Britain and EU urged to rejoin talks on NI protocol

Britain and the European Union should go back to the negotiating table without preconditions while the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill is going through parliament, a House of Lords committee has said.

The Lords subcommittee on the protocol said the agreement was having a “feast or famine” economic impact with Northern businesses that depend on supply chains in Great Britain suffering while those who trade more across the Border are thriving.

“Business representatives have repeatedly stressed the damaging economic impact of continued political uncertainty over the protocol. Notwithstanding their acknowledgement of the economically beneficial impact of the continuation of the grace periods, they have also set out serious concerns over the economic consequences of unilateral action. Without prejudice to the views of individual members on the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill or the EU’s response, we stress that a mutually agreed solution is the optimal outcome, and that the continued lack of agreement between the two sides is having an economically damaging effect,” it says in a report published on Wednesday.

The report calls for the grace periods and derogations to be made permanent and urged Britain and the EU to work towards a sanitary and phytosanitary/veterinary agreement that would reduce checks on food crossing the Irish Sea. The EU says any such agreement must mean Britain dynamically aligning with European rules while the British government wants Brussels to recognise its national standards as equivalent.

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Serious consequences

The committee’s members include former DUP leader Nigel Dodds, former SDLP leader Margaret Richie and former UUP leader Reg Empey, as well as former Conservative MEP and early Brexit advocate Daniel Hannan and Dean Godson, director of the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange and a biographer of David Trimble. The committee’s chairman, former diplomat Michael Jay, said the British government should attempt to restart negotiations while the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill is going through the Lords.

“Unless there are such negotiations, there is not going to be an agreement. And if there is not an agreement, then there’s going to be quite serious consequences for the British economy and alas for parts of the European economy,” he told The Irish Times.

Both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, the candidates for the Conservative leadership, favour the Bill, which would give British ministers the power to unilaterally rewrite most of the protocol. Lord Jay said he understood why the EU found it difficult to negotiate with a British government that is seeking to repudiate a treaty it made only three years ago.

“I can see why there is frustration on the part of the European Union but I also can see that in realistic terms there is going to have to be at some stage a negotiation in which both sides whatever the difficulties are going to have to make some changes in their present positions. Now for those to start you need to trust and that’s what we haven’t got at the moment,” he said.