My Lords, this is a very interesting debate to join. It is a pleasure to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, to his place, as it were, once again defending an extremely complex and difficult piece of legislation. I hope he will give pretty comprehensive answers to the points raised by my noble friend Lord Rooker, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, and the noble Lords, Lord Purvis and Lord Inglewood, because they all had great merit.
I spoke at Second Reading but was not able to attend the first day of Committee because of commitments in Cumbria. In all the furore about the unconstitutional and completely unacceptable clauses of the Bill, the Government have got away with the rest of it, which may not be unconstitutional but is certainly unacceptable. Therefore, this House should expose it to very critical scrutiny.
We need clarification—this is where my noble friend Lady Hayter’s amendment is so important—in very simple and clear language of what the Government mean by mutual recognition and how this will work out. The idea of mutual recognition was an important foundational principle in the history of the European Union and the single market, but only because mutual recognition without anything else is a weapon that results in a race to the bottom. In the single market White Paper put forward by Jacques Delors in the early 1980s, the whole point was that you had to have common standards and harmonisation in a list of certain areas—I think there were 300—to go alongside the principle of mutual recognition.
I have two points to make on this. First, on the position of the devolved authorities and the nations of Britain, do the Government recognise that an essential principle of devolution is that diversity and experimentation are good things, and that it is therefore important that in a devolved settlement the devolved nations should be able to experiment with setting standards in the areas of public health, environment and consumers? This is part of the point of devolution. It is not something the UK Government should seek to prevent. It is very important that the Government make clear their support for the principle of devolution and diversity.
My second general point is the one to which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, drew attention in his support for my noble friend Lady Hayter’s probing amendment: why do the Government include in their
general principle this business of goods being imported into the United Kingdom? Does this essentially tell the devolved Administrations that, in any trade agreement that the UK Government negotiate, they will have no say over the standard of goods coming into the UK and would have to accept them whatever they thought about their compatibility with their own aspirations to set standards? That seems to me a fundamental point that needs an answer. This legislation is deeply complex, but we need clarity from the Government on fundamental points.