My Lords, the ostensible purpose of the Windsor Framework (Enforcement etc.) Regulations 2023 is to make provision for the enforcement of GB standards rather than EU ones in Northern Ireland with respect to public health, marketing and organic products. That sounds like a step forward in efforts to repatriate powers from the EU to the UK. For reasons that I hope to demonstrate, however, quite the opposite is the case.
These regulations can be understood only if read in tandem with the Windsor Framework (Plant Health) Regulations 2023 and the Windsor Framework (Retail Movement Scheme: Public Health, Marketing and Organic Product Standards and Miscellaneous Provisions) Regulations, to which they make repeated reference and which were also laid before Parliament the week before last. Furthermore, none of these regulations can be understood apart from Regulation (EU) 2023/1231 of the European Union—otherwise known as the “SPS regulation”—which was passed on 14 June this year and without which none of them make sense. That regulation is the sun around which the regulations we are considering today, and their fellow regulations, orbit, such that it is not possible to scrutinise and understand the Windsor Framework (Enforcement etc.) Regulations 2023 without also understanding Regulation (EU) 2023/1231.
Before I comment further on the said EU regulation for the purpose of understanding the regulations before us today, I will first set out its centrality to these enforcement regulations. Regulation 3(2) of the Windsor Framework (Enforcement etc.) Regulations 2023 states that, in the regulations, reference to “the SPS Regulation” is a reference to EU Regulation 2023/1231. Meanwhile, Regulation 9(1)(b) of these enforcement regulations defines where the enforcement provisions fall, which is subject to
“Article 1(2) and Annex I to the SPS Regulation”.
Moreover, the regulations reference
“Northern Ireland plant health label”
42 times, defining the term on a basis that again takes us in two steps to Regulation (EU) 2023/1231. Regulation 3(2) of these regulations states that
“‘Northern Ireland plant health label’ has the meaning given in regulation 2 of the Windsor Framework (Plant Health) Regulations 2023”.
Regulation 2 of the Windsor Framework (Plant Health) Regulations 2023 defines “Northern Ireland plant health label” in turn by Regulation (EU) 2023/1231, stating that
“‘Northern Ireland plant health label’ has the meaning given to ‘plant health label’ in Article 2(22) of the SPS Regulation”.
Thus, central to the task of scrutinising and understanding the Windsor Framework (Enforcement etc.) Regulations 2023 before us today is understanding the SPS regulation, namely Regulation (EU) 2023/1231.
Anyone who has believed government claims to have “got Brexit done” and “taken back control” will be rudely awoken from that particular fantasy by the experience of reading Regulation (EU) 2023/1231. Unlike those EU regulations that apply to Northern Ireland because they apply to the EU as a whole and thus to Northern Ireland, this regulation, which was passed in June, is curious because it applies narrowly and specifically to the Government of the United Kingdom and not to any other part of the EU—even though the legislation was supposedly made some years after Brexit for the UK by the EU legislature, now without any UK representation. Formally, it is designated as this:
“Regulation (EU) 2023/1231 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 June 2023 on specific rules relating to the entry into Northern Ireland from other parts of the United Kingdom of certain consignments of retail goods, plants for planting, seed potatoes, machinery and certain vehicles operated for agricultural or forestry purposes, as well as non-commercial movements of certain pet animals into Northern Ireland”.
Although it is often said that the protocol/Windsor Framework has made Northern Ireland a vassal state of the EU, this legislation demonstrates that, in touching what people can do in the rest of the UK, there is a clear sense in which the vassal status to which we have been submitted impacts not only Northern Ireland but the whole United Kingdom.
EU regulation 2023/1231 makes provision for some goods to be subject to less exacting SPS border requirements than would otherwise obtain if traders submit to certain restrictions, which it is the purpose of the Windsor Framework (Enforcement etc.) Regulations 2023 to enable compliant traders to access.
Specifically, if those in the wider UK bringing goods to Northern Ireland are moving SPS retail goods to a confirmed Northern Ireland consumer with an address in Northern Ireland, and if those goods bear “Not for EU” labels—which are being phased in across a number of stages—and are subject to 10% to 5% identity checks at border control posts, and if the retailers in question have applied to join the trusted trader scheme and successfully obtained and kept trusted trader status, then, and only then, will they benefit from a simplified single SPS certificate.
The implications flowing from this are far reaching. First, contrary to the protestations of the Government, this is not unfettered access, which is the term used for free movement within a single market that, by definition, encounters neither a customs nor an SPS border, nor border control posts. So the first thing we must be clear about is that the alternative border arrangements that the Windsor Framework (Enforcement etc.) Regulations 2023 help effect do not remove, in the words of the Prime Minister,
“any sense of border in the Irish Sea”.
What they do is facilitate an alternative border experience in which the regulations before us today play an enforcement role, but it is still a border experience—a border whose function is to uphold the integrity of the separate legal regime that now exists in Northern Ireland, which is the result of our disfranchisement. That is an important point that must never be forgotten. The border is not just a dreadful inconvenience with far-reaching negative economic consequences but the symbol of our disfranchisement and humiliation.
Indeed, the EU has not only gone to great lengths to impose its disfranchisement policy on us but, with the connivance of our own Government—who are supposed to protect and defend us through the “all for one, one for all” covenant that makes any body politic possible—rubbed salt in the wound by having the gall to suggest that, rather than being the source of acute embarrassment, the product of our disfranchisement, which is the different legal regime to which we are subjected, should be dignified such that it is deemed worthy of protection through the provision of a border, cutting our country in two, and upheld through the provision of border control posts.
Secondly, the alternative arrangements that it is the purpose of the Windsor Framework (Enforcement etc.) Regulations 2023 to enforce are not transferred to us that we can hold and claim them for ourselves. They are offered by the EU only subject to certain EU regulations that it polices and enforces. In this regard, the most important article of EU regulation 2023/1231, without which one cannot understand the Windsor Framework (Enforcement etc.) Regulations 2023, is article 14.
Article 14 defines where the power lies and where the buck really stops. In article 14(5), the EU reserves the right to remove the alternative arrangements and press for its full pound of flesh against the full international border that ultimately remains as in place under Windsor as under the protocol, at which point the Windsor Framework (Enforcement etc.) Regulations 2023 will become irrelevant. It states:
“If the United Kingdom fails to comply with the conditions laid down in paragraph 1, point (c), or in paragraph 2, point (a) or (b), of this Article, the Commission shall adopt a delegated act in accordance with Article 17 to supplement this Regulation by suspending the application of Articles 4, 5, 6 and 9 to 12”.
In those 57 words, the true sovereignty implications of the Windsor Framework and the Windsor border are exposed and laid bare.
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In that sense, anyone voting for the Windsor Framework (Enforcement etc.) Regulations 2023 would effectively be saying: we will ask for alternative border
arrangements even though we know that, in doing so, we not only accept the reality of the border in the alternative border arrangements, rather than the removal of any sense of border in the Irish Sea, but consent to an arrangement that has at its heart the right of the EU to, in the final analysis, press for the most destructive possible expression of the border and its right and freedom to operate politically on the basis of that reality.
In recognising that fact we must, of course, not forget that that would be in addition to the full destructive manifestation of the border that the EU is already insisting on from 1 October with the advent of the red lane. There is no green lane default safeguard here for the UK, only an EU default safeguard to 100% red lane arrangements. Thus, far from removing any sense of border in the Irish Sea, the Windsor Framework (Enforcement etc.) Regulations 2023 authenticate and give life and credibility to an arrangement that cements in and makes permanent, as default, a full international border, cutting off Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom.
Finally, I note in passing that, as well as being the subject of the Windsor Framework (Enforcement etc.) Regulations 2023, enforcement is also completely central to the Windsor Framework (Retail Movement Scheme) Regulation 2023, Regulation 11 of which requires the competent authorities to assess goods coming into Northern Ireland on the basis of potential risks, such as disease. However, Regulation 11(2)(b) and (d) to (f) then bizarrely define risk in terms of capacity to conduct checks with respect to available staff and facilities. An enforcement requirement is thus made and effectively withdrawn in the same regulation on grounds of lack of capacity. Is this not a cynical device for encouraging people to conclude in the aftermath of 1 October that Windsor has been a lot less disruptive than usual because this will prevent us seeing what it is really like until July 2025 when the border control posts are ready? Have His Majesty’s Government discussed with the EU the implications of Regulation 11(2)(b) and (d) to (f) on the capacity of the border to meet both the demands of EU Regulation 2023/1231 and the demands of the red lane between 1 October 2023 and 31 July 2025? Have His Majesty’s Government been forced to give an assurance to the EU that Regulation 11 will be repealed, in whole or in part, on 1 August 2025 on completion of the border control posts at Larne, Warrenpoint, Foyle and Belfast?