My Lords, Amendment 143 is to some extent a coda to our recent discussions on the role of the office for the internal market and to the amendments I moved last week, which were intended to underscore the primacy of the common frameworks process. They would ensure that the market access principles are triggered only when it proved impossible by consensus for the four Governments to agree a common framework. The triggering would be by bringing forward regulations using the affirmative procedure.
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That would give this House and the other place a lock to ensure that the common frameworks process, including the provisions for dispute avoidance and resolution, had indeed run its course, before resorting to the blunt instrument of the market access principles. The Government cannot be allowed just to declare that the process has failed. Sadly, the disinclination of some Ministers to compromise suggests that it would be all too easy to use these powers as they are currently written. In our debate last week, I explained that the amendments would ensure that if such regulations were brought forward, both Houses of Parliament would be able to consider the reasoned arguments not only of Ministers here but of the devolved Governments as to whether they were necessary.
Amendment 143 would add further objectivity. It would require the office for the internal market, which the Government propose should be a genuinely independent source of advice, to give its opinion to Parliament on whether the specific proposed regulations to apply the market access principles were necessary. The office for the internal market would be required to report on the impact of making the regulations on the operation of the market and on the health and safety and environmental standards, among other things, in each part of the United Kingdom.
If we are to have an office for the internal market, it is essential that it gives value. One way in which it can do that is as an independent source of advice on whether the claims of the Government that such-and-such a measure poses a significant threat to the coherence of the internal market are credible or not. I beg to move.