I heard your positive assent, Dame Eleanor, when the shadow Secretary of State sat down, and you were rather impressed when the usual channels inquired of us how long we would take and we indicated that we would be brief. We were asked whether we would be about 20 minutes, and I aim to please, Dame Eleanor.
I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for North Down (Stephen Farry), who in many ways makes a great argument, but not, I think, the one he intended to make. What he outlined highlights starkly not just the practical application of state aid policy, subsidy policy and VAT policy, but the interface between that practical
application and the constitutionally injurious position that we are left in because of the protocol. Whether the differential between VAT on solar panels and renewables was £1 million or £100 billion, the issue is not the scale of the sum; it is why this sovereign Parliament is constrained in setting VAT rules for the nation. That is the nub of it. People say that there is no constitutional harm with the protocol, and when we highlight the constitutional damage that has been done, they rubbish it and wish it away, but here is the outworking of that; one part of our country is unable to benefit from VAT rates set nationally by this Parliament.
The fact that there are two probing—and, I respectfully suggest, rather superficial—amendments before us from across the political spectrum highlights that not only is there a problem with VAT rates, subsidies and state aid under the protocol, but that a resolution is required. Why should we have to negotiate that agreed solution or outcome? It is because we have ceded sovereignty in a way that constitutionally impinges on article 6 of the Acts of Union. That is why we are in this position. If that had not been impliedly repealed, as the Government lawyers state in our High Court in Belfast, we would not have these challenges.
The Joint Committee has summarily failed in many aspects of what it was tasked to do under the Northern Ireland protocol. It did not designate anywhere near enough goods as goods that could come from GB to Northern Ireland without risk of onward transit into the single market. We raised the issue of the VAT margin on the sale of second-hand cars, for example, for which there should have been a quick fix, but there was not. Whereas a second-hand car salesman in England pays VAT only on the profit from the sale of the car, in Northern Ireland they have to pay VAT on the entirety of the sale. Why? Because of the Northern Ireland protocol. The solution is very simple, but it took months and months of painstaking negotiation, and that is but one example from scores of issues that pervade industry and business in Northern Ireland.
That was the VAT margins; then there are the importation tariffs that our businesses in Northern Ireland had to pay in importing steel, a raw product, from GB to Northern Ireland. There should not be any tariffs at all within our own country. That highlights the practical application of the constitutional harm. Again, it took month upon month of painstaking work to get agreement through the Joint Committee, but when we were on the cusp of agreeing a solution for steel, I said, “Hang on a second. I have an aircraft manufacturer in Belfast East that uses aluminium. What about tariffs on aluminium?” It remains the case that a tariff is applied to any aluminium, a raw product, coming from GB to Northern Ireland, and a further tariff is applied to anything fabricated in Northern Ireland as a result of that raw product going back to GB for further integration—a tariff on the movement of a material from one part of our country to another, and back again.