The UK will not “shy away” from legislating to change the Northern Ireland protocol without agreement from the EU, the Northern Ireland secretary has said, as Liz Truss prepares to tell the Commons about plans to unilaterally lift checks. The foreign secretary will tell MPs of plans to bring forward the draft legislation after a cabinet discussion on Northern Ireland. However, the timetable for the draft laws has slipped, with the text now only promised before the summer break, according to Whitehall sources. Brandon Lewis denied plans had been delayed after an alarmed response from Dublin and Washington, saying there had been no intention to put the full legislation before parliament this week. “Something like that this week was never on the cards. We’re still debating the Queen’s speech and won’t finish debating the Queen’s speech and voting on that until later this week, later tomorrow, so in that sense it was never on the cards,” Lewis told Sky News. “But what we have always said is that we will not take anything off the table. We will do what we need to do to ensure that products can move to Northern Ireland in the way that they should be able to move to Northern Ireland from Great Britain as part of the United Kingdom internal market, something the protocol itself says it will respect but at the moment is not working properly. The plans to take unilateral action were causing a “wobble” in Westminster on Monday night after the DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, went further than before in a press interview and warned he would not go back into the Stormont executive until new laws were “enacted” . Truss is expected to tell MPs of plans to legislate before the summer should renewed negotiations fail. Lewis said legislation remained the fallback option and the government hoped to return to talks. “We would like to do that by agreement with the EU but we reserve the right to do what we need to do to do the right thing for the people of Northern Ireland and the wider United Kingdom,” he said. Lewis said there were companies unable to operate under the current rules. “There are too many companies, including major supermarkets, at the moment who have no stores in the Republic of Ireland, who are moving their products from their depots in Great Britain into Northern Ireland for sale and consumption in Northern Ireland, but going through checks as if they were going into the EU,” he said. “That just doesn’t work and there are products that can’t travel that way.” He said there was an urgency to find a new solution because the EU proposals would increase the bureaucratic burden. The UK has already acted unilaterally to increase grace periods. “What sometimes gets missed in this is that what the EU is proposing now is that some of the checks we’ve had grace periods for – we are at a standstill at the moment where we are not fully applying some of the checks the EU wants – they actually want to bring those in, so they want to make matters materially worse for the people of Northern Ireland, and that’s just not viable,” Lewis said. Johnson said on a visit to Belfast that the UK did not want to scrap the Northern Ireland protocol, but believed it could be “fixed”. He told broadcasters: “We don’t want to scrap it. But we think it can be fixed. And actually five of the five parties I talked to today also think it needs reform.”