Baroness Randerson (LD)

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his detailed introduction. There is a long background of negotiations on this legislation. The Explanatory Memorandum says that this SI “will in effect maintain the status quo”— that status quo was very hard fought in the days after the Brexit referendum. We have spent many hours in this Room debating the fallout from the detail of that situation. Paragraph 5.4 of the Explanatory Memorandum says that the instrument will “update the UK’s domestic … legislation by removing assimilated EU legislation” on road passenger transport. Of course, UK bus and coach operators will continue to operate within the context of the framework of EU and international legislation generally. As the Minister said, there are three types of commercial bus and coach services: the occasional, the regular and the special regular services carrying specified categories of passengers, such as pupils. It is good news that there is now a right for bus and coach operators to transport passengers through the EU to Moldova and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Are new signatories to the agreement likely to come on stream in future? This is a fairly limited market as it stands. The key change in this SI relates to cabotage—the carrying of passengers in the UK by foreign-based operators. Paragraph 5.10 of the EM explains that international operators participating in the UK “are currently permitted to undertake cabotage” under assimilated EU law. This right is being removed. My second question is: how many services, roughly, are affected by this? How common is the operation of cabotage by EU operators? I assume that the answer is that it is not very common, because one thing that slightly surprised me was the fact that there was no consultation on this SI. I declare my interest as a member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Is this an important new right, or is it a marginal benefit? As always, it is in Northern Ireland that the really intractable questions arise, following the Brexit vote and its implications. I am pleased that Northern Ireland operators will be able to operate cabotage within the island of Ireland, and vice versa. That is the only logical thing to do. I recall that, a few years ago, when I was a member of the EU sub-committee, we took evidence from a bus operator—although not in relation to this specific issue, of course. The bus operator said that his scheduled service crossed the border 13 times from one end to the other. The proposal at the time, from some enthusiastic Brexiteers, was that Britain should flex its muscles post Brexit by changing our clocks in the spring and the autumn on a different day from the EU. Businesses in Northern Ireland, and indeed in the Republic of Ireland, were very exercised by the practical issues, and the bus operator pointed out how impossible his timetable would become if we operated in a different way with time zones. This is possibly not an SI of the greatest significance, but it is nevertheless one to be welcomed because of the common-sense approach in relation to Northern Ireland and the fact that British operators will now be in the same commercial position as EU operators for cabotage.