My Lords, having listened to the Minister and read in detail the documentation, I can recall what I said in the House of Commons 18 months ago and privately, as well as publicly, on many occasions at the time, when I was one of a tiny handful of enthusiastic backers of the agreement that the European Union made with the British Government of the time, which Parliament chose to reject. I said that there is no such thing as a no-deal scenario because this means thousands of deals, but those will have to be done separately and in isolation. One of the problems with that is that there will be so many.
In the context of these changes—which I do not oppose—will the Minister tell us how many separate agreements will be required, purely from the scope of these regulations? Are we talking about bilateral deals with each country, or are we talking about a single
deal on a range of different issues with the European Union? Will those deals be in place from 1 January? Do we have the capacity? We have had all sorts of complications, because of Covid, in terms of how we work. One thing Covid has not done is make negotiations easier; it has made them more difficult. It is harder to get people and it is harder to fix meetings for decisions of any kind to be made. When they are multilateral and require negotiation, if we do not have a deal—though I suspect that we will probably end up with one, and I feel that is the way things are moving—are all the individual deals required in place to allow law enforcement to act as it did? I suggest that that is not possible: the capacity to do that in that timescale is not possible.
Will we potentially have the following scenario from January? The Home Secretary and the NCA previously described an earlier operation against organised crime, in which the NCA had managed to break into phones in some way, as the most successful in the history of policing in this country because we managed pretty simultaneously, across many different European countries and in this country, to arrest many hundreds of serious organised criminals. As I understood from what the Home Secretary and the NCA said at the time, these were people who were involved in major crimes—gun crimes and the rest—who were significant and dangerous criminals, and that happened across Europe, including in this country. Are the arrangements going to be in place that would allow a new such operation to begin seamlessly on, say, 2 January?
Will there be criminals in this country whom we have problems extraditing to another country because a deal will not have been negotiated with that other country by the time we get to January? Will there be criminals whom we wish to bring back from other countries—from Spain, France or wherever—to face the prospect of justice in this country, where we might not be able to do so because the agreements are not in place? Would I be right in thinking—as some of these agreements will be very technical and complex—that the presumption has been for a long time that any changes that might come would actually be in the light of a deal, and so would be negotiated over a much longer and more rational time period, rather than forced through in an incredibly short period simply to hold the system together?
Will there be bits of information that we cannot access purely because we do not have a deal in place, in a no-deal scenario? As I said—and I am sure that the Minister will agree—there is no such thing as no deal; it merely means that the deal on these issues has not been concluded because there has not been the opportunity to finish and finalise it, since we do not even know if we need it, as that is dependent on whether we get the bigger deal.
I appreciate that this is not the responsibility of the Minister—although it will be part of her department’s problem and the Ministry of Justice’s problem—but it is the problem of government and it is the problem of Parliament, because a scenario that allows criminals more freedoms than the law would wish to give them, simply because of jurisdictions crossing borders, is not—I think I can say without equivocation—what anybody voted for or perceived would happen.
The taking back of control that I and others argued for, voted for and won a referendum on was predicated precisely on the ability to do the things that we want to do and have international agreements in place. As I say, I was very relaxed with what was described as the Theresa May deal—I always tried to describe it as the European Union deal because that was the other party to it—because we would have avoided all these problems. I suspect that I am not the only person in this Chamber now who was of that view. However, we were a tiny majority, unfortunately, and we were unable to persuade any party. We failed the people there—I apologise for my part in that failure—but we tried. At least we recognised that this is probably for the British people the single biggest problem. No politician would be able rationally to explain, “Well, the criminal got away with it because we don’t have the agreement in place because we’ve not had the time to get the agreement in place. We will do but we can’t do so, sorry, come back next year and we’ll try again.”
Are those dangers or am I overstating the risk? I do not think that I am, having heard the Minister and read the documentation. There is a problem, which therefore suggests that, even with this deal at this current stage, the deal that can be agreed would have bigger positives for the country than the so-called no-deal option. That would mean thousands of further deals having to be negotiated, including many in the immediate future; we do not have a good capacity for that, and no one could have the capacity to do that.
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