Brandon Lewis: The solution to Protocol row is light-check ‘green lanes’ for goods entering NI from GB

Brandon Lewis said there had been no intention to introduce legislation this week to unilaterally overwrite parts of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The Northern Ireland Secretary, asked whether plans to introduce domestic legislation this week had been delayed until the summer, told Sky News: “Something like that this week was never on the cards.

“We’re still debating the Queen’s Speech and won’t finish debating the Queen’s Speech and voting on that until later this week, later tomorrow, so in that sense it was never on the cards.

“But what we have always said is that we will not take anything off the table.

“We will do what we need to do to ensure that products can move to Northern Ireland in the way that they should be able to move to Northern Ireland from Great Britain as part of the United Kingdom internal market, something the protocol itself says it will respect but at the moment is not working properly.

“We would like to do that by agreement with the EU but we reserve the right to do what we need to do to do the right thing for the people of Northern Ireland and the wider United Kingdom.”

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss will explain to MPs the UK Government’s position on what next steps to take on tackling the issues caused by the Northern Ireland Protocol, Brandon Lewis has said.

The Northern Ireland Secretary told BBC Breakfast: “Cabinet will be meeting in a couple of hours to make final decisions about what our next steps are and the Foreign Secretary will set that out later today.”

Asked whether he could rule out introducing domestic legislation to suspend parts of the Brexit treaty, the Cabinet minister said: “We’ve always said that we take nothing off the table.

“If we do need to legislate, we won’t shy away from doing that.”

Pushed on what had changed following the Prime Minister’s visit on Monday to Northern Ireland, Mr Lewis replied: “We wait and see what the Foreign Secretary says later on this afternoon.

“I think it is quite right that the Foreign Secretary sets that out to Parliament first – that’s the right approach, after Cabinet has made decisions this morning.”

The Northern Ireland Secretary said he wanted to see light-check “green lanes” established for goods entering the region from Great Britain that were not destined to travel into the European Union’s single market.

Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Brandon Lewis said: “The solution is, and what we’ve been outlining to the EU, that products that are moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland should effectively go through what has colloquially been called a ‘green lane’.

“So, those products that are being consumed in the UK, used in the UK, from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, should not be going through the same checks as products that are moving into the EU, into the single market – that’s pretty much what we have been outlining.

“There are too many companies, including major supermarkets, at the moment who have no stores in the Republic of Ireland, who are moving their products from their depots in Great Britain into Northern Ireland for sale and consumption in Northern Ireland, but going through checks as if they were going into the EU.

“That just doesn’t work and there are products that can’t travel that way.”

He added: “What sometimes gets missed in this is that what the EU is proposing now is that some of the checks we’ve had grace periods for – we are at a standstill at the moment where we are not fully applying some of the checks the EU wants – they actually want to bring those in, so they want to make matters materially worse for the people of Northern Ireland, and that’s just not viable.”