Prime Ministers Office 10 Downing Street
Thank you Mr Speaker,
Before I begin I know the whole House will join me in paying tribute to Betty Boothroyd, who passed away yesterday.
She was a remarkable woman, who commanded huge admiration and respect as the first female Speaker of this House.
She was as firm as she was fair. And she presided over many historic moments in this House, among them the debates on the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement.
Her passion, wit, and immeasurable contribution to our democracy will never be forgotten.
And Mr Speaker,
Let us also send our very best wishes to Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell and his family.
He is a man of immense courage who both on and off duty has devoted himself to the service of others.
This House stands united with the people and leaders of all communities across Northern Ireland in condemning those who are trying to drag us back to the past.
They will never succeed.
With permission, Mr Speaker,
Id like to make a Statement on the Northern Ireland Protocol.
After weeks of negotiations, today we have made a decisive breakthrough.
The Windsor Framework delivers free flowing trade within the whole United Kingdom.
It protects Northern Irelands place in our Union.
And it safeguards sovereignty for the people of Northern Ireland.
By achieving all this, it preserves the delicate balance inherent in the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement.
And Mr Speaker it does what many said could not be done:
Removing thousands of pages of EU laws
And making permanent, legally binding changes to the Protocol Treaty itself.
That is the breakthrough we have made.
Those are the changes we will deliver.
And now is the time to move forward as one country one United Kingdom.
Mr Speaker,
Before I turn to the details, let us remind ourselves why this matters.
It matters because at the heart of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement
and the reason its endured for a quarter of a century
is equal respect for the aspirations and identity of all communities, and all its three strands.
But the Northern Ireland Protocol has undermined that balance.
How can we say the Protocol protects the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement when it has caused the institutions of that Agreement to collapse?
So, in line with our legal responsibilities, we are acting today to preserve the balance of that Agreement and chart a new way forward for Northern Ireland.
I pay tribute to:
Our European friends for recognising the need for change particularly President Von der Leyen
My predecessors for laying the groundwork for todays agreement
And and My RHFs the Foreign and Northern Ireland Secretaries for their perseverance in finally persuading the EU to do what it spent years refusing to do:
To rewrite the Treaty and replace it with a radical, legally binding new Framework.
Todays agreement has three equally important objectives:
First, allowing trade to flow freely within our UK internal market.
Second, protecting Northern Irelands place in our Union.
And third, safeguarding sovereignty and closing the democratic deficit.
Let me take each, in turn.
Mr Speaker,
Core to the problems with the Protocol was that it treated goods moving from Great Britain to Northern Ireland as if they were crossing an international customs border.
This created extra costs and paperwork for businesses, who had to fill out complex customs declarations.
It limited choice for the people of Northern Ireland.
And it undermined the UK internal market a matter of identity as well as economics.
Todays agreement removes any sense of a border in the Irish Sea and ensures the free flow of trade within the UK.
We have secured a key negotiating objective:
The introduction of a new Green Lane for goods destined for Northern Ireland
with a separate Red Lane for those going to the EU.
Within the Green Lane, burdensome customs bureaucracy will be scrapped and replaced with data sharing of ordinary, existing commercial information.
Routine checks and tests will also be scrapped; the only checks will be those required to stop smugglers and criminals.
And our new Green Lane will be open to a broad, comprehensive range of businesses across the UK.
Im pleased to say we have also permanently protected tariff-free movement of all types of steel into Northern Ireland.
And for goods going the other way from Northern Ireland to Great Britain
we have scrapped export declarations delivering, finally, completely unfettered trade.
And Mr Speaker,
The commitment to establish the Green Lane is achieved by a legally binding amendment to the text of the Treaty itself.
This is a fundamental, far-reaching change.
And it permanently removes the border in the Irish Sea.
Mr Speaker,
Perhaps the single most important area of trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland is food.
Three quarters of the food in Northern Irelands supermarkets comes from the rest of the UK.
Yet the Protocol applied the same burdens on shipments from Cairnryan to Larne as between Holyhead and Dublin.
If it was implemented in full we would see:
Supermarket lorries needing hundreds of certificates for every individual item.
Every single document checked.
Supermarket staples like sausages banned altogether.
More delays. More cost. Less choice.
So, todays agreement fixes all this with a new, permanent, legally binding approach to food.
We will expand the Green Lane to food retailers.
And not just supermarkets but wholesalers and hospitality, too.
Instead of hundreds of certificates, lorries will make one simple, digital declaration to confirm that goods will remain in Northern Ireland.
Visual inspections will be cut from 100% now to just 5%.
Physical checks and tests will be scrapped, unless we suspect fraud, smuggling, or disease.
And so there will be no need for vets in warehouses.
Of course, to deliver this we need to reassure the EU that food imports wont be taken into Ireland.
So we will ask retailers to mark a small number of particularly high risk food products
as not for EU, with a phased rollout of this requirement to give them the time to adjust.
And more fundamentally, we have delivered a form of dual regulation for food the single biggest sector by far for East-West trade, and one of the most important in peoples lives.
Under the old Protocol, retail food products made to UK standards could not be sold in Northern Ireland.
Todays agreement completely changes that.
This means the ban on British products like sausages entering Northern Ireland has now been scrapped.
If its available on supermarket shelves in Great Britain, then it will be available in supermarket shelves in Northern Ireland.
We will still need to make sure that goods moved into Northern Ireland dont risk bringing in animal and plant diseases.
But thats clearly a common-sense measure, never opposed by anyone
to prevent diseases circulating within the long-standing Single Epidemiological Zone on the island of Ireland.
And, Mr Speaker,
That brings me to the treatment of parcels.
If the Protocol was fully implemented, every single parcel travelling between Great Britain and Northern Ireland would be subject to full international customs.
Youd have needed a long, complex form to send every single parcel even a birthday present for a niece or nephew.
And you could only have shopped online from retailers willing to deal with all that bureaucracy with some already pulling out of Northern Ireland.
Todays agreement fixes all of this.
It achieves something weve never achieved before - removing requirements of the EU customs code for people sending and receiving parcels.
Families can, rightly, send packages to each other without filling in forms.
Online retailers can serve customers in Northern Ireland as they did before.
And businesses can ship parcels through the Green Lane.
All underpinned by data sharing by parcel operators with a phased rollout and time for them to adjust.
So, Mr Speaker,
No burdensome customs bureaucracy.
No routine checks.
Bans on food products scrapped.
Steel tariff rate quotas fixed.
Tariff reimbursement scheme approved.
Vet inspections gone.
Export declarations gone.
Parcels paperwork gone.
We have delivered what the people of Northern Ireland asked for and the Command Paper promised.
We have removed the border in the Irish Sea.
But Mr Speaker,
To preserve the balance of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement, we also need to protect Northern Irelands place in our Union.
The Windsor Framework is about making sure that Northern Ireland gets the full benefit of being part of the United Kingdom in every respect.
Under the Protocol, in too many ways that simply wasnt the case.
Take tax.
When I was Chancellor, it frustrated me that when I cut VAT on solar panels or beer duty in pubs, those tax cuts didnt apply in Northern Ireland.
Now, weve amended the legal text of the Treaty, so that critical VAT and excise changes will apply to the whole of the UK.
This means zero-rates of VAT on energy-saving materials will now apply in NI.
Reform