Mr. Nigel Mills:

I have missed my trips to Ireland this year with the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee and the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, BIPA. To share solidarity with the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly I thought I would wear the tie this morning.

I have always thought a good deal between the UK and EU was by far the best way of delivering Brexit. It is going to be a messy January with people not being prepared because they did not think they would need to or because they have not worked out how to do it. Having a messy compliance process on top of a real economic change would make for a really bad start to Brexit. It is clearly in everyone's economic interest to do a trade deal. There are all the other aspects of the future partnership we want to see also, which go far beyond trade. I would hope to see one. I have always expected to see one. I have spent most of the year asking witnesses what percentage chance they give of a deal, but I suspect that percentage has somewhat come down from the heights of more likely than not or the 66% that Michael Gove used to give us. It seems to be a lot harder and getting a lot later than any of us thought possible. Who knows what the ratification process will be if we do see a deal. I still think that is the most likely outcome but there will need to be some compromise on both sides to achieve it.

On the relationship, we will all miss the daily interactions that officials could have through EU channels and we need to find a way to recreate them. We do have institutions for it through the Good Friday Agreement for North-South and east-west. I am not sure the east-west interactions have been as effective or valued as perhaps they could have been and perhaps we need to find a way to reinvigorate them. I recall about a decade ago, when David Cameron first became Prime Minister, they had a go at it and perhaps it is time to re-energise it. We need to raise the importance of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly as a liaison for parliamentarians. It meets but sometimes it struggles to get very good visitors or witnesses. That is probably a weakness on the UK side. On the Irish side we had the Minister, Deputy Simon Coveney, at the previous one in Ireland last year. There is almost a choice between holding the meetings somewhere interesting in the UK or Ireland or holding them in London and Dublin and having the best possible people coming to speak to the assembly. It is to be hoped on both sides we can re-energise it and at least find a way to meet virtually soon if we cannot do it physically for a little while longer.

On the Internal Market Bill, it is always going to be a challenge with the Northern Ireland protocol. There is a lot of text in the withdrawal agreement on it but not a lot of it is very precise. It is a very unusual situation to have part of one country sort of in the customs area of another area, or mainly in the customs territory of its home country but in the Single Market of another. Much of the detail of how we make this work would have to be agreed with good co-operation and spirit on both sides. It is regrettable we could not get around to that spirit of co-operation and trying to finesse another compromise until three weeks before it comes live. To make it work there will have to be truly very close working between our tax authorities and your tax authorities. It is very sad that four and a half years after the referendum we still have not quite got that good working on the ground. They need to get that up and running pretty quickly in the new year between the tax authorities. Many of the issues on the ground could be solved by joint working, compromise and flexible use of information that both sides have to tackle the real issues that will be there.

It is to be hoped, as we move forward, that we will be able to get that joint working up and running much more quickly.