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Official Controls (Amendment) Regulations 2024

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing these regulations and explaining them in such detail. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, on tabling the regret amendment, which means that the matter can be debated properly in this Chamber and given the scrutiny that it deserves. Far too many of these regulations are being laid by negative procedure and affirmative procedure and are being brought to the Grand Committee. The full scrutiny of Members in this Chamber needs to be brought to bear on the contents of these regulations, because they have significant effects. A lot of them are very technical in nature—when you listen to the Minister introduce the matter, it sounds extremely technical indeed —but when one delves into it, one can see the significant ramifications, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, pointed out in her forensic analysis of the regulations, and the effects and implications that they have.

I am sure that the Minister, having listened to her noble friend Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, will go away and say that the answer to this is to persuade the Prime Minister to come out publicly and declare his wish to rejoin the European Union. He may try to resist that, for obvious reasons, not least that it would further diminish his standing with the people of the United Kingdom. There will be those who say that the answer is to undo Brexit, but I think that that debate is long gone. The issue that we are debating is how Brexit is done. The problem that we have in Northern Ireland is not the fact that we had Brexit but the fact that Brexit has been done in a way that separates Northern Ireland, wrongly, undemocratically and unconstitutionally, from the rest of the United Kingdom. Brexit can be done and must be done, if the institutions at Stormont are to endure in the long run, in a way that does away with the current problems.

On the issue at the heart of these regulations—the biosecurity of Great Britain, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, explained at length—we had a recent example of the problem that is being created. On 16 January, the Defra Minister in the other place, Daniel Zeichner, told Members of Parliament about the steps being taken by His Majesty’s Government to protect people from foot and mouth disease in Great Britain. He said:

“The Government have taken decisive and immediate action. The import of cattle, pigs and sheep from Germany has been stopped to protect farmers and their livelihoods”.

The Minister did not talk about Northern Ireland voluntarily, but, when he was challenged, he said:

“Northern Ireland farms are just as important. In Northern Ireland, the controls will apply to meat and live animals moving from a 3 km protection zone and a 10 km surveillance zone surrounding the affected premises in Germany. Those products cannot be moved to Northern Ireland

”.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/1/25; cols. 331, 336.]

The biosecurity of Great Britain was so important that the import of all cattle, pigs and sheep from Germany had to be stopped immediately. By contrast, cattle, pigs or sheep could come to Northern Ireland from anywhere in Germany, so long as they did not come from a 10 kilometre surveillance zone surrounding the affected premises.

The levels of protection the UK Government insisted on for Great Britain, and rightly so, could not have been more different from those the EU provided for Northern Ireland, the UK having abdicated its biosecurity responsibilities in relation to Northern Ireland, as the noble Baroness said. In this context, the claim by the Minister in the other place that Northern Ireland farms are just as important looks limp, pathetic and absurd.

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The next day, businesses began cottoning on to the problem and asking Defra how the protections the Minister had spoken of in relation to Northern Ireland could be enforced. How were people to know whether the imports were coming from one part of Germany or another? Britain had taken the wise decision to ban it all to be absolutely sure. A bit of scrambling was done within Whitehall, which produced a bit of panic, followed by an announcement before the end of the day that all beef imports from Germany to the island of Ireland had been banned. That is such a chaotic,

unacceptable way to proceed, especially in the context of these regulations, which make it clear that it is possible to enforce an SPS border without hard infra- structure, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, outlined. There is no need for Northern Ireland to be fobbed off with EU biosecurity protections that will be changed only when there is some kind of crisis and, apparently, when the Republic of Ireland is given a special dispensation to keep the UK Government onside.

This is very real, recent, living example of how Northern Ireland is being treated completely differently compared with the rest of the United Kingdom on something that potentially affects the agri-food industry in Northern Ireland, and the health and welfare of British citizens in Northern Ireland. Of course, this all applies because sanitary and phytosanitary imports into Great Britain are controlled in one way but in Northern Ireland we are left under the jurisdiction of the European Union because of the Windsor Framework/protocol.

This is the outrageous constitutional position that Northern Ireland finds itself in, with all the undemocratic consequences that flow from it that deny the representatives of the people of Northern Ireland—unionists, nationalists and others, because there are people who do not designate as either, as we know—here or at Stormont any say in the laws that govern them in all these areas. That should alarm all parties in Northern Ireland but seems to be welcomed by nationalists. The SDLP, Sinn Féin and the Alliance Party revel in the fact that the EU makes these laws and, as elected representatives in Stormont on the so-called Democratic Scrutiny Committee, want hardly any scrutiny of these matters because everything that comes from Europe must be wonderful and cannot possibly cause any damage. All the evidence, of course, is that real hardships, frictions and difficulties are being caused.

Unfortunately, we have seen in recent days a development whereby the mechanism that was trumpeted by Rishi Sunak and others as a means of giving Stormont a brake on the application of EU law has been shown to be nothing of the sort. It is a dodgy brake, which is normally a subject matter for dodgy car salesmen, but in this case a dodgy politician and others portrayed the brake as something it is not. It is not a Stormont brake, for instance, because Stormont does not have the final say. Many of us argued that at the time; were dismissed by people in this House, people in the other House and by our political opponents, but we have been proved absolutely right. That cannot, therefore, be pointed to as a means of cutting the pipeline of European law, as people suggested that it would.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, said, these regulations illustrate the folly of the approach that Northern Ireland had to be aligned with European law for single market purposes, for the purposes of agri-food production and so on and so forth because that was the only way to avoid a hard border and the carrying out of checks along the border. We can now see from these regulations that it is perfectly possible to preserve the sovereignty of our country and ensure that there is no so-called hard border. This can be done by sending, for instance, as is said in these regulations, electronic pre-notification, requiring some

lorries to attend a facility for checks that do not have to be at the border on an at-risk, intelligence-led basis. What could be wrong with that?

We are going to have this for goods coming from the Republic of Ireland through Northern Ireland into Britain, but we cannot possible have it for goods coming from Northern Ireland or from Britain into the Irish Republic. Oh no; that would be contrary to the Belfast agreement, for some reason, and to any right and rational approach. Of course it is not. If it is perfectly possible to do it in one direction, it should be possible to do it in the other. This is perfectly sensible.

The fact of the matter is that successive UK Governments have buckled in the face of EU resistance to sensible outcomes, suggestions and proposals. Instead, we have a needlessly complex, undemocratic and unconstitutional framework that denies the democratic right of the people of Northern Ireland. This cannot and will not endure. Some people tell us, “Oh, it’s a complete waste of time to talk about these things. It’s all over. You shouldn’t waste your breath talking about them”. As long as we have people in Northern Ireland who are denied their constitutional and democratic rights and as long as we have this needless friction between the economy of Northern Ireland and our biggest market in the rest of the United Kingdom, we will continue to raise these matters. We will highlight and put the spotlight on them. I am not a defeatist in these matters. I believe that a point will come where people will realise that this entire monstrosity cannot endure in any sensible, pragmatic or practical way.

We had a vote in the Northern Ireland Assembly in December, which said by a majority vote that these arrangements should continue. The normal way in which the Assembly makes decisions on any crucial matters is by cross-community vote—a majority of unionists and a majority of nationalists. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, and other noble Lords from Northern Ireland will know, we have not had majoritarianism or majority voting on major issues in Northern Ireland for well over 50 years. However, this vote was rigged so that only a majority was required to ensure that unionists —despite every single one of them voting against—would have to have imposed on them arrangements which they do not support.

I note that, as a result of that vote going through on a majority, the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, has been tasked with undertaking the independent review. I have the greatest respect for the noble Lord. He has immense experience of Northern Ireland and has always acted in a way which has evoked trust and respect from all communities and all sides in Northern Ireland. I look forward to working with him as part of this review, but he will know—as all noble Lords need to know—that the fundamental problem with this protocol/Windsor Framework is the lack of cross-community consent. Every single unionist in this Westminster Parliament and every single unionist in the Stormont Assembly opposes it and votes against it. Their views seem to be cast aside, which is something that will have to be addressed.