Before I begin, I know the whole House will join me in paying tribute to Betty Boothroyd, who passed away yesterday. She was a remarkable woman who commanded huge admiration and respect as the first female Speaker of this House. She was as firm as she was fair and she presided over many historic moments in this House, among them the debates on the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. Her passion, wit and immeasurable contribution to our democracy will never be forgotten.
Mr Speaker, let us also send our very best wishes to Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell and his family. He is a man of immense courage, who both on and off duty has devoted himself to the service of others. This House stands united with the people and leaders of all communities across Northern Ireland in condemning those who are trying to drag us back to the past. They will never succeed.
With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the Northern Ireland protocol. After weeks of negotiations, today we have made a decisive breakthrough. The Windsor framework delivers free-flowing trade within the whole United Kingdom. It protects Northern Ireland’s place in our Union and it safeguards sovereignty for the people of Northern Ireland. By achieving all this, it preserves the delicate balance inherent in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. It does what many said could not be done: removing thousands of pages of EU laws and making permanent, legally binding changes to the protocol treaty itself. That is the breakthrough we have made. Those are the changes we will deliver. Now is the time to move forward as one United Kingdom.
Before I turn to the details, let us remind ourselves why this matters. It matters because at the heart of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and the reason it has endured for a quarter of a century is equal respect for the aspirations and identities of all communities, and all its three strands. But the Northern Ireland protocol has undermined that balance. How can we say the protocol protects the Belfast/Good Friday agreement when it has caused the institutions of that agreement to collapse? So, in line with our legal responsibilities, we are acting today to preserve the balance of that agreement and chart a new way forward for Northern Ireland.
I pay tribute to: our European friends for recognising the need for change, particularly President Von der Leyen; my predecessors for laying the groundwork for today’s agreement; and my right hon. Friends the Foreign Secretary and the Northern Ireland Secretary for their perseverance in finally persuading the EU to do what it spent years refusing to do: to rewrite the treaty and replace it with a radical, legally binding new framework.
Today’s agreement has three equally important objectives: first, allowing trade to flow freely within our UK internal market; secondly, protecting Northern Ireland’s place in our Union; and thirdly, safeguarding sovereignty and closing the democratic deficit. Let me take each, in turn.
Core to the problems with the protocol was that it treated goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland as if they were crossing an international customs border. This created extra costs and paperwork for businesses, who had to fill out complex customs declarations.
It limited choice for the people of Northern Ireland and it undermined the UK internal market—a matter of identity, as well as economics. Today’s agreement removes any sense of a border in the Irish sea and ensures the free flow of trade within the UK.
We have secured a key negotiating objective: the introduction of a new green lane for goods destined for Northern Ireland, with a separate red lane for those going to the EU. Within the green lane, burdensome customs bureaucracy will be scrapped and replaced with data sharing of ordinary, existing commercial information. Routine checks and tests will also be scrapped. The only checks will be those required to stop smugglers and criminals. Our new green lane will be open to a broad, comprehensive range of businesses across the UK. I am pleased to say that we have also permanently protected tariff-free movement of all types of steel into Northern Ireland. For goods going the other way, from Northern Ireland to Great Britain, we have scrapped export declarations; delivering, finally, completely unfettered trade. The commitment to establish the green lane is achieved by a legally binding amendment to the text of the treaty itself. This is fundamental, far-reaching change and it permanently removes the border in the Irish sea.
Perhaps the single most important area of trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland is food. Three quarters of the food in Northern Ireland’s supermarkets comes from the rest of the UK, yet the protocol applied the same burdens on shipments from Cairnryan to Larne as between Holyhead and Dublin. If it was implemented in full we would see supermarket lorries needing hundreds of certificates for every individual item, every single document checked and supermarket staples like sausages banned altogether. More delays. More cost. Less choice. Today’s agreement fixes all this with a new, permanent, legally binding approach to food. We will expand the green lane to food retailers, and not just supermarkets but wholesalers and hospitality, too. Instead of hundreds of certificates, lorries will make one simple, digital declaration to confirm that goods will remain in Northern Ireland. Visual inspections will be cut from 100% now to just 5%. Physical checks and tests will be scrapped, unless we suspect fraud, smuggling or disease, so there will be no need for vets in warehouses.
Of course, to deliver this we need to reassure the EU that food imports will not be taken into Ireland, so we will ask retailers to mark a small number of particularly high risk food products as “not for EU”, with a phased roll-out of this requirement to give them time to adjust. More fundamentally, we have delivered a form of dual regulation for food, the single biggest sector by far for east-west trade and one of the most important in people’s lives. Under the protocol, retail food products made to UK standards could not be sold in Northern Ireland. Today’s agreement completely changes that. This means the ban on British products like sausages entering Northern Ireland has now been scrapped. If it is available on supermarket shelves in Great Britain, then it will be available on supermarket shelves in Northern Ireland. We still need to make sure that goods moved into Northern Ireland do not risk bringing in animal and plant diseases, but that is clearly a common sense measure, never opposed by anyone, to prevent diseases circulating within the long-standing single epidemiological zone on the island of Ireland.
That brings me to the treatment of parcels. If the protocol was fully implemented, every single parcel travelling between Great Britain and Northern Ireland would be subject to full international customs. You would have needed a long, complex form to send every single parcel, even a birthday present for a niece or nephew, and you could only have shopped online from retailers willing to deal with all that bureaucracy, with some already pulling out of Northern Ireland. Today’s agreement fixes all of this. It achieves something we have never achieved before: removing requirements of the EU customs code for people sending and receiving parcels. Families can, rightly, send packages to each other without filling in forms, online retailers can serve customers in Northern Ireland as they did before, and businesses can ship parcels through the green lane—all underpinned by data sharing by parcel operators, with a phased roll-out and time for them to adjust.
No burdensome customs bureaucracy. No routine checks. Bans on food products: scrapped. Steel tariff rate quotas: fixed. Tariff reimbursement scheme: approved. Vet inspections: gone. Export declarations: gone. Parcels paperwork: gone. We have delivered what the people of Northern Ireland asked for and the Command Paper promised—we have removed the border in the Irish sea.
To preserve the balance of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, we also need to protect Northern Ireland’s place in our Union. The Windsor framework is about making sure that Northern Ireland gets the full benefit of being part of the United Kingdom in every respect. Under the protocol, in too many ways that simply was not the case. Take tax. When I was Chancellor, it frustrated me that when I cut VAT on solar panels or beer duty in pubs, those tax cuts did not apply in Northern Ireland. We have amended the legal text of the treaty so that critical VAT and excise changes will apply to the whole of the United Kingdom. That means zero rates of VAT on energy-saving materials will now apply in Northern Ireland. Reforms to alcohol duty to cut the cost of a pint in pubs will now apply in Northern Ireland. Because we now have control over VAT policy, we can make sure that the EU’s plan to reduce the VAT threshold by £10,000 will not apply in Northern Ireland, nor will the SME VAT directive that would have brought huge amounts of EU red tape for small businesses.
We are also making subsidy control provisions work as intended. Already, just 2% of subsidy measures in Northern Ireland fall within the scope of the EU approvals under the protocol. Nevertheless, today’s agreement goes further, addressing the so-called reach-back of EU state aid law by imposing stringent new tests. For the EU to argue that we are in breach of its rules, it would now have to demonstrate that there is a real, genuine and material impact on Northern Ireland’s trade with the EU. That is a much higher threshold than in the protocol, limiting disputes to what the 2021 Command Paper called
“subsidies on a significant scale relating directly to Northern Ireland”.
We have also protected the special status of agriculture and fisheries subsidies in Northern Ireland, which will be completely outside the EU’s common agricultural policy. All that means that the problem of reach-back is fixed.
As well as tax and spend, the UK Government have a responsibility to protect the supply of medicines to all its citizens, but our ability to do that was constrained by
the protocol. The biggest problem is that drugs approved for use by the UK’s medicines regulator are not automatically available in Northern Ireland. Imagine someone suffering with cancer in Belfast seeing a potentially life-changing new drug available everywhere else in the UK, but unable to access it at home. When the current grace period ends in 2024, the situation will get worse still: expensive and burdensome checks on all medicines; companies having to manufacture drugs with two completely different labels and supply chains; and pharmacies needing to check every package with complex scanners.
When 80% of Northern Ireland’s medicines come from Great Britain, those frictions pose a serious risk to the supply of medicines to the people of Northern Ireland. To fix that, today’s agreement achieves something unprecedented: it provides dual regulation for medicines. The UK’s regulator will approve all drugs for the whole UK market, including Northern Ireland, with no role for the European Medicines Agency. That fully protects the supply of medicines from Great Britain into Northern Ireland, and once again asserts the primacy of UK regulation. The same medicines, in the same packs, with the same labels, will be available in every pharmacy and hospital in the United Kingdom. Crucially, dual regulation means that Northern Ireland’s world-leading healthcare industry, which brings much-needed jobs and investment, can still trade with both the EU and UK markets. This is a landmark deal for patients in Northern Ireland. It is a permanent solution that brings peace of mind.
The protocol banned quintessentially British products going to Northern Ireland. When people wanted to import oak trees to mark Her late Majesty’s platinum jubilee, the protocol stood in their way. It suspended the historic trade in seed potatoes between Scotland and Northern Ireland. If implemented, it would create massive costs and bureaucracy for people travelling around the UK with their pets, disrupting family life and our family of nations. That is why today’s agreement will lift the ban on shrubs, plants and trees going to Northern Ireland. It will lift the ban on the movement of seed potatoes—particularly important for Scottish businesses. We will deliver that by expanding the existing UK plant passport scheme.
When it comes to pets, we have made sure that people from Northern Ireland will have completely free access to travel to Great Britain. A pet owner travelling from Great Britain to Northern Ireland just needs to make sure that their pet is microchipped and then they will simply need to tick a box when booking their travel. Whether it is lower VAT rates, lower beer duty, jubilee oaks in garden centres, seamless travel with pets, seamless trade in seed potatoes or the seamless supply of cutting-edge medicines, all that is now available for everyone, everywhere in the United Kingdom.
The Windsor framework goes further still, by safeguarding sovereignty for the people of Northern Ireland and eliminating the democratic deficit. Fundamentally, the protocol meant that the EU could impose new laws on the people of Northern Ireland without their having a say. Some Members of this House, whose voices I deeply respect, say that EU laws should have no role whatsoever in Northern Ireland. I understand that view and I am sympathetic to it, but for as long as the people of Northern Ireland continue to support their businesses having privileged access to the EU market, and if we
want to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland—as we all do—there will be some role for EU law. The question is: what is the absolute minimum amount necessary to avoid a hard border?
Today’s agreement scraps 1,700 pages of EU law. The amount of EU law that applies in Northern Ireland is less than 3%, and the people of Northern Ireland retain the right to reject that 3% through next year’s consent vote. However, that consent vote is about the whole protocol so it cannot, by its nature, provide oversight of individual new laws. It does not address the No. 1 challenge to sovereignty made by the protocol: the EU’s ability to impose new or amended goods laws on Northern Ireland without its having a say. To address that, today’s agreement introduces a new Stormont brake.
The Stormont brake does more than just give Northern Ireland a say over new EU laws; it means that it can block them. How will that work? The democratically elected Assembly can oppose new EU goods rules that would have significant and lasting effects on their everyday lives. It will do so on the same basis as the petition of concern mechanism in the Good Friday agreement, needing the support of 30 Members from at least two parties. If that happens, the UK Government will have a veto. We will work with the Northern Ireland Assembly and all parties to codify how the UK Government will use that veto.
Let me tell the House the full significance of that breakthrough. The Stormont brake gives the institutions of the Good Friday agreement a powerful new safeguard. It means that the United Kingdom can veto new EU laws if they are not supported by both communities in Northern Ireland. Yes, it is true that until now the EU had refused to consider treaty change; we were told that it was impossible, and that EU negotiators would never consider it. The Stormont brake has been introduced by fundamentally rewriting the treaty—specifically, the provisions relating to dynamic alignment. That is a permanent change and it ends the automatic ratchet of EU law. If the veto is used, the European courts can never overturn our decision.
The EU has also explicitly accepted an important principle in the political declaration. It is there in black and white that the treaty is subject to the Vienna convention. This means that, unequivocally, the legal basis for the Windsor framework is in international law. I would like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) for his support in negotiating this point. It puts it beyond all doubt that we have now taken back control.
From the very start, we have listened closely and carefully to views on all sides of this debate. I am grateful to many Members of this House, the communities of Northern Ireland and the voices of business and civil society for putting forward their suggestions. I want particularly to thank the Northern Ireland business groups that I have spoken to. I hope in today’s agreement they recognise that we have addressed their concerns. We are delivering stability, certainty, simplicity, affordability and clarity, as well as strengthened representation for the businesses of Northern Ireland.
I also want to speak directly to the Unionist community. I understand and have listened to your frustrations and concerns, and I would not be standing here today if I did not believe that today’s agreement marks a turning point for the people of Northern Ireland. It is clearly in
the interests of the people, and those of us who are passionate about the cause of Unionism, for power sharing to return.
Of course, parties will want to consider the agreement in detail, a process that will need time and care. There are, of course, many voices and perspectives within Northern Ireland, and it is the job of Government to respect them all, but I have kept the concerns raised by the elected representatives of Unionism at the forefront of my mind, because it is their concerns with the protocol that have been so pronounced.
What I can say is this: our goal has been to ensure the economic rights of the people of Northern Ireland under the Act of Union and the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, placing them on an equal footing with the rest of the UK with respect to tax, trade and the availability of goods. We have worked to end the prospect of trade diversion, removed any sense of a border for UK internal trade, removed routine customs or checks for goods destined for Northern Ireland, removed thousands of pages of existing EU law and introduced a UK veto on dynamic alignment, through the Stormont brake. We have created a form of dual regulation where it works and is needed the most, in sectors like medicines and food retail. We have delivered unfettered access to the whole UK market for Northern Ireland’s businesses, and we will take further steps to avoid regulatory divergence in future. We have secured a clear EU commitment and process to manage future changes with a special goods body.
All of this means that Northern Ireland’s businesses have continued access to the EU market, as they requested. It means that we have protected the letter and the spirit of Northern Ireland’s constitutional guarantee in the Belfast agreement, with the Stormont brake creating an effective cross-community safeguard. There are two distinct economies on the island of Ireland, and that will remain the case. Today’s agreement puts it beyond all doubt that Northern Ireland’s place in the internal market and the United Kingdom is fully restored.
I want to conclude by directly addressing the question of the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill. As I and my predecessors always said, the Bill was only ever meant to be a last resort, meant for a world where we could not get negotiations going. As the Government said at the time of its introduction, our
“clear preference remains a negotiated solution”.
Now that we have persuaded the EU to rewrite fundamentally the treaty text of the protocol, we have a new and better option. The Windsor framework delivers a decisively better outcome than the Bill, achieving what people said could not be done and what the Bill does not offer. It permanently removes any sense of a border in the Irish sea. It gives us control over dynamic alignment, through the Stormont brake, beyond what the Bill promised. The Bill did not change a thing in international law, keeping the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and leaving us open to months—maybe years—of uncertainty, disruption and legal challenge. Today’s agreement makes binding legal changes to the treaty itself and is explicitly based on international law. Unlike the Bill, it is an agreement that provides certainty
and stability and, crucially, can start delivering benefits almost immediately for the people and businesses of Northern Ireland.
Of course, the House would expect to be informed of the Government’s updated legal position on whether there is a lawful basis to proceed with the Bill, so I am publishing it today. It says that because we have achieved a new negotiated agreement, which preserves the balance of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, the original and sound legal justification for the Bill has now fallen away. In other words, neither do we need the Bill nor do we have a credible basis to pursue it. We will therefore no longer proceed with the Bill, and the EU will no longer proceed with its legal actions against the UK. Instead, we will pursue the certainty of a new way forward with the Windsor framework.
Let me just remind the House of the full breadth and significance of what we have achieved today. We have achieved free-flowing trade, with a green lane for goods, no burdensome customs bureaucracy, no routine checks on trade, no paperwork whatsoever for Northern Irish goods moving into Great Britain and no border in the Irish sea. We have protected Northern Ireland’s place in the Union, with state aid reach-back fixed, the same tax rules applying everywhere, vet certificates for food lorries gone, the ban on British sausages gone, parcel paperwork gone, pet paperwork gone, garden centres now selling the same trees, supermarkets selling the same food and pharmacies selling the same medicines. We have safeguarded sovereignty for the people of Northern Ireland, with the democratic deficit closed, the Vienna convention confirmed and thousands of pages of EU law scrapped. With the Stormont brake, we have safeguarded democracy and sovereignty for the people of Northern Ireland.
That is the choice before us, Mr Speaker. Let us seize the opportunity of this moment—the certainty of an agreement that fixes the problems we face, commands broad support and consensus and offers us, at last, the freedom to move forward together. That is what the people of Northern Ireland deserve; that is what the Windsor framework delivers. As a Conservative, a Brexiteer and a Unionist, I believe passionately, with my head and my heart, that this is the right way forward—right for Northern Ireland, right for our United Kingdom. I commend it to this House.