UK Parliament / Open data

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

My Lords, I will be slightly less cynical than the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, on the subject of impact assessments. I will speak to Amendment 22 in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Lennie, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and my noble friend Lord Kerslake. I will take a less cynical view about impact assessments.

For the historical record, it might interest noble Lords to know that when we were negotiating our

accession to the European Union, the first thing that we tabled in Brussels was an impact assessment of the European budget on the United Kingdom, which of course had not been part of the European budget until then. It was a very long way different from the one tabled by the Commission in return, but we were actually right. The consequence of being right was a very long negotiation in the 1980s under Baroness Thatcher that resulted in the rebate system. My point is that when we were negotiating with the European Union from the outside, we had no hesitation whatever about producing an impact assessment— and thank heavens we did. Otherwise, we would not have got the commitment from the European Union that if things went as we predicted rather than as it predicted, it would adjust the budgetary burden, which eventually it did.

I want to look forward now and not backwards, because this seems quite odd. We are now a little over eight months from the referendum and it defies belief that the Minister and his colleagues have not conducted impact assessments by now. If not, I am not at all sure what they have been doing—but since I know that he is an extremely hard-working person I can assume that they have in fact quite a lot of impact assessments but are not sharing them with anyone else. It was rather odd, when the Prime Minister spoke at Lancaster House, and even odder when a White Paper was published, that there was not a single blooming figure in either of those two documents—not one. That was a trifle odd. It is not what the Government normally do. It is even odder if they do have impact assessments; it could be that they are so awful that they do not want to tell anyone about them. That also would not be hugely comforting.

I would like to play the game by the Minister’s rules. He has argued several times that to publish impact assessments would be to give the game away and give the people with whom we are negotiating some deadly secrets that they would be unable to get from anyone else. Okay, let us play the game by those rules. In that case, there are two impact assessments that could be published which would not have the slightest possibility of doing damage to us. The first is an assessment of where we would be in terms of our economy if we stayed in the European Union. That is not difficult to do, because the previous Government did it. If he looks at the papers that were published last March he will find it all there.

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The second one—this is the other bookend—the Government could perfectly easily publish the impact assessment of the effect of crashing out without an agreement and applying World Trade Organization tariffs, non-tariff obstacles and all that. Why would that be easy? Because we are doing it already. Those are the rules that we apply to third countries now. Those are the rules which, if we crash out, we will have to apply to our markets in the European Union—and vice versa. So that could be published, and it would not be giving away any secrets: it would simply tell us what the two bookends are. Bookend one is the impact assessment of staying in the European Union; bookend

two is the worst possible scenario, namely that we crash out and apply World Trade Organization rules.

I am coming to the end of my remarks. I would like the Minister to say why the Government cannot publish those two bookends, because if we have them we will be able to judge what the Government are negotiating between the two—and I do not think the Minister will deny that they are negotiating somewhere in between those bookends. Somewhere in the middle there is a mysterious thing called a bespoke agreement. If I remember rightly, bespoke suits take longer to make and cost twice as much—but let us leave that to one side. It will be somewhere in the middle, and when we get it we will be able to judge whether it is near one bookend or the other—so why not do it?

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
779 cc678-680 
Session
2016-17
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
Subjects
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