Lord Dodds of Duncairn (DUP)

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the regulations. Once again, we are debating regulations which may appear on the surface to be technical and limited in scope, but, as we know, such regulations raise issues of real constitutional and democratic significance and importance. No one here tonight is going to argue against high standards of plant health or biosecurity. Of course we need effective protection against pests and disease, and Northern Ireland farmers and growers deserve robust safeguards. The question is not whether we should have these high standards; it is who decides those standards and what they should be. In a democracy, the answer should be straightforward. The laws applying to citizens of the United Kingdom should be made by legislators people elect and can remove. Yet here we are passing regulations because, as the Explanatory Memorandum says, they are necessary to implement obligations arising under the Windsor Framework and to reflect EU legislation which continues to apply to Northern Ireland. Such legislation is not made here at Westminster, nor at Stormont by the Northern Ireland Assembly, yet UK businesses and UK citizens in Northern Ireland are required to obey it. Parliament is being asked to amend domestic law as a consequence of a regulatory regime imposed on part of the United Kingdom by the European Union. These regulations permit the authorities to enforce laws. That is what these regulations give: the power of enforcement. They do not actually set the laws people are having to abide by in Northern Ireland. That has already been decided. It has been decided by the European Union and imposed on Northern Ireland. So tonight, whatever noble Lords’ views are on the merits of the issues before us in these regulations, we cannot debate those. That has already been decided. We are debating the enforcement mechanisms. That is the constitutional reality that Ministers and others continually try to avoid with words such as “technical”, “pragmatic” and “necessary”. When you look at some of the wording of the regulations, you can see that these are not mere technical tidy-ups of wording, updating the statute book in some small way. I refer to some of the clauses in the regulations. New paragraph (4C) in the Forest Reproductive Material Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2002 states: “A reference to a member State is to be read as if Northern Ireland were a member State of the European Union”. New paragraph (1A) in the Plant Health (Official Controls and Miscellaneous Provisions) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2020 says that “(a) any reference to a member State is to be read as if Northern Ireland were a member State of the European Union (b) any reference to the Union or Union territory”— that is, European Union territory— “is to be read so as to include Northern Ireland”. These are hardly technical changes. They are not small matters. Instead of removing the regulatory border within our country, government policy amounts to managing that border by accommodating the EU rules that created the need for it in the first place. It is an acceptance and entrenchment of the problem, not a solution to the problem. We hear much about protecting the Northern Ireland internal market, and we have heard it again tonight. In a genuine internal market, goods move freely from one part of the country to another without an international customs border—without the special schemes we have in Northern Ireland, with their crushing bureaucracy, enormous costs and compliance requirements that are having a chilling effect on companies doing business with Northern Ireland consumers and, in some cases, banning it altogether. The problem with the way in which the Windsor Framework is discussed by the Government and others who support it is that each individual regulation is presented as some small technical measure. Each individual change is said to be limited in scope and not burdensome; but, taken together as part of the Windsor Framework in their totality, they amount to something constitutionally enormous: the subjection of Northern Ireland to laws made by an authority outside the United Kingdom and the creation of barriers to trade between one part of our country and another. As the Minister has just tried to explain, the Government are not even bothering about public consultation any more. They say it is unnecessary. If legislation affecting England, Scotland or Wales were being amended because laws made by a foreign legislature continued automatically to apply in certain respects, would Ministers really regard consultation as an unnecessary formality? The absence of consultation is particularly striking because these regulations concern enforcement. The Government are not simply tidying up references in legislation. They are assuring that the requirements flowing from the EU regime can be effectively enforced in part of the United Kingdom. Surely that deserves proper scrutiny and engagement with those who will be affected in Northern Ireland. The absence of a full impact assessment is similarly concerning. A key assessment should be what the cumulative impact is of all these arrangements on trade within the United Kingdom. The reality is that the Windsor Framework, of which this is part, fundamentally alters Northern Ireland’s constitutional position without the cross-community consent that has been the foundation of political stability in Northern Ireland for decades. It is simply nonsense to say that the only choices are the present arrangements or some kind of hard border on the island of Ireland. That has been comprehensively debunked and shown to be false. The Government need to be working towards fundamental solutions to the problem, rather than continuing to legislate to administer the consequences of the protocol and to entrench it even further. For those reasons, I beg to move.