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European Council

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness and the noble Lord for their comments, but I am somewhat disappointed that they do not seem to have fully welcomed the fact that we have made sufficient progress and that we can now move to talk about the future. They have been saying that this is what they want for months, yet now we achieve it, unfortunately it seems that they are not as keen as perhaps they said they were originally.

To answer the noble Baroness’s question, we will start talking to the EU 27 about the shape of the future relationship and the details of the implementation period straightaway and the EU will be producing guidelines in March to further aid those discussions. The noble Baroness also asked about Gibraltar. I can confirm that the UK Government are committed to engage with the Crown dependencies and overseas territories, including Gibraltar, of course, as we prepare to exit the EU, to ensure that their interests and priorities are taken into account. We will never enter into arrangements under which the people of Gibraltar would pass under the sovereignty of any other state against their wishes. We had the fifth meeting of the UK-Gibraltar ministerial forum on 11 December with DExEU and Treasury Ministers taking part alongside the Chief Minister, Deputy Chief Minister, Financial Secretary and Attorney-General of Gibraltar, so I can assure her that we have Gibraltar’s interests at the centre of our thoughts and will continue to do so.

The noble Baroness asked about Erasmus. As she rightly acknowledged, the Prime Minister announced our intention to continue to participate in the Erasmus programme for at least another three years, until the end of the current budget period. Anything further than that is for the future negotiations, but that commitment shows how much we value the Erasmus programme and understand its importance. In relation to onward movement, I fear that I can say no more than I said last week: this was an issue we were hoping to resolve, it has not yet been resolved but we have been very clear that we want to come back to it at the next stage of the negotiations. On her question about the Fisheries Minister, he certainly managed to balance his responsibilities in representing the UK in the recent discussions with taking his role as a parliamentarian extremely seriously.

The noble Lord, Lord Newby, asked about citizens’ rights. As we have said all along, we wanted a reciprocal agreement on citizens’ rights and that is what we have agreed. We now want to make sure that we turn the agreement into the legal agreement we will see in the withdrawal and implementation Bill. He asked about

the sectoral reports. Everyone can see them, they are available for anyone to see and I certainly encourage all noble Lords to do so.

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