I wish to speak to new clause 11 and against amendment 73.
Last week, we had a debate in Westminster Hall in which the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who is back in his place, advised me that everything would become clear when the White Paper was published. I am afraid that for me, 70 minutes before we are going to vote, Government policy is still not quite clear. I am going to ask the Minister a few questions in the hope that we might get some clarification from him. I am interested in the interrelationship between the Bill and the White Paper, which was published last week.
Contrary to what some right hon. and hon. Members wish to say, the common market, which is the customs union, is fantastically popular with the public. Whenever
I ask my constituents, “What do you dislike about Europe?”, they say, “Being bossed around”, and “The immigration.” When I say, “What do you like about it?”, they say, “Oh, we love the common market.” Well, of course, the common market is the customs union. When I talk to industrialists, what they want—in the words of GlaxoSmithKline, which employs 1,000 people in my constituency—is “no disruption”. PPG Industries, which is a supplier to Airbus, wants a common rule book. When I spoke this morning to the North East chamber of commerce, it said that 90% of its members want to stay in the customs union. We know that legally speaking that is not possible, so we have to have a new one that will give them the “exact same benefits”.
I am not clear about whether the Bill facilitates the customs approach that is set out in the White Paper. Nor am I clear about which of the Government’s amendments have made changes to the Bill that will enable them to undertake the facilitated customs arrangement that they have described in the White Paper. Nor am I clear—I very much hope that the Minister will be able to explain this; I am sure that he now will be—about whether the Government’s proposed acceptance of amendments from the ERG means that they are abandoning the facilitated customs arrangement as their opening position or that they are still holding to it. If they are still holding to it, I would suggest that it is not wholly practical. It will need a tracking system so that when people import goods, they know where their final use is going to be. This is a whole new bureaucratic system. It means that people who import will have to have information along the supply chain that, at the moment, is of no concern to them. The White Paper says that there is going to be a formula so that we can follow the proportions from the past year, but what if things change from one year to another? Then people will have to make their rebates on the basis of new, fresh information in real time. It sounds very much as though we are going to have not only VAT but VAT mark 2.
Paragraph 20 on page 18 of the White Paper says:
“This could include looking to make it easier for traders to lodge information…This could include exploring how machine learning and artificial intelligence could allow traders to automate…This could…include exploring how allowing data sharing across borders”
would work. It could include rather a lot of things. I can only imagine officials saying to Ministers when they were drafting this, “This does seem to involve rather a lot of imagination.” It does not seem to be bottomed out. I would much prefer it if we could go along the path set out by my hon. Friends on the Front Bench in new clause 11, because what is being proposed will be horrendously bureaucratic and an open invitation to smuggling.