19
Examination of witnesses
Marco Cillario, Deborah Annetts and Luke Petherbridge.
Q147 The Chair: Welcome, everybody, to the hybrid House of Lords and to the European Affairs Committee for a public evidence session this afternoon. It is a public evidence session in our inquiry into the future of UK-European Union relations. In particular, this is about the mobility of people in various sectors—the creative sectors, the travel sectors and the professional sectors—all in one go.
We are pleased to have with us an extremely good panel of people. We have, from the freshly renamed Independent Society of Musicians, Deborah Annetts—welcome back, Deborah—who has been helpful in the past. From the Law Society, we have Marco Cillario. From the Travel Association, we have Luke Petherbridge. We all know who you are, but those who are watching do not. I would be grateful if when you speak for the first time you could, just in a sentence or two, describe yourself and the organisation that you represent today.
It is a public evidence session, so a transcript will be taken and we will send that on to you. We would be grateful if you could check the transcript and notify us of anything that needs to be corrected. That is important because we will use the transcripts for the purposes of our report. It may well be very important indeed.
We have only an hour this afternoon and we have quite a lot of canvas to cover. I would be grateful if you could keep your answers pretty crisp. I would be grateful to my colleagues if they could keep their questions pretty crisp as well so that we can get through the full set of questions.
I will begin. At a high level, because we will get into a lot of the low level as we go through the question sets, could you assess the overall impact of Brexit so far on the mobility of professionals in your respective sectors between the EU and the UK, and indeed vice versa? Mr Petherbridge, because we have heard less about your sector, what has the overall impact of Brexit been on tourism between the UK and the EU and vice versa? I will begin with Deborah Annetts.
Deborah Annetts: Thank you so much for arranging this evidence session. The ISM is grateful for it. I am chief executive of the ISM, which has been going since 1882. We promote the art of music and we look after the interests of many thousands of musicians across the music sector, from classical to pop and rock and emerging genres such as bells on our phones and so on. We have a broad range of experience.
Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster for music. Before Brexit, before we had the TCA, musicians could travel freely backwards and forwards to the EU. We had—and I hope will have again—a thriving creative industries sector. Post Brexit, musicians are telling us that it is simply economically not viable to tour into the EU anymore. The figures do not work. They have almost given up, I would say.
The Chair: Thank you for that sobering beginning. I will move to Luke Petherbridge.
Luke Petherbridge: Thank you very much for having us here today. I am the director of public affairs at ABTA, the UK Travel Association. We represent around 3,900 consumer brands within the travel industry. That is everyone from listed companies through to specialist tour operators and independent high street travel agents. Prior to the pandemic, our combined turnover of membership was about £40 billion annually.
On the impact on tourists and then tourism businesses, I will start with tourists and travellers. I characterise what has happened so far as being a series of additional hassles and hurdles that you have to go over, which have made the experience of travelling between the UK and the EU slightly less seamless than it was before we had the TCA in place.
Primarily, there are challenges around the 90 in 180-day rule for UK nationals’ ability to remain within the Schengen zone in the European Union. Then there have been a variety of other changes. Of course, we were never part of the Schengen area and so we have always had passport checks, but you now need to have your passport stamped . We use third-country lanes at airports and ports, which leads to delays and queues in certain instances. For business travel in particular, there is a series of new restrictions and rules around business activities in Europe, which vary from country to country and so you need to check that with each country before you travel. There are also restrictions on what equipment you can take with you when you travel to the European Union and value thresholds around customs declarations, which are an inconvenience. That is the tourist side.
Our members primarily are tourism businesses, travel businesses, tour operators, coach operators and the like, selling holidays from the UK to the European Union. For those businesses, the experience has led to huge operational challenges, particularly with getting their staff into the European Union.
Prior to our departure from the European Union, just to give a bit of context, we had about 20,000 staff a year posted under the posted workers directive from the UK into the European Union to support tourists on their holidays. Those were chalet hosts, ski guides, travel reps, nannies, performers and a variety of positions. About 5,000 in addition to that were hired on local contracts within the European Union, primarily under freedom of movement rights.
We no longer have freedom of movement or indeed the posted workers directive and the ability to utilise that fully. You need to get a visa for longer-term stays in any Schengen country. As a result, there is an additional cost to fill many typical tourism roles and a lot of red tape for businesses to go through that. While the TCA includes some short-term tourism personnel facilitations, there are a number of problems with that.
The 90 in 180-day rule is a big one. The typical tourism season is about six months, whether that is the winter season or the summer season. Clearly, the 90-day rule does not last long enough for tourism workers to remain in destination under those facilitations. For certain sectors, that is particularly challenging. Coach drivers, for example, would have been in the European Union for upwards of 200 days a year. They cannot, clearly, get a visa in certain member states because they are not residents of that member state. They do not remain in one member state; they drive across the European Union or across different states, transiting across Europe. That is not an option for them.
We have also had issues around mutual recognition of professional qualifications, which is limiting some of the roles that UK nationals can fill, and indeed national derogations. Even within the kinds of flexibilities that exist for short-term personnel, there are national derogations around things like nationality requirements. For example, in France, you have to be an EU national to be a tour guide. Of course, that no longer applies to UK nationals; therefore, we cannot provide tour-guiding services in France.
The Chair: Thank you very much. They were more sobering words. We will come back to a lot of the detail of this, of course, later in the question set. Marco?
Marco Cillario: Thank you. I am the international policy manager at the Law Society of England and Wales. We represent about 200,000 solicitors in England and Wales. It is the largest legal profession in the UK. A number of them operate internationally, and Europe has historically been the single largest market for legal services exports.
The way this has historically been done has been through what we call “fly in, fly out”, which is when a lawyer gets a call from a client based, for example, in Germany, flies there, spends perhaps a couple of days there in client meetings providing legal advice and then flies back. Pre-Brexit, it was pretty straightforward. You would get a call from a client and be there the following day to provide legal advice and perhaps at the same time provide legal advice back into the UK, whether by phone or e-mail, and then fly back with no issues.
Post-Brexit and after the end of freedom of movement, this has become considerably more complicated. The lack of clarity is such that this in many cases prevents lawyers even attempting to travel in the first place. This is because, as was mentioned by Luke, we are dealing not just with the EU as a bloc when it comes to short-term mobility and immigration but with 27 different countries. There is a variety of rules as to what someone can do as a short-term business visitor, what the conditions are to get a visa, the processing times and the costs. Lawyers in particular tend to be risk averse. If they are not sure that they are compliant, they prefer not to do something. This is having a real impact on the competitiveness of the sector across the EU.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Lord Wood is joining us remotely.
Q148 Lord Wood of Anfield: Hello. Thanks for those initial answers. I guess they all touch on what I want to ask about, which is to try to understand what the main factors are behind these changing patterns of professional mobility between the EU and the UK. From the opening remarks, in the case of music you talked about the costs and related issues. I have friends who are musicians who have insurance and things like that.
To what extent in your different areas is it driven by cost, by visa availability or by lack of recognition of professional qualifications? Maybe you could each give us a summary of the main factors that drive the problems that you have identified, starting with Deborah.
Deborah Annetts: Thank you very much. We have some similarities with both travel and the law, but the issue with musicians is that they tend to need a musical instrument as well to be able to perform. It is absolutely fundamental that they are able to take their musical instrument with them across the channel. That sounds so easy and it has become incredibly problematic because of something called carnets. You need to make sure that you have a carnet, which costs many hundreds of pounds, if it is not a portable instrument. There are lots of conversations around what is a portable instrument that you can stick on your back and take through customs. Irrespective of what the rules may say, not all customs officials across the EU have read them and, therefore, we get reports back of overly officious customs officials in France fining our musicians for not having a carnet when in fact they were totally in line with the rules. There is a lack of understanding about the rules across the various EU countries and how they should apply to UK musicians post-Brexit.
The next one I will look at is cabotage. I did not even know the word “cabotage” until 18 months ago. Cabotage, basically, is about the driving of trucks. The TCA has rules around what kind of truck can go where. In particular, anything over 3.5 tonnes can do only three movements in the EU. That means that an orchestra in the UK, which often has bought its own truck or the Arts Council has funded the purchase, can now go to the EU only for a short hop and then back. Otherwise, it will break the cabotage rules. Sometimes it hires trucks in the EU to be able to do multiple visits but, when the SNO did that, it found it cost £20,000. Again, the tour was simply not economically viable.
On top of this, there are rules around merchandise, with merchandise getting impounded, again by customs officials, rather than making it to wherever the gig is and equipment getting stuck with customs officials, again because of carnet rules. The band White Lies was supposed to perform in Paris and had to cancel its gig because its equipment was stuck somewhere. It is not just about musicians’ mobility. There is a whole heap of other rules that musicians need to comply with.
I will finish with one last bit, which is so ridiculously complicated that it is untrue. It is something called CITES, which is all about endangered species and applies to musical instruments and things like bows. To get a CITES stamp, you have to go through a designated port. We have been saying to the UK Government now for about two years, “For goodness sake, make Eurostar a designated port. That would ease the bureaucracy on musicians.” We have just heard that that will not happen. Even things that would assist in relieving bureaucracy are not happening. For musicians, it is not just about getting from A to B; it is about getting trucks, equipment, merchandise and musical instruments across the channel and then across EU borders as well.
Marco Cillario: I mentioned the lack of clarity. Business travel, as are all EU-UK relations, is now regulated by the TCA. The TCA has a section on business mobility, Articles 140 to 145. For the legal sector—and it is probably not the only sector that would say this—those provisions are rather disappointing. The reason is that the provisions do not fit with the way lawyers tend to work in practice.
I could spend a lot of time describing why that is, but I will focus just on one category of business travellers in particular, which is short-term business visitors. This category can travel to the EU and, if they are EU citizens, into the UK without a visa or a work permit and they can do some business-related activities for up to three months in any six-month period. However, by and large, they cannot charge clients for services provided as short-term business visitors. This is causing a lot of issues for the sector because, on the one hand, if a client calls you to go to Brussels tomorrow, replying that you are stuck because of your visa processing time is not a good response, but at the same time no one wants to be at risk of being non-compliant. The result is that they will hold off travelling because of the risk of being non-compliant with the limitation on what short-term business visitors can do in the EU.
As I said, the TCA is disappointing. However, it is not all doom and gloom. There are provisions in the TCA that would be of huge help to the legal sector, and I suspect to other sectors as well. In particular, Article 145 commits both the UK and the EU to make publicly available information that relates to circumstances in which you need a visa, processing times for visas and procedures to obtain visas. It is detailed and it is pretty straightforward, unlike a lot of other parts of the TCA.
The problem is that this article has not been implemented yet almost two years since the TCA was signed. The UK has done a better job than many EU member states in implementing this article. If you are an EU citizen travelling into the UK, you find a lot of the information you are looking for, but if you are a UK citizen travelling to most EU member states, you will not find this information publicly available. The commitment is there in the TCA, but EU member states have not implemented it so far.
Luke Petherbridge: From our side, the fundamental challenge is that the tourism season tends to last for six months, whether that is a winter season or a summer season, and we have that 90 in 180-day rule. That means you have to obtain visas in 26 of the 27 EU member states, the exception being Ireland, if you want to offer tourism services. That is the fundamental challenge.
Then we have mutual recognition of professional qualifications, which has fallen away. For example, we used to be able to provide tour guiding services in Malta. We no longer can because they no longer recognise the UK qualifications. We have similar challenges around cabotage for coach companies. They are no longer able to pick up or drop off people within the European Union, which provides a challenge.
All this has led to, fundamentally, a decline in UK nationals working in tourism roles overseas. We did a survey with Seasonal Businesses in Travel, which is a group we work closely with on this issue, and it showed a 30% decline in the number of UK nationals working in tourism roles within the European Union in the years directly following the referendum. That will almost certainly have fallen a lot further once we are able to do another assessment. Of course, Covid has meant we are yet to have a Covid-free year—we have had a summer season, but we have not had a winter season. We will do this in the coming months. It almost certainly will have fallen further because there are a number of destinations and countries now across the European Union where you cannot get a visa for the types of roles that UK nationals used to fill to support UK tourists overseas.
The example of France shows how complicated it can be even where visa rules exist. A lot of work has been done with the French Government to demonstrate the economic importance of UK tourism to France. It is worth about €7.5 billion a year to the French economy and supports 37,000 jobs in France directly and about 100,000 on top of that. There is a visa regime in France that is available to UK tourism workers. However, in the years immediately after the TCA came into force, we saw a 75% decline in the number of UK nationals working in France because it is a complicated system.
UK ski operators, for example, starting at the moment the season for the coming winter, have to go through a five-phase process. There are several steps within each phase. Fundamentally, you have to advertise in France initially to demonstrate that a French national could not do that job that you hope to bring a UK worker in for. You then have to have identity and medical checks in both the UK and in France, including chest X-rays for tuberculosis after arrival. The whole process takes between eight and 12 weeks minimum. It is fundamentally difficult and an operational challenge, and that is country which is working pretty closely with the industry to put such systems in place. A number of countries simply do not have visa regimes.
Lord Wood of Anfield: Wow. Thank you very much, all three of you.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick: To what extent has the travel industry taken on board the additional problems that will be caused if the EU tightens up its treatment of British tourists going to the European Union, which I gather is in the offing to come into force about the end of next year?
Luke Petherbridge: I assume you are referring to two schemes. We have the entry and exit checks coming into place in May. They are biometric checks on UK travellers going to the European Union. Across the industry, there is pretty widespread concern about that being introduced. It will dramatically increase the processing time for UK tourists. At certain ports, particularly the port of Dover, for example, how that will work given the space challenges they already have will be incredibly difficult.
Then the visa scheme ETIAS, the European travel information and authorisation system, is coming in. That is, in effect, similar to the US ESTA. It will cost €7, last for three years, and you will require pre-authorisation to visit the European Union. Of course, we have never had to do that before, but it is a system, because the US scheme is in place, that British travellers are pretty familiar with. I would not expect that to have a huge consumer behavioural impact on travel patterns. Before the pandemic, about 74% of all outbound travel from the UK went to the European Union. I do not expect that to change fundamentally as a result of that coming in. Of course, the UK Government have their own electronic travel authority coming in in 2025 as well.
Q149 Lord Lamont of Lerwick: I want to ask my one question simply to Deborah. I understand entirely how difficult it has become for musicians. My question is about how far you would seek to improve things by trying to negotiate with the European Union and how far with individual national government. As I understand it—because I have heard you talk about this before—the UK Government claim to have improved conditions in respect of certain individual countries. You have disputed some of the claims they have made and you have also made the point that sometimes individual countries’ descriptions of their own regulations are not clear or accurate.
Would it be right to say that the only thing that can be done, which may be rather minimal to improve conditions, is with individual Governments of individual states rather than with the EU as a whole?
Deborah Annetts: You have put your finger right on the essence of the issue. There are different levels of legal competency. The TCA is a matter that rests between the UK and the EU. For instance, cabotage falls within that and can be unpicked only with a further development of the TCA.
Mobility falls into two different halves. Half of that, we believe, could be tackled via a visa waiver agreement, which would sit outside of the TCA and be negotiated with the EU. Lord Frost has said that it is a workable proposition. In our conversations with various government officials, they have also said that they believe it is legally viable. We believe that a carefully and tightly drafted visa waiver agreement would tackle one half of the problem around visas.
The work permit element is more complicated. We have 27 EU states, many of which have different rules even within the state itself. There are different regimes within Belgium and Germany. It makes it incredibly complicated. We would welcome the UK Government taking more of a lead in bilateral negotiation, particularly with states where, previously, UK performers have been working significantly; for example, Austria and Sweden, where there are quite difficult restrictions. We would ask DCMS to engage with those countries to see whether we could get to a better position on work permits.
That is the point. Not all EU states are the same. Our view is that you need to tackle the ones that are proving most problematic for the music industry. It is a multifaceted answer.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick: I remember that the Government claimed they had made big improvements on the work permits in Spain, but there seems to have been some dispute about that.
Deborah Annetts: Yes. My understanding is that other parts of the music industry believed that they had done the work and that the UK Government then claimed the victory. There was a feeling that that did not help partnership working and collaboration between the Government and various parts of the music industry. I was not party to that lobbying, which was done in Spain by the ABO. I think LIVE lobbied Spain as well. I am not sure how much the UK Government were involved.
That also leads on to a bit of a problem we face in music, in that DCMS simply does not have the teeth to tackle some of these problems, in my view.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick: Thank you. Sorry, what does that mean, it “does not have the teeth”?
Deborah Annetts: We have been having meetings of the touring working party now for close on two years and we just go around in circles. We do not see any progress.
Q150 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: I thank you also, Deborah Annetts, for the help you have given the committee over the time that we have been corresponding with various government departments in an exercise that sounds just about as frustrating as yours. Thank you for your help.
To what extent if any have changes been made so far to address the various difficulties—carnet, cabotage, visas and all these sorts of things—since the TCA came into effect? To what extent have there been any improvements at all? How successful have they been in the actual market? Have they shown any positive trends in the ability of performing artists and others to move around?
Deborah Annetts: Again, if we look at this, it is multidimensional. We have slightly better arrangements for mobility with Spain and Greece. The Greece arrangements are due for review this month but they are not huge. They are around the 90 in 180-day provision. Nothing else has changed with mobility. We still believe that a visa waiver agreement is a sensible way forward and there are indications from Lord Frost that he also now believes that perhaps the TCA was too strict when it came to the treatment of musicians.
On cabotage, there is a workaround whereby if you wish to tour and you are a UK organisation, and you set up an EU operation with its own truck—so you need a fleet of trucks—you can get around the cabotage rules. That will not work for a British orchestra because it will not have a fleet of trucks. That will work only for big hauliers that look after people like Elton John. There has been no change on carnets.
On CITES, the situation is getting worse now we know that Eurostar will not be a designated port and the Government say they will charge for musical instrument certificates. That is linked to CITES, which will make the situation worse.
From the data that we are currently collecting—this is our current open, sixth survey post Brexit—musicians tell us that either they will move to the EU or they will just give up because they cannot make the figures work. We have to remember that music is trade. This is not about immigration; it is about trade. The music industry simply finds it very problematic to trade with this trade agreement.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Yes. I was going to ask you to say, in your dealings with the Government, whether there seems to be any awareness that this is an industry that produces huge benefits to the British economy. Do they quantify them? Do they recognise them? Do they show any concern that they may be reduced?
Deborah Annetts: We have not seen that. The music industry is part of the bigger creative industries, which is worth £116 billion per year—the same as financial services and the same as the construction industry. It is an important industry. It also generates soft power. We have not seen any indication from the Government that they understand the seriousness of not unpicking some of the damage that the TCA is doing to this industry.
Q151 Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: I thank you also for your evidence, although it has made me thoroughly depressed, I must say. You have made it clear that things are even worse than I had appreciated. Marco said that it is not all doom and gloom. It sounded pretty much all doom and gloom to me, although the lawyers might benefit in some ways. We would never get a pipe band into a European country at the moment, I would have thought, to play a lament, which would be appropriate.
How do we sort this? Can we improve the situation? What can we do unilaterally with each country? On what areas should we work multilaterally with the European Union? Is there any way that you can brighten my evening before I jump out the window?
Marco Cillario: I will go first since I said it is not all doom and gloom. I want to explain what I mean by that. There is a trade agreement with the EU, the TCA, and that is not all bad. It could be better; it could be improved. The good news is that it can be improved because there is a provision by which the TCA will be reviewed five years after coming into force in 2026. That is not miles away in trade terms and so work needs to begin now.
The even brighter news is that there is an article in the TCA that mentions specifically short-term business visitors, which I was referring to earlier—that category of business visitors who can travel without a visa for up to three months in a six-month period. It envisages a review of the activities that short-term business visitors can carry out in the mutual interests of the UK and the EU. We have this provision, Article 126, and we should use it. We should expand substantially the amount of activities and the types of activities that short-term business visitors can carry out.
Obviously, I represent the legal profession, so I will say that we should include the provision of legal services among those activities, and there are good reasons for that. One good reason for including it is that the UK already to an extent allows EU lawyers who come to the UK to provide legal services, so the UK would not need to change too much about its own immigration system. It would just be about clarifying better what activities can be carried out and getting the EU to agree to those and commit to them under the international agreement, the TCA.
That needs to be done with the EU, and so not just at a bilateral level but you need to negotiate with the Commission. The same goes for the implementation of Article 145, which I referred to earlier. When it comes to getting more clarity and implementing Article 145, the view of the Commission is that this needs to be implemented at member state level. For that, some work needs to happen on a bilateral level with each EU member state.
So there is something we can work with. At the moment, the situation is challenging for a number of professions, but it is important that we focus on what we have and we work on that basis, because we can achieve something and we should achieve it with the TCA.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: Thank you. Deborah, do you have any optimism at all?
Deborah Annetts: Not quite as much as the lawyers, I have to say. Perhaps the musicians should start becoming lawyers instead. We have so many problems across so many issues. It is not just about mobility, as I said; it is also about equipment, instruments and merchandise. That does make it more problematic.
We could sit down—possibly not with DCMS because it has not been the most proactive, but possibly with BEIS or even the Foreign Office—and say, “These are the areas where we need bilateral agreements in our industry. Can we just work through them in a logical fashion to try to increase the flexibility in terms of mobility?” and so on across the various issues that I have highlighted. Other elements are domestically changeable. I see no reason why Eurostar should not be a designated port, and I strongly urge the Government to encourage that.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: We could recommend that.
Deborah Annetts: Yes. Also, the Government should not introduce charges for musical instrument certificates vis-à-vis CITES. This profession is on its knees post Covid. It needs support. It does not need further charges. If we are not careful, we will see a lot of our emerging musical talent leave this country and go to the EU. That is not just because of Brexit; it is because of things like what is happening at the ENO. Those opera singers will not stay in this country. They will leave.
Ultimately, this is a seismic set of issues facing our cultural sector. I do not know whether we will have the same level of soft power deriving from the cultural sector in, say, 20 or 40 years’ time.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: Thank you. Luke, will we need a visa for every country of the European Union or could we negotiate something different?
Luke Petherbridge: We will need a new visa to visit the countries that are in the Schengen area. It will last for three years and be renewable. It is an online system.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: And we can go to countries outside the Schengen area without a visa. Could we not negotiate with any of the other Schengen area countries?
Luke Petherbridge: No, the Schengen area is within the Schengen code, so they will have to abide by that.
To pick up on some of the other points that were made by fellow panellists, I absolutely agree that, beyond 2026, we would welcome consideration of a mobility chapter within the trade and co-operation agreement. Clearly, for services sectors, not just travel but the others represented today, that simply is not there. Deborah said earlier that Lord Frost himself has acknowledged that the Government were too puritan about the issue of mobility. It is hurting significant UK industries. Our is an industry where you have £51 billion of spending in the UK economy every year by UK travellers before they travel overseas. The industry generates £49 billion in gross value added. The Government need to look again at important sectors of the UK economy that are let down by the current trade and co-operation agreement.
Part of that, clearly, is the mutual recognition of professional qualifications. That needs to be looked at. It is referenced in the trade and co-operation agreement that there will be further discussions on that, but we have seen little of any updated development in that area.
Outside of the trade and co-operation agreement—and to address the point about doom—there is stuff we could do right now that the Government simply are not being proactive about. A youth mobility scheme has been mentioned by a few people today. A youth mobility scheme already exists. The UK does that with Australia, New Zealand and many other countries around the world. We have recently extended it to Iceland, an EEA country. EU countries are negotiating it with other counties. It was referenced earlier that Italy signed a cultural exchange programme, essentially a mobility scheme, with Canada this year. This exists and can be used as a framework to start bilateral discussions to get around some of these issues and present a partial solution to industries like ours today.
As far as I can see, there is no good reason why the Government would not do this. It is not part of the wider controversial immigration debate, as was referenced earlier. There is no longer-term right to remain within youth mobility schemes. It is already there on the shelf. It baffles me, frankly, that we are not already looking at this as a country. When we have raised this with officials, the Government have repeatedly said that they are open to it, but we seem to have a passive approach. It seems to be very much, “If you approach me, I may have a discussion with you.” We need the Government to be out there proactively batting for important UK industries and that does not appear to be happening.
Also, areas of UK policy have an impact on sectors of the travel industry. For example, the UK’s approach to immigration generally—the one person, one document issue around entering the UK—has impacted the youth and school travel markets. It has effectively undermined collective passports and the list of travellers scheme. We support calls like those from the Tourism Alliance, UKinbound and others for a youth travel scheme. That could be negotiated outside the TCA. We ask that that be looked at. On things like ID cards, the UK Government are completely in charge of their own policy. Those are the asks we put forward.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock: It is good that we have people who know their stuff like you advising us on it. Thank you very much.
The Chair: I regret that the long-awaited vote will now happen. Could we please suspend the evidence session? The moment that we are quorate again, we will rebegin. We have two questions to go, from Lord Trenchard and from Baroness Scott in the “most patient” position. We will start again in about 10 minutes or so.
Committee suspended for a Division in the House.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Welcome back, everyone. The vote has happened. We have two substantive questions to go. The first is from Lord Trenchard.
Q152 Viscount Trenchard: The question I was going to ask has already been asked many times over, so I may digress slightly from what I was going to say.
I know a little bit about the music industry and the difficulties faced by musicians, because I must declare an interest. My son runs a music festival, and I am the chairman of a music festival business. I have had many British musicians complaining about not being able to go and play in Europe, whereas European musicians do not seem to have nearly such problems coming to play here in the UK.
This question is principally for Deborah. What else can we do? What changes to the mobility agreement arrangements do you anticipate would have any significant impact? You have talked about the possibility of a visa waiver agreement. Is there anything that has not been proposed that you think could reasonably be proposed? Deborah, could you give your comments on that first?
Deborah Annetts: There is hard negotiation, like the visa waiver agreement, which absolutely should be taken forward. By “hard”, I mean it is not soft power. It is a document that can easily be negotiated with the EU. We have taken extensive legal advice from Sarah Lee KC as to how a visa waiver agreement would work. We have a document that we have shared with DCMS, which is absolutely legally watertight. There are elements that are hard law, if you like.
Other things are softer types of collaboration. For instance, it is important that UK Members of Parliament continue to have a dialogue with EU MEPs. It is essential to keep that conversation going so that we can share the issues that are becoming clearer as the TCA develops.
The youth mobility scheme is important in creating opportunities for emerging artists and youngsters generally, so that we do not lose the concept of collaboration from the UK into the EU and vice versa.
Viscount Trenchard: Leaving aside the musicians themselves, lots of people go around with musicians with their kit, put up their stages, organise the sets and all that. Is it equally bad for them?
Deborah Annetts: It is very bad indeed. For instance, “War Horse”, which is a National Theatre production, was not able to tour in the EU because financially they could not make the figures work. The big theatre productions are having difficulties because of the costs around things like carnets, cabotage, CITES and so on.
It is exactly the same set of issues with anything that requires kit. Film is also affected, because that has a lot of kit with it, and likewise the pop and rock side of things, because they often come with vast amounts of sound engineering and so on and their own specific roadies, whom they now cannot work with. That has caused a big problem, because pop and rock stars like to have a particular set of people that they travel with, and they now cannot do that.
You have to understand how interdependent the relationships are within the creative industries to come up with a solution that will meet those various aspects. It is a complex ecology and it will require a multidisciplinary approach from top to bottom and side to side, whether you are looking at the hard law stuff like the visa waiver agreement or the softer types of collaboration that I have mentioned.
Viscount Trenchard: Thank you very much. Marco, I would like to ask more about the legal profession. Is this an area that the UK Government should discuss much more with member states? In your area, a lesser proportion of the difficult part is a union competence and there is more that remains member state national competence. Is that correct?
Marco Cillario: It depends on the issue. When we talk about rules on mobility in general, to the extent that these are negotiated or improved as part of the TCA, that is something that the UK Government should take up with the Commission. The Commission is keen to assert its role when it comes to EU-wide matters.
I was, however, referencing earlier the issue of clarity of rules, which affects many professions. To the extent that the clarity of rules is concerned, that is a matter that the UK should take up with individual member states, because the Commission itself has said that it is down to the member states to make information publicly available on these matters.
Viscount Trenchard: In your view, could the UK Government be doing more to engage with member states on that?
Marco Cillario: We certainly have not seen the full implementation of Article 145, so that has not happened yet. More work needs to be done there.
Viscount Trenchard: Okay. Thank you. Luke, I have listened with great interest to everything you have had to say, particularly in connection with the EU’s proposed new EU entry/exit system and what effect you think that will have.
Also, it seems to me that the UK has a new exit/entry system. I have travelled to the Far East twice in the last six weeks and I thought that one of the benefits of regaining control would be that, as a British citizen, I would go faster through immigration because the other EU member states would no longer have the right to come through my channel. But, in fact, they still do, and so do the Australians, the New Zealanders—I am not sure about the Americans—and many other countries’ nationals. As British citizens, we have less favourable treatment at immigration coming into our own country than we did before. I digress on to the UK’s entry/exit system, but I would like your comment on that as well as on the EU’s new entry/exit system.
Luke Petherbridge: Yes. The entry/exit checks that are coming in from the European side involve biometric checks. For the first time, when you travel to the European Union as a UK citizen, you will have to provide your biometric data. That process will take a significant amount of time. You are talking about at least several minutes as opposed to the 30 seconds or so that it may take you to pass through the border currently. Clearly, that will slow the process of moving passengers. It is less of an issue for airports, which have established processes; it is more of an issue for ports and, particularly, the port of Dover. I know several businesses in Kent have raised concerns with the UK Government about that issue.
The other challenge is connected to mobility. In relation to not being able to be in the European Union for more than 90 days in any 180-day period, to date, there has not really been an automated way of checking that. As soon as that system is turned on, there will be. For tourism workers, particularly coach drivers and the like, it will be not avoidable anymore. They will be able to see whether you have breached that limit. That will not just affect tourism businesses; it will also affect a growing number of UK tourists, I suspect, and we will begin to see people turned away, perhaps those who own second homes and the like in the European Union. That will be a pretty big challenge for the sector and drive home the problem around the 90 in 180-day issue.
On the UK side, the UK Government intend to drive as many people as possible to use e-gates to smooth the process at UK borders. Overall, I suggest that is probably a good thing for the operation of the UK border system, to be honest. That is what is driving that. But, of course, there are knock-on impacts. I mentioned earlier that one way in which you do that is to stop accepting things like ID cards, and you require one document from one traveller. That has knock-on impacts for things like the list of travellers scheme and collective passports. People under 18 can travel with a teacher in a group without the need for individual passports at the moment. That will not happen in future. That is impacting inbound and outbound school and youth group travel, which is why it is one of the areas we have said the UK Government should look at. It is not feasible—I certainly have not seen any evidence—to suggest that children are overstaying having been on a school group to the UK.
The Chair: Thank you very much. The final substantive question goes to our most patient colleague, Baroness Scott.
Q153 Baroness Scott of Needham Market: Luke, you have led quite nicely into the line of questioning, because I wanted to ask each of you about the mobility of young people, whether it is educationally, for work or for cultural activities. I will start with Marco. I originally thought maybe it would not impact on you, but “young people” means up to 30, or 35 if you are Australian, and so perhaps it does.
Marco Cillario: It does, absolutely. One point that I should have raised before is that I completely agree that the UK should negotiate youth mobility schemes with EU member states bilaterally. One thing to bear in mind about youth mobility schemes is that sometimes they are restrictive in the professions they cover. It is important that the UK considers closely which professions should be covered.
Obviously, I am going to say that the legal profession should be covered, and there are good reasons for this. This area is important for lawyers, because the way UK lawyers have traditionally been trained, particularly in the large number of firms that have an international outlook, is by spending, normally, six months during their training or immediately after they qualify in an EU member state. Many law firms have a network of offices across the EU. UK-headquartered firms will have branch offices across the EU. They have traditionally offered possibilities to their young lawyers to spend some time there to learn how a different office may operate and to build connections with clients. This has been important in the training and development of many lawyers who have then been successful in their careers.
It is even more important for smaller firms that do not have branch offices in the EU. While firms that have offices in the EU still have the option to send their young lawyers there through an intra-corporate transfer scheme—that is not the same as a youth mobility scheme, but it is still there—firms that do not have offices in the EU do not have that option and at the moment have no options. Youth mobility schemes will be important for the legal sector, and we call on the Government not to wait until 2026 for the review of the TCA but to negotiate youth mobility schemes bilaterally with the EU member states now.
Baroness Scott of Needham Market: Turning to you, Deborah, apart from the not inconsiderable challenges you have outlined for us today, are there any specifically for you around young people?
Deborah Annetts: Many in the creative industries start to learn their profession when they go to music college, theatre college and so on. They learn their skills in a professional context and are earning fees from about the age of 18 onwards. Traditionally, the way to build your career, particularly in music, was to work in Europe. Whether it is pop and rock or classical, it makes absolutely no difference; it is the way that you establish your name. Then you can come back to the UK or indeed go to the US with your reputation established. That is an incredibly important part of becoming a professional musician.
However, the way some EU states operate their work permits discriminates against youngsters who do not have a significant musical reputation. They look at a much higher fee for obtaining a work permit. I am thinking of Denmark here, where it is about £200 to get a work permit. That is problematic for an emerging musician, singer or whatever.
We see this as a longer-term issue. If we do not enable our emerging artists to have this opportunity, it will do harm to our creative industries in the long term. They simply will not build their reputations to become the Spotify success stories of the future. That is incredibly important for the UK economy. You have to look at this holistically and in the round. Everything is interdependent.
I want to add one other thing, which I should have added to the last answer. We are desperate for a cultural exemption. I urge the Government, when they get to the renegotiation of the TCA in 2026, to see whether we can construct a cultural exemption to deal with the various issues that I have highlighted today.
Baroness Scott of Needham Market: Is there anything specifically on young people that you think the Government could do now?
Deborah Annetts: It is problematic, because it hits into all the other issues that I have raised such as cabotage and so on, but let us definitely have a look at the youth mobility scheme and see whether that can be broadened out.
Luke Petherbridge: I echo Deborah’s points about route into industry. Traditionally, the ability to work in Europe as a travel rep, a ski guide or whatever has been a rich source of career development within the travel industry. If we look at the travel industry at the moment, we see that many business leaders started as travel reps or ski guides or in these roles that you are no longer able to do or certainly will not be able to do in the same numbers moving forward as a young UK national within the European Union. We have that longer-term concern about blocking some of the pathway into our industry.
Clearly, there is a soft power element to tourism as well. UK tourists are incredibly important to local economies across the European Union. For many EU countries, their main source of income or one of their leading economic sectors. There is a mutual beneficial argument that you can make there.
A youth mobility scheme would benefit not just the outbound traveller sector but the inbound sector as well, which relies on many of the language skills that perhaps we do not have in the UK. Germany is a huge source market for the UK inbound tourism market, for example. There is language development itself. One of the ways you learn languages is to go and live and experience culture and experience life in European countries or countries overseas. We have blocked the ability for young UK nationals to do that at the moment. It seems deeply regrettable that we have done that. The UK Government should look at that, particularly as we include it in trade deals all over the place at the moment. It seems illogical that we will not look at it with our nearest economic partners.
Q154 The Chair: Thank you very much. That was the end of the substantive questions. I have one tiny little question.
We have managed to get through without mentioning Covid. If we had been having this evidence session a year ago, we might have been worried about whether some of the effects we have been talking about are Covid related or are Brexit related. Very briefly, because it is the end of the session, would you like to make any Covid-related points so that we are sure that the Covid effect is properly understood by us? Perhaps I could start with Marco and work across.
Marco Cillario: Looking at it now, the main impact of Covid is that the period of time in which we really see what Brexit means for mobility is a lot shorter than it would appear. When the UK left the single market and customs union, when the transition period ended at the end of 2020, most of Europe was in lockdown or had travel bans. At that point and for the best part of the next 18 months, we could say there would be no travel anyway because of Covid rather than because of the new rules post Brexit.
I do not know what the other panellists’ view will be, but the issues that we see now in relation to business travel and mobility are entirely down to Brexit. As far as international travel is concerned, Covid is by and large out of the way, but there are all the issues that the three of us have listed that are entirely down to Brexit.
Some may say, “Well, in the post-Covid era, more people are working digitally, so why would, for example, a lawyer need to travel to the EU when they can provide advice remotely from the UK?” There is still a substantive difference between meeting a client in person, particularly for what are often confidential discussions, and seeing a client on the screen, particularly when your EU competitors have no issues with meeting clients in person.
Yes, Covid is out of the way. It means we have a smaller period of time to assess, but that does not mean that we cannot assess the impact of Brexit.
Deborah Annetts: We have been tracking the impact of Brexit since 2016. That is when we did our first Brexit report. By 2017, we started picking up comments from respondents saying that they were now not getting auditions because of the threat of coming out of the EU. This has increased year on year to 2022, when UK respondents are saying that they cannot get auditions in the EU and they cannot get work in the EU because of their nationality. They are seen as far too costly. That is pretty much across the board. It is absolutely a line increasing year on year. It is nothing to do with Covid; this is purely Brexit.
Luke Petherbridge: I agree with Marco’s comments. Covid has depressed the travel industry, or travel. We were the first in and the last out of Covid. Travel restrictions were lifted only in March 2022. I said earlier that we have not had a full year, of both a summer and a winter season, yet without significant Covid restrictions. That makes it difficult to assess any impact on volume of travellers.
To be honest, I do not expect there necessarily to be a large impact on the volume of leisure travellers. For business, it is more interesting to look at, but even this year we would anticipate getting back to only three-quarters or maybe 70% of business travel from where we were. It will take some time to disentangle that piece.
However, we should not be mistaken in any sense. A lot of the challenges we have discussed today are not about Covid. It is not Covid that has created the 90 in 180-day rule for UK nationals. It is not Covid that has created the costs associated with obtaining visas and work permits in the European Union. It is not Covid that is blocking off the route for young UK nationals to enter industries like the travel industry in the way that they have done for many decades. That is clearly Brexit.
The Chair: Thank you all very much. We will end it there. It has been a fascinating tour through some of the less obvious areas and issues that need to be addressed in the coming period between us and the European Union. We are grateful to you for sparing the time this afternoon to give such clear evidence all round. With that, I will declare the evidence session over.
