Lord Empey:

I am not going to go into too much detail on the Windsor Framework insofar as my colleagues are looking at it at the moment. It is very complicated. Some important documents are still not even available yet. That being said, however, we have had a proposal on the table for four years, even before the protocol was introduced, to deal with the downstream consequences of Brexit. By way of an example, we went to see the former Prime Minister David Cameron in his office in No. 10 Downing Street in February 2016. Our purpose in going there was to point out that there were two possible outcomes in a referendum: that people on the island were used to referendums; and that such referendums were frequently fought on issues that were not necessarily on the ballot, but that there were other issues that persuade them. Our main reason for going was to see what his plan was for dealing with us in the event that the leave side won. David Cameron was very confident that he had a fantastic economic argument and that he would not lose. We persisted, nevertheless, and came away from that meeting clear in our minds that there was no plan. They had not worked it out, and so it has been.

In January 2019, we proposed that the institutions of the agreement could be utilised to assist us either by amending or creating another cross-Border body. This was on the assumption that Whitehall would devolve some responsibility to Stormont for the oversight of all of this and that the new or amended North-South body could have an educational role in explaining what the regulations were in the different markets to different companies. It was thought the same would happen in Great Britain because a lot of smaller businesses over there have stopped trading with us. In addition, if people saw any activity they were very concerned about or felt there was something untoward, they could report it to the relevant authorities. This would go, in some way, to dilute the democratic deficit because the assembly would be directly involved effectively under licence from London to oversee the operation of the processes here.

They have now come up with the Windsor Framework, and we are looking into all of that, but the fact remains that things were very badly negotiated. We went out of our way to try to warn people about what would happen. Sadly, not enough people were listening to us. Now we are left in this kind of limbo. It is not good for anybody because businesses need certainty. They do not have certainty. People tell us that we should have taken the best of both worlds. It was very hard to take the best of both worlds if one cannot even take the best of the world one is in. We are a long way from that. Only the functioning of the institutions in a meaningful way will fix that. The institutions, North-South and east-west, could well be used to assist us very much in dealing with these problems. I hope people will pay some attention to that.