My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, for moving Amendment 5. I had intended to add my name to it, but then I started to look at the Northern Ireland dimension and how that could be covered. I therefore want particularly to speak to my Amendment 356, which is linked with Amendment 5 and which tries to deal with the unfortunate situation in Northern Ireland. I shall be brief because noble Lords have probably heard enough of my voice today.
At a time when the devolved Governments feel that they are facing what they call, rightly or wrongly, a power grab, surely it is important that the UK Government should carry those Administrations with them in such a major project as this. I listened very carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said. As always, he was totally consistent, but he must accept that there is a conflict between the perception of a legislative consent mechanism at Westminster—which tends to regard it as a convention, as I said—and the understanding that has developed among the devolved bodies, which see it more as the norm and a mechanism required as part of the legislative process. I understand the noble Lord when he says that there may be parts of the legislative process without it, because of their international connotations et cetera, but when there is an impact, as has been mentioned in certain cases, on the powers coming back from Brussels and going to wherever they go to—Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast—then there clearly needs to be a mechanism to sort that out. That is not just at this point in time; that mechanism needs to be ongoing for the future, because I entirely accept that there is a UK single market and that there must be some rules for it.
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I do not think there is a problem with pesticides. We had incidents in Wales; I think the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, will recall this in the National Assembly at the very early stage, when there was the question of GM crops. Exactly the same argument arose: what about the farmer with a farm straddling the Flintshire and Cheshire border? That question arose, but such things could be worked out. There was no great problem. The much greater problem is that there is a perceived unfairness there and no response to it. As the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, mentioned, the UK Government have given the impression that the Bill sometimes overrides the devolution settlements. That causes a reaction in Cardiff and Edinburgh that could have been avoided. There must be some attempt to negotiate some agreement by working together toward a consensus. The Government heralded Brexit as taking back power. The irony is that the settlement, in the light of the treatment of the devolved regimes, is seen by many people in Edinburgh and Cardiff in that context: powers are being taken back, but in the opposite direction.
The amendment gives the Government an opportunity to show in the Bill that they respect the devolved legislatures and, perhaps more importantly, to say how they will bring forward in due course their own amendments that will deal will this issue, which should never have boiled up to the level it is at now. It is the sort of thing that could have been resolved, but because of the lack of conversation and contact, it has become an issue that we are debating tonight.