moving parcels. They put in place another piece of the jigsaw of the Irish Sea border. They do not ameliorate or remove it; this is a new creation that is not here at present. Their effect is to separate Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom in the sense of placing it outside the same single market as Great Britain for postal purposes.

It is very important to differentiate what will happen in future as a result of what the EU law happens to be—remember, it will be EU law that determines what happens as far as the Windsor Framework is concerned—from the changes to law secured by these regulations. Having presented these changes as being about the Windsor Framework rather than what the regulations actually do, I think it is important to point out the constitutional implications. Parliament is not passing EU legislation whereby the EU unilaterally says that it will not press home its rights in relation to private parcels. In these regulations, the Government are proposing a border against which the EU has the right to press its full rights, or less than its full rights. At present, under the Windsor Framework, the EU has determined that it will not press its full rights in relation to parcels, but if it ever has a change of heart there will be nothing in this legislation, or any UK legislation, that will provide any kind of safeguard, because we have created a border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland for these purposes.

The EU has made it clear that it reserves the right to withdraw at any time from the trusted trader scheme, which means we would be left with the full impact of these regulations dividing our country. We have to take it that in the future the EU will decide not to implement its full rights as far as the moving of parcels is concerned. But in the past we have seen decisions taken unilaterally by the EU—for instance, in relation to its proposal to prevent vaccines being moved into Northern Ireland—so this is not unprecedented or unimaginable; it could happen. If it decides to withdraw from the trusted trader scheme, by default we end up in a situation in which the full panoply of EU rules applies to all movements of parcels—that is in the Windsor Framework.

These regulations create a border and facilitate the imposition of EU laws on Northern Ireland. If anyone has any doubt about that, look at the EU question and answer guidance on the Windsor Framework, which makes it very clear that the EU can at any time withdraw support from the trusted trader scheme, with the effect that all goods movements between Great Britain and Northern Ireland will be subject to the so-called red lane. It has to be said that the EU question and answer documents and associated papers go into much more detail and have proved much more accurate than what the Government put out in relation to these matters.

We are going to be totally reliant on EU law and, even as it stands, that is unacceptable. Why should businesses sending to other businesses within the United Kingdom be subject to full EU customs procedures and checks? We are conceding our rights as a nation for the future. Whether Northern Ireland consumers and businesses experience the full disruption of the border is entirely dependent on the attitude of the EU, which can change the legislation that currently moderates its approach to the border if it withdraws its support in the relevant articles of the legislation I referred to earlier.

The constitutional implications are stark, and they contradict what the Prime Minister said about the removal of any sense of a border in the Irish Sea. How can it possibly be claimed that that is true? He claimed that it would be as easy to move goods from Birmingham to Belfast as from Birmingham to the Isle of Wight. Again, that is simply not true, even within the terms of the current proposals of the Windsor Framework, because business-to-business movements are clearly subject to full custom checks and goods do not move in the same way as in the rest of the United Kingdom.

It would be good if we had a straightforward analysis and explanation rather than this continual attempt to pretend that everything is fine and nobody will notice. That is simply not the case. The DUP quite reasonably set tests that were based word for word on utterances and statements made by various Prime Ministers since the protocol was introduced. One of them was to remove the Irish Sea border, but here we have in this legislation, which is part of the Windsor Framework that is claimed to meet our tests, the building of a border in the Irish Sea for the purposes of these movements.

For those reasons we oppose this statutory instrument, and we will continue to press the Government to restore Northern Ireland’s full rights as part of the United Kingdom and the rights of all citizens of Northern Ireland to equal citizenship in this United Kingdom.

There are other matters that could be raised. The 46th report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee asks a number of very detailed questions about why it is thought that these regulations are so urgent when they will not be implemented until autumn 2024. It is incumbent on the Government to set out in detail today their answers to the committee’s important questions.

It is not the first time that the Government have sought to rush through secondary legislation in relation to these types of matters. We had it with the so-called Stormont brake, on which the committee was not even able to do its business properly because the time was so constrained, and yet there was no particular urgency on that either. What is the urgency to introduce this today? Why have the Government not responded to the important questions set out in the scrutiny committee’s 46th report?

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which has looked at this statutory instrument in some detail. As the Minister said, we had several questions and we are still seeking clarification. I am also a member of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland Sub-Committee.

I support the Windsor Framework and appreciate that this statutory instrument addresses business-to-business customs checks. For the wholeness of this debate, it is important that we in Northern Ireland can avail ourselves of our unique opportunities, being a member of the UK internal market and able to access the EU single market. There are major economic opportunities there, and the people of Northern Ireland should see them fully utilised and realised in order to underpin our economy.

Recently, I saw some interesting figures about economies within the UK. Northern Ireland was quite far down the scale, but it came up to about number 2 earlier this year. A contributory factor was us in Northern Ireland being able to avail ourselves of both markets.

Although I support this statutory instrument, I have several questions. The noble Lord, Lord Dodds, referred to the burdens being placed on business. We members of your Lordships’ committee on the protocol and the Windsor Framework have just completed our report, which will be published next week. We looked at labelling. Will the parcels have to indicate that they are not for the EU and therefore not going through a certain lane? There are potential burdens and expenses there for businesses in Britain, and that has to be explored. What discussions have taken place with potential businesses? What information is available to them about requirements and practical arrangements?

My queries about the statutory instrument relate to the process of compiling it—the very issues raised by our standing committee on statutory instruments. I have several questions concerning three points. The measures that allow powers in relation to existing requirements, as opposed to those deriving from the Windsor Framework, have not been well explained. Why is this the case? Will a better explanation be provided for businesses? The noble Baroness referred to existing requirements in her concluding remarks about the dates for this to come into force, but what are those existing arrangements? The noble Lord, Lord Dodds, referred to this.

The regulations introduce quite specific changes in relation to customs procedures. What will the impact be and how will the changes ushered in by the regulations be funded and resourced in terms of staff? Will additional funds be provided for them? It is important that, in all this, additional challenges and burdens are not placed on businesses; and that any such challenges or burdens are mitigated to allow businesses to avail themselves of the good opportunities that I believe they can avail themselves of through access to the UK internal market and the EU single market. I do not think that things should be placed here in a punitive way.