I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. The point that he mentions in paragraph 71, the issue of engagement of the Northern Ireland institutions in this process, is one of the most sensitive of all and I do not think it would have been right for us to set out a specific way forward in the Command Paper.
The difficulty we have is the lack of democratic consent for specific measures as they come through from the EU’s law-making process. At the moment those are imposed without consent. We are proposing a reordering of the governance arrangements of the protocol so that the consent, if it exists in Northern Ireland for such measures, can be more real, meaningful and based on genuine debate. There are a number of ways of achieving that if the EU wants to go down that road and that is a pre-eminently political question for people in Northern Ireland, as well as one for the UK Government. That is why we have set out the issue without proposing a specific way forward, but it is very much an issue for discussion.
We want to proceed by negotiation and that is part of it. I want to be clear about what is possible for us in doing so. First, the Command Paper sets out how the tests for Article 16 are, in our view, met. I urge the European Union to take that judgment seriously. It would be making a significant mistake if it thought we were not ready to use Article 16 safeguards if that were the only apparent way forward to deal with the situation in front of us. As my noble friend Lord Hannan commented, there is ample justification for doing so.
Secondly, if we are to avoid this situation there needs to be real negotiation between us and the European Union. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, correctly referred to the need for an atmosphere of co-operation and trust. Others, such as the noble Baronesses, Lady Suttie and Lady Chapman, and the noble Lord, Lord Empey, echoed that. The question of trust has come up a lot in these discussions. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, asked for assurances that the time we have before us would be used constructively and the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, asked for an assessment of progress on that negotiation. We have had several technical discussions. I will give the floor to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay.