Westminster not seeking ‘power grab’ insists Green
THE UK Government has “no interest at all” in using the process of transferring European law into British law as a “power grab” against the devolved nations, First Secretary of State Damian Green has said.
Mr Green and Welsh Secretary Alun Cairns met First Minister Carwyn Jones in Cardiff yesterday to discuss arrangements for distributing powers returned from the European Union in the so-called Repeal Bill.
Mr Jones joined forces with the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon earlier this month to label the Bill an “unashamed move to centralise decision-making power in Westminster”.
The UK Government said the Bill would allow common frameworks to be put in place where necessary before further devolution.
Mr Green said their discussions had covered a full range of issues. He said: “The UK Government has no interest at all in any kind of power grab.
“We want and expect more powers to be devolved to Wales after Brexit.
“There is a huge mass of legislation that needs to be passed to enable businesses to have certainty and confidence, to allow investment to continue and so on.”
Following the meeting Mr Jones tweeted: “Useful first meeting with @DamianGreen but some way to go before we can support Brexit Bill.”
CARWYN Jones has told Theresa May’s deputy there is no chance that the National Assembly will pass the EU Withdrawal Bill in its current form.
In a face-to-face meeting with First Secretary of State Damian Green, the First Minister insisted that the UK Government abandons its plan to grab powers that should be coming to Wales from Brussels after Brexit.
Mr Green, a long-standing friend and adviser of Theresa May, whom he met when they were both students at Oxford, came to Cardiff to discuss details of the Bill with Mr Jones.
After the meeting, the First Minister told us: “The UK Government look at things in an entirely different way to us.
“So far as they are concerned, they are the superior Government and we are secondary to them in all things.
“That’s entirely different from our view, which is that on matters relating to Brexit they should treat us as equal partners.”
The current disagreement arises out of the EU Withdrawal Bill, which deals with how legal powers coming from the EU will be handled after Brexit.
Some powers – over policy areas including agriculture and the environment – would be expected to pass directly to the devolved administrations. But the UK Government wants to hold them at Westminster and create new UK-wide frameworks. Under the UK Government’s plan, laws could be changed by Ministerial decree using what are known as Henry VIII powers.
Mr Jones and his Scottish counterpart Nicola Sturgeon have rejected such an outcome, and in his meeting with Mr Green, Wales’ First Minister insisted it was wholly unacceptable.
He later told us: “We all want there to be a practical outcome. Of course it makes sense for there to be UK frameworks covering certain things. But the way to achieve that is not for the UK Government to simply seize the powers and tell us what they intend to do.
“Instead, they should allow the powers to be devolved from Brussels to us, after which we can all discuss creating frameworks as equal partners. But that’s not the way they see things.
“The fact is that in agriculture, for example, the UK Government effectively acts as the Government of England in the EU, with the devolved administrations representing the other UK countries. “But under their proposal, they want to take control of agriculture across the UK. That’s a power grab and we can’t accept it.
“What they’re doing at the moment is running at a wall, instead of running around it. We can show them how to run around the wall by treating the devolved administrations as equals.”
Mr Jones said he could not “stand up in the Assembly and advise AMs to vote for this Bill”.
He said: “I don’t like using the word ‘veto’, but the UK Government has said that it wants to proceed with the Bill on the basis of agreement with the devolved administrations. There is no way we are going to budge on this.”
Asked about the more general lack of progress on Brexit talks in Brussels, Mr Jones said: “In my opinion, the UK Government hasn’t the faintest idea what it’s doing.”
Mr Green was less bullish than Mr Jones, saying that for him it was a beginning of a dialogue.
Asked what had been said about the so-called Henry VIII powers during his meeting with the First Minister, Mr Green said: “We obviously discussed a full range of issues. Specifically I was reassuring him that the UK Government has no interest at all in any kind of power grab.
“We want and expect more powers to be devolved to Wales after Brexit than has been the case with the devolution settlement up to Brexit.
“In terms of the so-called Henry VIII powers, a lot of this Bill is about the practicality of life. We know that we will leave the EU at the end of March 2019. There is huge, massive legislation that needs to be passed to enable businesses to have certainty and confidence for investment to continue and so on.
“We’re looking for the most practical way in which we can get all that legislation through, and discussed by Parliament as well as in the relevant areas agreed with the devolved administrations.”
Asked whether it couldn’t be done without the Henry VIII powers, Mr Green said: “We think the proposals in the Bill are sensible and practical because there is an enormous mass of legislation. And so at the same time as we’re negotiating with the EU, we’re talking to the devolved administrations about the devolution aspects of this.
“We have to remember that people are getting on with their lives outside
the political world. They want to know what’s going to happen to their business, they want to know that the law will still operate, that the statute book will still operate after March 2019 in an efficient way. That’s what this Bill is designed to achieve.”
It was put to Mr Green that some Tory backbenchers were unhappy with the Bill and might vote against it. Was he confident the Government could get it through?
He responded: “Yes. We’ve said that we are open to suggestions and we’ll talk to people around the UK and across parties. If people have practical suggestions, I’ll talk to people. [Secretary of State for Brexit] David Davis will talk to people.
“But yes, I am confident that this Bill will go through, not least because it is extremely necessary for the proper functioning of our economy that we make sure there’s no cliff edge in March 2019. I think everyone in Parliament will get that. It doesn’t matter what view you took at the referendum. It’s very important that we maintain that certainty for people.”
Asked about the lack of progress in Brexit negotiations in Brussels, where the EU is refusing to talk about future trade arrangements with the UK until the two sides are heading for agreement on the so-called divorce bill, the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic and the status of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU, post-Brexit, Mr Green said: “In terms of the sequencing, the hard division between things you need to agree before you can talk about trade simply doesn’t work in practice.
“On Northern Ireland, for example, it is impossible to say you need to agree a solution on the border without discussing trade and customs. That’s what the issue is there. So this distinction is in some ways artificial. There’s more progress being made than is sometimes made out. We’ve agreed things like health cards and so on – things that matter to millions of British citizens travelling abroad, as well as people coming here as well.
“So things are being agreed. Inevitably, at an early stage of negotiation, conflicts and difficulties will be played up. But the whole history of negotiations within the EU and indeed other negotiations are that you start off with early difficulties and then you make progress. So I’m confident that we can come to a successful conclusion.”
While he wouldn’t discuss figures relating to a possible settlement of the so-called divorce bill, Mr Green said: “We are a country that meets our obligations, so we will have some legal obligations, we will have some political and moral obligations, and also there will be EU programmes that we will want to continue to participate in – and obviously if we’re participating in those programmes, we will continue to pay our fair share of what those numbers are. There will be things like that after Brexit, but they will be nothing like some of the numbers that have been put about.”
Mr Green said that in addition to the EU Withdrawal Bill there would be an Immigration Bill that will implement changes to immigration law post-Brexit in line with people’s concerns.