Trade Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 13th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I speak to offer the Green group’s support for Amendment 46 and closely associate myself with the remarks of the noble Lords presenting it, particularly the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bull.

I was going to be brief but I really want to respond to what the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, said. She suggested that the amendment seeks to recreate what was lost. No, it is trying to save what is threatened: the businesses, livelihoods and professional lives of people who have, as the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, alluded to, spent many years studying—and invested their time, energy and finances—to develop lives that are now under serious threat.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bull, in her useful setting out of the different ways in which the exchange has happened, spoke about where services are an integral component of a good being sold. We think of companies that have offered long-term service contracts for goods sold into the EU and EEA and the difficulties that they might experience in continuing those service contracts unless we have the kind of mobility framework offered here. We are now on a rescue mission.

I do not think anyone else has referred to this in detail but we have to go back to what we will be missing if we do not have the opportunity for EU/EEA citizens to come into the UK under this kind of mobility framework. There is the important area of language studies. Sadly, we have seen some documentation since the vote in 2016 showing that interest in language study, at least in our schools, has actually fallen. If we are to continue to operate in this world, where we are going to have much more complex relationships with other countries in Europe than we do now, we will desperately need those language skills. The reciprocal side of this is of course that Britons have the very valuable skill of being native English speakers that they can take around the continent and beyond.

We need to have quality of language teaching and development of language skills in the UK. Most of the teaching assistants in our schools are native speakers from other parts of Europe. These are crucial issues, so I commend the amendment to the House.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I too support the amendment. It is very important, and noble Lords who have spoken have made some very good arguments in favour of it. As we all know, free movement within the EU has been very important for education, services and other businesses as well as for people getting to know each other. It could easily and should still happen after Brexit, but that needs the Government to support the idea positively and proactively even after we have left.

Transport is of course part of mobility. It must be cheap, reliable and accessible. Although Covid-19 has caused a massive reduction in demand, it is still there and it still needs to be there. However, the situation regarding the Government’s support is still very confusing and uncertain for services and their users. I have been trying to get answers from the Government for several months on how much in loans, guarantees or grants they have given to each of the international transport sectors, by which I mean air, sea, road and rail. I have had two Written Answers saying that that information per sector is commercially confidential. Surprisingly, maybe, I got a letter from the noble Baroness, Lady Vere, this morning saying that providers have many options as to how to find money, but with no comparators.

I can see why the noble Baroness could not see tell me about comparators. If one digs a little deeper, one finds that in the maritime sector—ferries—the Public Accounts Committee recently reported that the Government had written off £85 million for cancelled ferry contracts, which included a settlement with Eurotunnel of £33 million because apparently the Government had forgotten that Eurotunnel took the same kind of traffic that the ferries do. Noble Lords will remember that the Government spent £14 million on a company called Seaborne Freight, which owned a non-existent ferry and whose terms and conditions of carriage on its website appeared to have been copied from an online takeaway.

In the air sector, airlines have had soft loans to keep them alive. The noble Baroness said in a Written Answer that the Government were

“working closely with the aviation sector to support it to ensure there is sufficient capacity”.

They have spent £3 billion on keeping the franchise railways going, and that is good, but for cross-channel rail there is not a penny to ensure sufficient capacity. According to a presentation by the High Speed 1 chief executive Dyan Crowther to the all-party rail group last week, Eurostar has received no government guarantees or support and is likely to reduce the number of trains a day that it operates, possibly to between three and five or even fewer in order to survive. These are of course low-emission services, and I remind Ministers that, according to Eurostar, if all the passengers who took Eurostar in the last few years were to transfer to air, the increase in emissions would be equivalent to 40 new Luton Airports. We love Luton Airport but the emissions from 40 of them is hard to imagine.

Is there a solution? I suggest there are many that the Government ought to adopt. The European Union Council has adopted emergency measures to give member states the opportunity to reduce infrastructure charges to zero for trains. Italy and France are thinking about it, Austria has done it and the UK could do the same; it would be nothing to do with Europe but they could do it for HS1 to reduce the track access charges to just the direct costs. That might cost HS1 about £100 million but let us not forget that the Government made about £2 billion selling HS1 to the private sector, so they could afford to do this through HS1. It would mean that all train operators got the same benefit on that loan.

I hope the Minister can provide some comfort that Eurostar services can survive, providing the availability of a cost-effective and environmentally friendly transport service for those who want to work, live or study for the purpose of trade and goods. It would be a disaster if it were forced to close.

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, we all owe a great deal of thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Fox, for his amendment and for the very good speech that he made in support of his arguments. We have read them before but they have not gone away since we discussed them in 2019, and I look forward to seeing how the Minister responds to them. There were also some other very good speeches, particularly—although it is invidious to choose—those of the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, who put the case for the creative industries extraordinarily well, with a devastating analysis of the problems that they face.

This issue is primarily about how services are going to be dealt with after the transition period ends. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bull, put it, the issues that we face affect all trade but these days most trade in goods is also wrapped into a service that is provided; she quoted the figures for Rolls-Royce, which I think are instrumental. We need to be sure that the arrangements that are made post transition for this area are well founded and will continue. I assume that that means GATT, which will be applying, and its four pillars, which she talked about: the ability to operate in support of trade in-country, in another country, in support of the provision of services to that country and living and working there in order to provide such services as are required for that. These are important issues and we hope that they will get a full response from the Minister.

However, at the heart of the debate, in more ways than one, are the creative industries. We had an impassioned plea for more attention to be paid to the particular needs of the creative industries regarding mobility. That is not inappropriate in itself but it is also quite important to recognise that the creative industries are not having a good time at the moment, not least because of what appears to be a rather standoffish approach being taken by the Government, who question whether jobs in the creative industries are really “viable”. There is the extraordinary advert about looking for your next job when you are a ballet dancer and there is no reason why you should change, suggesting that the right thing to do is to move into cyber.

This is a bad time to raise this issue but it is one that needs to be raised. At the end of the day the creative industries, particularly the performing and visual arts, are about the personal and the sharing of personal experiences. Without people’s movement and engagement, it is difficult to see how those industries can survive, but it is important that they should. The question I want to leave with the Minister is this: will GATT be sufficient to ensure that the creative industries will thrive after the transition period comes to an end?