I will try to be brief, Mr Deputy Speaker, but you will appreciate that there is a lot the DUP would like to say today in very limited time. The regulations we are debating, known to many as the Stormont brake, touch on many important legal and political matters.
At the outset, I thank the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State and others for their continued engagement with my party and for the efforts they have made. Although at this stage we may differ in our views on the Windsor framework, I am not here to question the motivation of Ministers in seeking to make improvements, but they must—and, I hope, will—continue to work with us and others to get the further improvements that we need to enable the restoration of devolved government in Northern Ireland.
To be clear, I want to see the restoration of devolved government in Northern Ireland. My party is a party of devolution; we believe that delivering effective government for our people is the best way forward, working alongside this House and this Parliament. That is where we want to get to, but we have to get it right.
I echo the comments of the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) about the rush to bring this statutory instrument forward. I have written to the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments expressing my concern that we have not had adequate time for scrutiny of the instrument. The Government have indicated that we are not dealing just with the SI before us, but that this is also an indicative vote on the Windsor framework itself. It is therefore important that I reflect not just on what the Stormont brake does, but on where it fits in to the wider Windsor framework.
Fundamentally, for us the problem with the Northern Ireland protocol is the continued application of EU law in Northern Ireland in circumstances in which it covers all manufacturing of goods in Northern Ireland, regardless of whether those goods are being sold in the United Kingdom or to the European Union. I repeat the statistics that I quoted earlier at Northern Ireland questions: of all goods manufactured in Northern Ireland, the vast majority—some £65 billion out of £77 billion of goods manufactured—are sold in the United Kingdom. The solution must be proportionate to the difficulty, and the difficulty is the EU’s desire to protect its single market and to maintain an open border on the island of Ireland. But the price for that cannot be that Northern Ireland businesses manufacturing goods for sale in the United Kingdom are inhibited in many ways from trading within their own market.
I say to the Secretary of State, in relation to the Windsor framework, that although improvements have undoubtedly been made, we have not yet fully addressed the fundamental problem of the continued application of EU law for the manufacturing of all goods in Northern Ireland. We believe that the real solution here is similar to that proposed in the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which was that, where goods are being sold in and staying in the United Kingdom, United Kingdom law and standards apply, and where goods are being manufactured by Northern Ireland businesses for sale in the Republic of Ireland or any other EU member state, EU rules apply. That is the solution that we are looking for. The Windsor framework does not deliver that solution.