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Select Committee on the European Union Uncorrected Oral Evidence: Progress of UK-EU Future Relationship Negotiations

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Select Committee on the European Union Uncorrected Oral Evidence: Progress of UK-EU Future Relationship Negotiations Select Committee on the European Union Uncorrected oral evidence: Progress of UK-EU Future Relationship Negotiations Thursday 25 June 2020 3 pm Watch the meeting Members present: The Earl of Kinnoull (The Chair); Baroness Couttie; Baroness Donaghy; Lord Faulkner of Worcester; Baroness Hamwee; Lord Kerr of Kinlochard; Lord Lamont of Lerwick; Lord Oates; Baroness Primarolo; Lord Ricketts; Lord Sharkey; Lord Wood of Anfield. Evidence Session No. 1 Virtual Proceeding Questions 1 - 13 Witness I: Hon Fabian Picardo QC, Chief Minister of Gibraltar. USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and webcast on www.parliamentlive.tv. 2. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither Members nor witnesses have had the opportunity to correct the record. If in doubt as to the propriety of using the transcript, please contact the Clerk of the Committee. 3. Members and witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Clerk of the Committee within 14 days of receipt. 1 Examination of witness Hon Fabian Picardo QC. Q1 The Chair: Good afternoon, Fabian, and welcome back. For those watching in the UK, Fabian Picardo QC MP is the Chief Minister of Gibraltar. We are grateful that you are exposing yourself yet again to a grilling from us. It is enormously helpful, particularly at this time. This is a public evidence session of the European Union Committee in the House of Lords, held in the House of Lords virtual system. As such, a transcript will be taken and we will send that to you. We would be grateful if you could check it in due course and make sure that there are no errors in that transcript. I thought I should explain the format, which is a bit different from the usual one. We have prepared some questions and we have a running order of members of the Committee, who will each have up to five minutes to ask you questions. We will then move on and I will call the next member, and we will go through like that. At the end, if there is still some time, there will be a sort of injury time list of questions, where members have two minutes to ask additional questions. Given that time is short, I will start. To bring things to what has been going on for the last 100 days, I wondered if you could tell us how Gibraltar has responded to the Covid-19 outbreak and how you would characterise the co-operation you have had from both the Spanish and UK authorities. Fabian Picardo: My Lords, good afternoon. Thank you so much for taking a continued interest in Gibraltar. I see this much less as a grilling and much more as an opportunity to share with members of the upper Chamber the experiences of the Government of Gibraltar, in the context of both the ongoing negotiations as to the future relationship between Gibraltar, the United Kingdom and the rest of the European Union, and, indeed, the times in which we live, the way the virus has affected Gibraltar and how we have got around it. It is not just those two, but how they have interplayed with each other. I must emphasise that I am welcoming you to Gibraltar because, for the first time, I am giving evidence to the upper Chamber while sitting in my own office. It used to be a chapel in its day. You have introduced me to a splendid new experience. You have made my office feel a little like Hogwarts. I have walked through the usual door and ended up in the Palace of Westminster. It is, indeed, a pleasure to give you this hybrid welcome to my usual place of work. To reflect a little on what has happened in Gibraltar in the past three and a half months and how we have dealt with the issue of coronavirus, we have done so as a community, very much in unity. The Government have followed public health advice assiduously and worked with our equivalent of the NHS, the Gibraltar Health Authority, not just to ensure that we were dealing with the issues manifesting in the infection but also in getting ready to deal with more serious cases that might have required 2 hospitalisation. As a result, we upgraded the amount of beds that had ventilated capacity in our ICU by over 500% and we opened a Nightingale ward in a sports centre in Gibraltar, which served as an additional ward to our St Bernard’s Hospital. We have been blessed in being able to tackle the coronavirus as a real community, with a team spirit that has enabled us to face down the first round of the arrival of coronavirus on our shores. The death toll in Gibraltar has been zero. The number of persons infected in Gibraltar today, for the ninth consecutive day, is zero. We had a maximum number of persons infected that ascended to 176, if the statistic does not fail me, but it may have been 184. None of them was serious. We had some people in our wards and some in our intensive care unit. Nobody with coronavirus required any serious intervention or ventilation as a result of coronavirus. The key to our success was that we locked down early and in stages. When I came back from seeing the Prime Minister in mid-March, on the aircraft and having received public health advice as we began our flight back to Gibraltar, the Deputy Chief Minister and I were able to consult the Attorney-General. Both of them are with me. I was also flying back with the Financial Secretary that day. I was able to consult the Attorney- General on the proportionality of steps that we intended to take on landing, with the support of the Cabinet. That included closing down restaurants, cafeterias and bars in Gibraltar. We did that quickly. We then confined our over-70s immediately because we understood that they were most at risk. A week later, we took the next step. In keeping with our approach of including everyone in our decision-making, and of consultation with our parliamentary Opposition, the leader of the Opposition attended Cabinet as we made those decisions and shared with us his views. We shut down the economy of Gibraltar and locked down the whole population of Gibraltar. As a civil libertarian, that was a difficult step for me and for all members of my Cabinet to take, but it was absolutely the right decision. It led us to a difficult period, which will mean that we need strong opportunity for recovery, because the economic effects will be in Gibraltar as they have been around the world. But we can say that we have won the first round against Covid-19 and we are ready for when she comes round again. The Chair: How would you characterise the co-operation that you have had with the Spanish and UK authorities? Fabian Picardo: Thank you for reminding me of that limb of your question. In fact, one of the things that I discussed with the Prime Minister in London was how we might receive support from the United Kingdom in the procurement of PPE, which I know has been a vexed issue in the UK itself, and how the United Kingdom might assist us with issues relating to ventilator capacity. Also of importance in Gibraltar was that we 3 worked alongside the MoD on a MACA request, which the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary agreed to. We had support from the United Kingdom on procurement and military assistance to the civilian authorities, and an ongoing dialogue with the UK authorities, and with the NHS and Public Health England at a professional level, over the procurement of all the necessary materials for swabbing and testing, et cetera. In particular, we liaised with an NHS trust that includes a consultant epidemiologist, Nick Cortes, a Gibraltarian working in the United Kingdom. That has been a very fluid process. I established a platinum command when I declared a major incident, which included the Deputy Chief Minister, the Minister for Civil Contingencies and our civil contingencies head, as well as the Commander British Forces in Gibraltar and the Governor of Gibraltar, so that we could cover all aspects of our separate responsibilities, in case we had issues relating to internal security as a result of what we feared might be the worst consequences of Covid-19 sweeping through Gibraltar. That was a very strong relationship between Gibraltar and the United Kingdom. At the same time, we found that this difficult moment for mankind brought the politics of the Spain-Gibraltar issue to a new pass, at a moment when we received immediate communication from the Spanish Ministry of the Interior, which has responsibility for the frontier crossing. I spoke directly to the Spanish Minister of the Interior, Señor Fernando Grande-Marlaska, about the lockdown not preventing workers coming to do key jobs in Gibraltar from crossing the frontier. Indeed, the Foreign Secretary of Spain, Ms Arancha González Laya, also spoke to me about issues relating to cross-frontier movement and how they would be managed. We enjoyed a strong relationship with the Spanish public health authorities. They enabled the movement of swabs from individuals suspected to have Covid from Gibraltar to Spanish laboratories, which assisted us in taking the load before we were able to do our own testing and verification, and continued movement of health supplies to Gibraltar, despite the Spanish state of alarm preventing the movement of health supplies other than in keeping with the directions of the Government.
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