My Lords, it has taken me a while to come to terms with the reality that my noble friend the Minister has taken responsibility for an error in his department—a very rare occasion indeed—but his outstanding speech and excellent explanation of the GIs completely carried the Committee. We fully appreciate the way he has come back to us to give us the background.
I had the privilege of serving on the European Union Committee’s sub-committee in 2007 that undertook a detailed analysis of European wine, entitled A Better Deal for All. I had the great privilege of working with Lord Plumb at the time. I stand by all the committee’s recommendations, many of which are still relevant in the context of a post-Brexit UK, but possibly more relevant to the bureaucrats in Brussels. I am also a long-standing unpaid member of the Haberdashers’ Company’s wine committee.
These are simple and straightforward regulations and, as my noble friend the Minister said, they clarify a technical error, which is welcome. However, my noble friend’s presence at the Dispatch Box on this subject provides the Grand Committee with an opportunity to hear about a key issue during the current round of trade negotiations with wine-producing countries, being ably led by the Secretary of State, Liz Truss, who is doing excellent working securing future arrangements between the UK and a number of countries producing new world wine.
The issue in this context that should concern your Lordships is the future regime for wine import certificates, first in the context of the EU and separately in the context of all wine-producing countries with which we trade. Now that we have left the EU, I can see no national interest in nor justification for the retention of wine import certificates. Freed from unnecessary bureaucracy, the retention of these forms is a cost on the Exchequer and on the industry. In fact, they are no use, so much so that my noble friend the Minister would find it difficult—I would go as far as to say impossible—to name any other bottle of potable alcohol from vodka to rum that requires them. All are well served by standard customs paperwork.
Yet the retention of wine import certificates, which is exclusively a decision for government and Parliament, is to place an onerous and costly process on those merchants and buyers—the restaurants, pubs and bars—that buy a wide selection of wines as their unique selling point and which now have to face the bureaucratic process of obtaining a physical stamp for wine imported,
which has no safety benefits and above all no consumer protection advantages. After all, if there were any consumer protection gains, we would have them for imports of every other bottle of alcohol.
With safety and authenticity being guaranteed by the importer, I am a loss to understand why the Government are looking to retain these import certificates. After all, one significant advantage of Brexit consistently argued by the Government with which I was in complete agreement was to ensure a substantial reduction in unnecessary red tape, freeing Parliament to promote freer trade and erasing unnecessary bureaucracy.
I ask my noble friend the Minister just one simple question: why does he of all people—bright, questioning and perceptive as he always is—want to keep VI-1s? What is their benefit? Can it possibly be greater than the bureaucratic costs and processes that they cause? These forms require a physical customs stamp on entry into the UK, duplicating everything that is necessary in normal commercial documentation. They do not address the historical challenge of counterfeited wine since, should there be another Australian scandal, that would not be discoverable on the face of the certificate. Counterfeited wine would be stamped at the customs point, so I cannot see how possible issues of fraud are in any way covered by these certificates.
Possibly this bureaucracy is to be retained to protect English producers, but surely my noble friend the Minister and the Committee would not conceive of resorting to red tape to protect our outstanding English producers, who can succeed on merit and quality even if they currently produce less than half a percent of total wine consumption in the UK. So what do the Government see as the benefit of VI-1s?
A simplified version of the form is good for the European Union, but the answer to that challenge is to welcome the deferred date for the EU introduction, which is now the end of the year, and use that time to introduce digital forms, moving with pace from the CHIEF to the CDS system. That is the least bad outcome with Brussels and is surely acceptable to everybody in the industry. However, importing to the EU is, of course, different from the rest of the world, where surely there is no need for these forms at all. After all, most of the wine imported from Australia is in bulk. While there may be 10,000 or more suppliers in the EU supplying major retailers in the UK, only a handful export from Australia, and the majority do so in bulk.
What can it possibly be that would make the exceptionally popular and able Liz Truss so unpopular in bars and restaurants the length and breadth of the UK, not to mention the dent in popularity of my noble friend the Minister when the Bishops’ Bar reopens? The only answer I can come up with is that this is a pawn in an otherwise much larger series of trade negotiations. If so, the Minister will understandably have little to say, particularly in answer to my only question of what is the value of a VI-1 certificate. If that is the case, I totally understand and would not wish to weaken the Government’s negotiating position in the trade negotiations under way this year. If I am wrong, then I hope this House will return to the
subject in due course and be united in seeking to end this unnecessary and costly bureaucracy—costly to the Government, to the wine industry in the UK and, above all, to the consumers, who will pay the price for the bureaucracy we hoped we had left behind on 31 January 2020.
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