A Labour peer is launching a bid to avert a fresh energy crisis with potential power cuts and drastic electricity price rises in Northern Ireland as a result of proposed Brexit legislation.
The former Northern Ireland secretary Peter Hain will table an amendment to the Northern Ireland protocol bill in the House of Lords on Wednesday to protect the so-called single energy market (SEM), which allows power to be traded with the island of Ireland as one economic unit.
He fears that if the bill were to become law access to the SEM would disappear, disrupting Northern Ireland’s energy supply.
Such is the significance of the SEM that two years ago government officials feared thousands of electricity generators sited on barges would have to be sent to the Northern Ireland coast to maintain energy supplies in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
“It is our duty – not the EU’s – to keep the lights on in Northern Ireland,” said Lord Hain.
“If the EU decides to prevent the continued free flow of goods and electricity across the Irish border because of the removal of CJEU [the court of justice of the European Union] from the protocol, it would be not a sign of its malintent but rather a well-flagged consequence of the wanton recklessness of the government in writing the bill in this way,” he is expected to tell peers in the House of Lords.
The single energy market is seen as a triumph of cooperation between Northern Ireland and the republic in the post-Troubles era.
Whitehall papers leaked in 2018 suggested that electricity bills could rise by up to £200, diesel generators would be needed to keep power supplies running and energy companies could collapse.
Hain said the impact of the skeleton protocol bill going through the Lords involves “unknowable consequences” because “so much of its effect will come through powers that are neither clearly demarcated nor spelled out”.
He added that he did not doubt that a continuing role for the European court of justice could be finessed to sustain the SEM but it would have to be negotiated outside this bill.
“By amending the bill to avoid such a situation in which the removal of the CJEU jurisdiction could have unintended consequences for the operation of the single electricity market – which the government has been clear it wishes to keep fully functioning – we would at least ensure no disruption to electricity supplies in NI even if it loses free access to the EU’s single market for goods,” Hain will say.
Labour stepped up its campaign to halt the Northern Ireland protocol making it to the statue books intact, with 22 amendments tabled 10 days ago.
Jenny Chapman, a shadow Cabinet Office minister in the Lords, told the Guardian the bill was “an abomination, undermining the UK’s hard-won reputation as a responsible, trustworthy partner” and called on the government to “scrap this reckless legislation”.
