Lord Lilley (Con)

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Frost on bringing this regret Motion against these regulations. It is extraordinary that this House is only now considering them months after they came into effect, but that makes it all the more important that we consider their implications, both in practice and in principle. I want first to respond to the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. He wants an SPS agreement. I have good news for him: we have an SPS agreement. It is called the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures. It follows on from an agreement that I helped negotiate—the Uruguay round—which created the WTO, which then led to this. It says that SPS measures “shall not be applied in a manner which would constitute a disguised restriction on international trade”. In particular: “Members shall accept the sanitary or phytosanitary measures of other Members”, of the WTO, “as equivalent, even if these measures differ from their own”. Our measures, of course, are very largely identical. None the less, they have not been accepted by the EU because the EU likes to use phytosanitary measures—in direct conflict with the agreement it has signed—as a protectionist measure to impose what one EU negotiator referred to me as their desire to be a regulatory hegemon. “We are a regulatory hegemon”, he said, “and we intend to remain so in our area”. They try to impose it on Switzerland and they would like to impose it on us. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, is a fanatical enthusiast for international law and hates any breach of it, except when the EU is in breach, as it is on multiple occasions on this very issue of sanitary and phytosanitary measures, and has been found to be so by the WTO. I am sure he will welcome the fact that we have this agreement and will do his best to persuade the EU to live up to the agreement it has already entered into, rather than request we make further concessions for it to agree to something it has already agreed to. I do not fully understand the Government’s position on these specific measures. I look to the Minister to illuminate them and explain them to me; I may well have not understood them. They seem to relate to two bugs or diseases. The first is Heterobasidion irregulare; I am sure noble Lords are thoroughly familiar with it. The impact of the controls will be that: “Host material imported into Great Britain from EU Member States, other than any EU Member State where Heterobasidion irregulare is known not to occur … will need to be free from this pest and compliant with the additional import requirements. This pest will also be subject to increased awareness raising, surveillance and action on detection within Great Britain to protect biosecurity”. Is Ireland free from this bug? If it is, why do we need any checks?