Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office written question – answered at on 7 March 2023.
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what steps he is taking to help ensure that the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill contributes to removing obstacles to exports from and imports to Northern Ireland.
The Government has been clear that our preference was a negotiated solution to the challenges with the Protocol. Now that we have rewritten the Treaty text of the Protocol with binding legal changes, we have a better option. As the published statement of the Government's legal position sets out, because we have achieved a new negotiated agreement, which preserves the balance of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement, the original and sound legal justification for the Bill has fallen away. Neither do we need the Bill nor do we have a credible basis to pursue it. We will therefore no longer proceed with the Bill, and the EU will no longer proceed with legal actions against the UK. Instead, we will pursue the certainty of a new way forward with the Windsor framework.
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