My Lords, I support Amendment 60 in my noble friend’s name, and I will speak to Amendments 65,66 and 67 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Fox. This is a very short debate which in many respects reinforces points made in other groups, but it can be divided into two areas: first, the necessity of avoiding, where at all possible, using secondary legislation to amend primary legislation, as the previous group have indicated; and, secondly, to have an argument about pausing not just the Bill but the implementation of an Act before the Government have their policy ducks in a row.
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The second point relates to Amendments 65, 66, and 67. Part of the Government’s intent with this legislation is to have an alternative framework to the one that we have left by virtue of membership of the European Union single market. It is inevitable that we will need some form of arrangement with the European countries that are our biggest service sector trading partners. It may not be depressing to everybody but it is depressing to me that the Government’s assumption on this Bill is using the Home Office modelling that there will be a 70% reduction in the number of applications from EEA citizens seeking mutual recognition of their qualification to provide a service within the UK. On the second day of Committee I indicated the statistics that need not be repeated about how this is to the disbenefit of the United Kingdom—but the Government are on this journey. Part of the route for this will be to offset the shortages in labour and the increases in demand for services that the Government themselves are forecasting are inevitable.
However, we do not know yet how the Government will calculate demand, only that they have said that they will take a number of factors into consideration. We do not yet know, as we have demonstrated today in Committee, how many of the regulators will be asked to reduce fees, shorten timeframes, or change their application processes for those outwith Europe. The Government have indicated that they will not publish any draft regulations, and we have yet to see clarity on what those regulations might look like. Also, when it comes to non-European countries, the Government have not indicated how they intend to use this Bill vis-à-vis international trading agreements. As my noble friend Lady Randerson and the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, indicated, there are now inevitabilities that we will be asked to implement new mutual recognition provisions within trading agreements. Australia has been referred to.
I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, who is not responding to this debate, knows that I respect him greatly. I hope that he also knows that it is fairly futile to ask me not to ask questions of him about letters that he writes to me, and that it is not premature to ask questions about documents that are sent to me by his office. I will scrutinise them. Agreements in principle are very significant documents; they are inked international agreements and I will continue to scrutinise them.
As my noble friend Lady Randerson rightly indicated, there are professional qualifications chapters within the Australia trade agreement, and they are worth scrutiny—but proper scrutiny. Scrutiny and accountability do not come simply with a piece of secondary legislation. Yes, we may pray against and annul it—although that is exceptionally rare in this House, as we all know. In fact, I think it is the position of the Official Opposition that they will never seek to do that. Therefore, that is not necessarily a useful tool, and if they are not accompanied by full consultation and do not go through stages where they can be amended, this is a very much lower standard than what was promised by the Secretary of State, Dr Fox, when he told the House of Commons that the Government would
“bring forward a bespoke piece of primary legislation when required for each new future trade agreement that requires changes to legislation and where there are no existing powers.”—[Official Report, Commons, 16/7/18; col. 42.]
That is different from saying, “If the Government need to”. Dr Fox was categorical; now we have equivocation.
That leads on to my second point: what are our future trading policies going to be when it comes to professional qualifications and trade agreements? The Government’s impact assessment gives the impression that it is to our advantage that we have to negotiate separately with the 27 countries for mutual recognition agreements. At the same time the Government have agreed a multicountry agreement with Norway and others, and now they want to have within CPTPP an 11-country-wide agreement. So what is the Government’s approach? Do they support multilateral mutual qualification frameworks or do they want bilateral country-to-country agreements?
The Government have not published either a skills framework or a skills strategy that would be the basis on which we looked at demand. The amendments would give the Government an opportunity within a year, if the Bill goes through, to publish such statements, policy and strategy. At that point we would be able to implement the legislation with a much clearer idea of what the regulations would include, and of course who they would impact.