6. What assessment has the Counsel General made of the impact of the European Commission’s draft EU withdrawal agreement on Wales? OAQ51908

We are studying the EU’s draft document carefully. Our priorities for transition are certainty, clarity and minimum disruption. It's essential that the transition period is agreed at the March council because the current uncertainty prevents proper planning, and that is unhelpful to say the least.

Thank you for that answer, Counsel General. The publication of the draft codification of the withdrawal agreement arose following the December meeting of the Council of Ministers to ensure that they ratified the agreement that they came to. It covers six parts, two protocols, 165 articles, clearly focusing on the phase 1 agreement, but also on the transition period, and covers areas including citizen-acquired rights, which you mentioned in the previous question, but also the issues relating to perhaps intellectual property and other aspects of business and regulatory issues, particularly the transition period. What discussions have you had with other legal officers across the UK to ensure that Welsh interests are protected in this process?

I thank the Member for that question, which is absolutely crucial and refers back to the point that I just made about the absolute necessity of getting certainty, both for Welsh citizens and for businesses exporting to the rest of the EU. One of the most significant unknowns at the moment is the nature of the arrangements for implementing the withdrawal agreement. Dominic Grieve in the House of Commons brought forth a successful amendment and the UK Government will now bring forth a separate Bill. But we don't know in the Welsh Government when that will be introduced nor what it will say, nor what its relationship will be to the EU withdrawal Bill, for example. So, that's a clear example of the sort of uncertainty that we need to tackle straight away. We haven't been consulted by the UK Government on it and we don't know what devolution issues it raises in particular, which is obviously at the heart of this. We've seen, in the context of the discussions around the EU withdrawal Bill how absolutely essential those questions of devolution are, for us to protect our rights in this Chamber on behalf of the people of Wales. So, we need engagement from the UK Government on its proposed mechanism for implementing the withdrawal agreement as a matter of priority.

Counsel General, the draft agreement proposes a common regulatory area on Ireland, and it rightly proposes the need to sustain the Good Friday agreement, the all-Ireland economy and the north-south co-operation. Because the UK wants to leave the single market and the customs union, that means that a hard border would have to be created in the Irish sea and at Welsh ports. My colleague Rhun ap Iorwerth has been raising this on many occasions, but, from your perspective, is there any way that the Welsh Government can influence or even participate in any of the discussions about the nature of the UK's border with Ireland?

The challenge in relation to what's proposed by the UK Government in relation to Ireland is the difficulty of envisaging the sort of specific solutions that they can in fact bring forward to ensure a soft border while maintaining separate customs and regulatory regimes in Northern Ireland to the EU. From our perspective, the most rational outcome would be for the whole of the UK to remain fully aligned to the single market and remain in a customs union. We're absolutely not convinced that the potential economic benefits of free trade deals would outweigh the economic costs of customs barriers between the UK and the EU. As a Government, we take every opportunity of restating that position to the UK Government.

Counsel General, yesterday I welcomed the law derived from the EU (Wales) Bill, with particular reference to section 7, which allows for EU derived Welsh law to be interpreted in line with the EU charter of fundamental rights, which is not being transposed into UK law by the EU withdrawal Bill. Do you agree that the charter is vital to the safeguarding of equality and human rights protection, and is section 7 of the Bill robust enough, given that if the EU withdrawal Bill goes ahead as it is, laws in areas previously within EU competence, such as consumer protection and workers' rights, will be at risk?

Thank you for that question. It does indeed. It's an essential part of the toolkit that we have in Wales and the UK to protect human rights. The Welsh Government has been absolutely clear that it does not wish the UK withdrawal from the EU in any way to lead to a dilution in human rights protections, including the extended protections that are available under the charter, which Jane Hutt refers to in her question.

The Welsh Government supports the ongoing efforts to amend the EU withdrawal Bill in the House of Lords to ensure that the charter is fully incorporated into UK law after Brexit, and the UK Government has committed to look again at this issue and come back to the House of Lords at Report Stage with further proposals in relation to that.

It remains the Welsh Government's position that the best outcome for this is for the EU withdrawal Bill to include reference to the charter and to continue the application of the charter in the UK following Brexit. If that is not what is achieved, section 7 of our Bill, although it doesn't incorporate the charter in that sense, provides a good level of protection. We have to navigate in that Bill the complex issue of devolved competences in this area, and it's important to ensure that we have certainty that the provisions in the Bill are in competence. And in relation to that clause, we feel that including a reference to the charter in that way provides the opportunity of interpreting EU law in a way that is consistent with the charter and which continues in that sense the protections that we want to see sustained in Wales following Brexit.