Trade (Australia and New Zealand) Bill

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 12th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Thomas]

I hope my hon. Friend accepts that the case I am making for providing serious and detailed impact assessments for future trade deals will help to ensure that his point gets proper consideration in future.

I hope that new clauses 13 and 14 remind Ministers of the significance of trade for working people and of the need for trade to play its part in helping to tackle climate change and accelerate progress towards net zero. When the Australia deal was negotiated, two Conservative Governments, both with distinctly underwhelming records on climate and workers’ rights, were in the negotiating room. In this country, the Conservative party has consistently sought to exclude representatives of working people in the trade unions from all significant consultation on trade deals. The trade deals that we as a country sign should raise standards, support better employment and help to tackle climate change instead of, as the Conservative party seems to want, heralding a race to the bottom.

We have tabled amendment 1 to stimulate serious and sustained detailed consultation with all the nations and regions of the United Kingdom on the details of the chapters of the trade deals. It is a reminder to Ministers of the need to step up and improve further their discussions with the devolved Administrations and with the regions of England about the impact of deals on specific communities and economic sectors. My hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Dame Nia Griffith) gave the example in Committee of farmers in Wales, where 85% of the beef and 60% to 65% of the sheepmeat produced are consumed in the UK. There is genuine concern about the impact of a huge hike in tariff-free quotas of meat from Australia and New Zealand on our farmers’ ability to sell into our markets, with all the obvious implications for rural communities, family farms and economic, social and cultural life.

There are similar concerns across the regions of England, in Scotland and in Northern Ireland. The Select Committee on International Trade heard evidence that the Department cannot yet model fully the impact of trade deals on the nations and regions of the UK. That is all the more reason for better consultation before new trade regulations come into force.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

On livestock and meat, is not it the case that a sizeable amount of our imports comes not from Australia or New Zealand—and they would not under the agreement—but from the EU and South America?

[Gareth Thomas]

Absolutely, but we have conceded that the deals are important and that they must be supported, and we want more trade with Australia and New Zealand. I gently say to my right hon. Friend that it is right to ensure that the deals work much better than they appear set to do at the moment. I hope that our amendments will help to achieve that.

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[Richard Foord (Tiverton and Honiton) (LD)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[John Spellar]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Richard Thomson]

I am spoilt for choice. I think I heard the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) first. I will then come to the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar).

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[John Spellar]

Surely it is not as simple as the hon. Gentleman is making out. Did we not have a substantial trade deficit in agricultural products with the countries of the EU as well?

[Richard Thomson]

There may have been a deficit in totality, but I hope the right hon. Gentleman is not trying to contend that the situation has been made any easier by the trade environment we now find ourselves untimely ripped into.

We have to ask, “To what end?” Even the UK Government’s own analysis shows that the trade deal with New Zealand will deliver a mere 0.03% benefit in GDP to the UK over 15 years and the Australian deal 0.08%, all the while the UK-EU trade and co-operation agreement will lead to a contraction of UK GDP by 4.9% over 15 years.

A number of safeguards could have been put in place in the agricultural chapters to protect farmers: no full liberalisation irrespective of time period; lower quota terms; percentage controls on the ratio of frozen to fresh carcases to protect the high quality Scottish fresh meat trade; clauses that work out beef and lamb tonnage quotas in a carcase-specific way, so premium cuts are protected; seasonality clauses; clauses to ensure the exports and imports of high value meat are properly valued; and trigger safeguards that could have been applied to protect the domestic market against any surge in imports in a particular year.

On new clause 5, it is important that an assessment is carried out on the impact of implementation of the procurement chapters on hill farmers and crofters in Scotland. Many in the hill farming and crofting communities are highly economically marginal. They have a huge economic importance in terms of supporting their areas, but the economics can be precarious at the best of times and they will certainly not be made any easier by the terms of this trade deal. The risk of undercutting standards through the deal means that meat is likely to end up costing less in the UK if it is shipped in from Australia or New Zealand, rather than if it is produced at home.

Analysis by Quality Meat Scotland has concluded that New Zealand beef farmgate prices are anywhere between 25% and 30% lower than Scottish farmgate prices, and 10% lower than their Scottish counterparts for lamb, undercutting on price. Matters relating to food standards fall within the competency of the devolved Administrations, but they have absolutely no power to exclude imported products on the basis of how they have been produced or on the undercutting of standards that feed into the undercutting of prices.

Donald MacKinnon, the chair of the Scottish Crofting Federation, speaking of the 15-year-long transition period, said:

“This is about changes that can happen over a much longer period of time. Agriculture does not operate on year-to-year, short lifecycles. We operate in generational terms in our businesses, and 15 years is a relatively short period of time in that sense. So it is not that we are concerned that the negative impacts are going to happen straightaway. This is about the long-term future of our industry. That is what my members are concerned about.”

Jonnie Hall, director of policy, National Farmers Union of Scotland, said:

“Ultimately, an awful lot of procurement contracts will be negotiated on price, given that there will be a written understanding, at least, that the standards in them will be of an equitable value, if that is the right expression. It is the competing on price piece that will probably be of more concern to Scottish producers than anything else, because we operate under different agricultural production systems and our cost structures are therefore different…it may be that New Zealand and Australian produce is more attractive simply in terms of value for money—I will call it that, but the word ‘value’ is not right.”

It is notable that the EU managed to secure the same market access into New Zealand for its exporters as the UK, but at a much lower cost to its domestic producers.

The Secretary of State has said that she is a huge believer in British farming and the role it plays in our national life, and has written about her fears of the impact that opening up our markets will have on domestic producers. We firmly believe that she should allay those fears by renegotiating the agricultural chapters of these deals with the new Australian Administration and the New Zealand Government. We should ensure that we monitor very closely the impact it has on our agricultural communities. While renegotiating, she might also want to consider the fact that Australia is one of the few countries in the world that maintains an effective absolute ban on the importation of UK beef. The Secretary of State has said that she does not believe the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs raised concerns with the World Trade Organisation via the Department for International Trade on this issue. That should certainly happen, and it should certainly have been addressed in the trade deal to make sure that this barrier was lifted.

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[John Spellar]

Does my hon. Friend agree with me about the irony that the Liberal party, which was founded on free trade and campaigning against the corn laws, is now becoming an agriculturally protectionist party?

[Sir Mark Hendrick]

I will not comment too much on that. There are rules to free trade—it is not a free-for-all—but at the same time, I do not think that the Liberal Democrats believe in totally free markets any more than we do.

Records show that the former Prime Minister, then the Trade Secretary, the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk, pressed ahead with the deal despite receiving detailed warnings from her own officials in 2020 that she was acting against the UK’s best interests. The British agricultural industry and farmers already facing pressures from inflation and labour shortages stand to lose the most from this Bill, as the NFU has long maintained. These deals are not in our economic interest and are a threat to domestic business and food security. They could also force many farmers out of business, according to the NFU president, Minette Batters. Ultimately, the Government may see implementation of these deals as a stepping stone to accession to the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership, but I am dismayed that that is at the expense of our own farmers and our wider economy.

May I ask the Government to review the negotiations on the chapters of this agreement, and the lessons learned from those negotiations, and to make an assessment of how this experience might inform the negotiation of future trade agreements? If other countries, in CPTPP or elsewhere around the world—whether in South America or wherever—can see that this country can be rolled over so easily in its negotiating power, it sets a bad precedent for future trade deals.

Australia and New Zealand Trade Deals

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Monday 14th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Greg Hands]

I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s support for trade deals and I look forward to him voting for one of them one day. In terms of the impact on Welsh farmers, I must point out some of the market access that we have recently gained—for example, Welsh lamb is now able to enter the US market for the first time in many decades due to the United States removing the small ruminants rule, and I was in Taiwan only last week are trying to negotiate access for Welsh lamb to the Taiwan market. When it comes to accumulation, he ought to think about the fact that there is tariff-free, quota-free access for the European Union for the UK at the moment. That has been the case from day one of the trade and co-operation agreement.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Surely one of the points we ought to be considering is the fact that about a third of the beef consumed in the UK is already imported. Some of it is imported from Brazil, where there are concerns about deforestation, and a big amount is imported from the EU, primarily from Ireland. We might not see fresh competition from Australian beef, but import substitution might be part of the equation.

[Greg Hands]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a strong point. We are all in favour of competition, and of consumers being able to make their choice, but I would add that meat exports from Australia and New Zealand are much more likely to go to the far eastern markets. A big percentage of the exports from Australia and New Zealand currently go to those far eastern markets that, frankly, we would like to access by joining the CPTPP trade agreement. We want to have a piece of that action. He is right that it is more likely that exports from Australia and New Zealand will displace those from the EU, giving choice to consumers.

These are more than just deals with like-minded and long-standing partners; they are part of the UK’s new strategic approach.

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[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

The hon. Gentleman raises a useful point. Our farmers are seeking a level playing field. We believe in our farmers and we want them to be able to compete on the same basis.

We also see in the Australian deal a lack of success on tackling climate change. The former COP26 President, the right hon. Member for Reading West (Alok Sharma), told the House last December that the Australia deal would reaffirm

“both parties’ commitments to upholding our obligations under the Paris agreement, including limiting global warming to 1.5°.”—[Official Report, 1 December 2021; Vol. 704, c. 903.]

However, the explicit commitment to limiting global warming to 1.5° was not in the deal, despite the fact that the Minister had said that only a matter of days before it was signed. What went wrong in those final days? Was it perhaps that Ministers simply gave way for the sake of getting a completed deal?

The current Secretary of State for International Trade, the right hon. Member for Saffron Walden (Kemi Badenoch), was sadly not here to open the debate. When she was standing to be Conservative party leader, she branded the net zero climate target “unilateral economic disarmament”. I think it is fair to say that there are worries about her commitment to delivering the progress needed on climate change, given that she has expressed that view publicly. Not only does that view misjudge the economic imperative of action to tackle climate change, but it fails to recognise the huge opportunities that the transition to net zero could provide. The question must also be asked: how broken can a party be when dabbling with climate change denial is a way to drum up support from its members?

On labour standards and workers’ rights, the Government did not push as hard as they might have done, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) said in an earlier intervention. On the Australia deal, the TUC said that the

“agreement does not contain commitments to ILO core conventions and an obligation for both parties to ratify and respect those agreements”

and that it provides

“a much weaker commitment to just the ILO declaration.”

That is a mistake. We should not set a precedent for new trade agreements across the globe to sell short our workers here or elsewhere.

[John Spellar]

I accept my right hon. Friend’s point when it comes to dealing with some countries, but in the case of the deal with Australia, where there is a strong Labour Government committed to workers’ rights and trade union rights, and a strong trade union movement, are we not slightly making a mountain out of a molehill here?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend about the Australian Government. Having met a number of representatives of the Australian Government, I know that their commitment to workers’ rights is second to none. It is a shame that we did not see a similar commitment from this Conservative party, frankly. Of course, the issue with the Australia deal is the precedent that it sets: other countries with lower workers’ standards than Australia will look at the standards in the deal and think that they should be the starting point in negotiations. A further issue is around geographical indicators, on the cross-party International Trade Committee said:

“The Government has failed to secure any substantive concessions on the protection of UK Geographical Indications in Australia”.

We have to ensure backing for our fantastic national producers and not let them be undermined.

[John Spellar]

Is it not also the case that this trade deal does not, for example, have an investor-state dispute settlement clause, because with comparable legal systems and comparable levels of development it is not necessary? Surely we do not need one template for all sorts of trade deals with all sorts of countries in very different circumstances.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I completely agree with my right hon. Friend that we do not need a single template, but we could do with a core trade policy and a core set of objectives from the Government.

I turn to the issue of scrutiny, because for those in this House who follow trade matters closely, it will not have gone without being noticed that this debate brings a distinct change of focus from Ministers at the Department for International Trade. Ministers—I would say they are new Ministers, but I think the Minister for Trade Policy, the right hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands), is competing with Frank Sinatra in the comeback stakes—will I am sure be aware of stinging rebukes from the cross-party International Trade Committee, which has regularly and strongly raised the need for better scrutiny structures around trade deals. It called in its recent report for

“the Government to accept specific recommendations to enable better scrutiny of any FTAs”.

That is very much a cross-party matter—the hon. Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) has regularly made the case to me as the shadow Secretary of State as well as to the various Secretaries of State and I hope that those criticisms and recommendations are having an impact. I hope that those recommendations, which come from right across the House, are being heard. Perhaps that is why we have at least ended up with today’s debate, although the irony is not lost on us that parliamentary time has now been allocated to agreements that were long ago signed and agreed.

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[Drew Hendry]

It will come as no surprise that I do not agree with the Government Member. These are damaging deals. They are one-sided and other people will want access.

Talks are ongoing with India, Brazil, Mexico, the Gulf states, the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership countries and Canada. Will they now accept less than has been offered here? This might just be the damaging start of the process. No wonder the National Audit Office report says that the UK Department for International Trade is “taking risks” in its haste to sign new deals.

This is bad for consumers. Research by Which? found that 72% of people across the nations of the UK do not want food that does not meet current standards coming in through trade deals. And boy, do standards differ! In Australia, animal welfare standards are well below what is expected of our producers, particularly on pigs, eggs, sheep and beef, with cramped sow stalls, battery cages, the painful mulesing of sheep, huge herds of cattle in zero-grazing feedlots, and permissible live animal transport times that are twice the length of ours. Australian poultry farmers use 16 times—I repeat, 16 times—more antibiotics per animal than our farmers. The UK Government’s own advisers have voiced concern about the impact on UK farmers of the overuse of pesticides in Australia, including 144 highly hazardous pesticides.

[John Spellar]

But do we not also import chicken from countries with very questionable standards, such as Brazil, from which we also import beef, and Thailand? Are there not, even within the EU framework, considerable variations in animal welfare standards?

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[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Trade is one of the issues that, from time to time, erupt in British politics. Indeed, in some areas it has dominated political discussion, and it has twice split—torn apart—the Conservative party. After all, that is why we had free trade halls in many of the great cities of the industrial north and midlands.

There is a strong case to be made for open trade, and I sometimes wish the Government would make it more strongly, both in general and in detail, and particularly in relation to the opportunities it presents. We have heard a great deal about some of the possible problems, and I shall come on to those shortly, but there are also opportunities for our industries and services, which were mentioned a moment ago by the hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford).

We have to recognise, and we should be making the argument, that trade has been a major engine of human progress for millennia, and has driven prosperity, innovation and a flow of ideas. It has enabled the development of civilisation. When people advance arguments against trade, one almost wonders whether they consider that the industrial revolution was desirable and right and a great advance in human progress, but although there were considerable and well-documented costs to that development, fundamentally humanity benefited and moved forward. We need to be advancing those arguments, not the arguments of people who want to return to some idyllic pastoral age, which was actually never much of an idyll at all, because we have certainly made great progress as a result; and if we are going to do that, we have to say, “Who better to do such deals with than Australia and New Zealand?”

These are countries with which we share huge affinities, connected with families and relatives, and with which we have shared service and security and intelligence relationships over several centuries. They are countries with similar legal systems and similar values that work together in the wider world. There may be some difficulties, and I am pleased about—well, not pleased; in fact I am slightly dismayed, but I suppose I could also take some partisan pleasure in them—the revelations of the utter inadequacies of at least one of the Ministers involved in the trade deals, who made the fundamental error in negotiations—any negotiations—of believing that getting a deal is more important than the contents of the deal. That is a recipe for failure in business, and it is a recipe for failure in government as well. I therefore hope that Ministers may now learn the lessons from that period. It was not even the deal, but the photo opportunity it presented, that seems to have been most important, and we definitely need to move beyond that.

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman think that this may also reflect the fact that for many years the UK has not needed negotiating teams to go into the negotiating rooms on behalf of the UK to make trade deals, and that that naivety may in part—along with Ministers’ overenthusiasm—have resulted in poor terms in this trade deal?

[John Spellar]

I take the hon. Lady’s point about the shortfall in technical skills. The hon. Member for Mole Valley identified certain failings in at least one individual. I am not qualified to comment on that, but I am perfectly prepared to believe it. There was certainly a technical deficit—because trade deals have been undertaken by the European Commission on behalf of all member states—but that was exaggerated, and indeed made far worse, by the obsessive and indeed utterly irresponsible attitude of the Trade Secretary at the time. Unfortunately, the Conservative party then saw fit to put that same individual in as Prime Minister, where those same negative qualities completely imploded the Government and demonstrated why the description of her as a “human hand grenade” was so apt.

There was a discussion earlier about several of the common factors between our countries, and they include labour standards. The developments in Australia are enormously encouraging, because some of the reductions in labour standards that were brought in by the previous conservative Government there are now being rolled back and trade unionism is being encouraged. I am sorry that the Minister for Trade Policy has just left the Chamber. When he was describing the talks with the United States, I thought he missed an opportunity to say that the UK and US trade union movements were involved in those talks in Baltimore and Scotland. I know that was at the insistence of President Biden and the American trade team, but I hope that this Government will have learned the positive advantages of having representatives of the trade union movement involved in those discussions and that they will include them in future discussions with countries that have comparable effective and free trade unions, because that has enormous value in getting the right sort of deal.

The fact that we need trade deals, that we need to have trade, and that Australia and New Zealand will be excellent partners does not exonerate the Government from their inadequate performance, which has been described in several previous debates and again here today. Also, it is not just about getting the deals; it is also about enforcing them. Another area where this Government and others have failed considerably is in allowing China into the World Trade Organisation, with the various qualifications that that required, and then allowing it time and again to breach the conditions under which it joined up, until it became much more difficult to take action because it had grown its economy, quite often by violating those deals as well as by using industrial espionage to steal intellectual property.

I want to touch on scrutiny. I fail to understand the Government’s reluctance to face scrutiny on this. They have a big majority, and the farming influence is not so dominant on their Back Benches, but in some of these deals they have a case to make. Given that we are not exactly overburdened with parliamentary business from the Government, because they do not seem to have got their act together, I do not understand why they are having these debates now and not at an earlier stage in order to defend their position—for example, to talk about some of the other benefits of the deals.

Visas for professionally qualified people have been mentioned. I have said in a previous debate that, where there is enough commonality in training, we ought to be asking the professional bodies what additional training an individual might need. They would not need to fully requalify; they would need only to undertake the necessary training to deal with any differences. This would encourage the movement backwards and forwards of professionally qualified people and encourage training in all our countries.

I fully accept that Ministers have a difficult task in remedying some of the deficiencies from the Truss era, but I hope that they will learn the lessons from these agreements and take them forward in future discussions, to ensure that they improve both the process and the substance as they focus on the deals.

Notwithstanding that, I hope both sides of the House—the new shadow International Trade team, as I said back in September, is a great improvement on some of our previous shadow International Trade teams, in having a generally favourable view of trade but a critical view of the detail—can then go forward and, bluntly, not follow those in the Chamber whose only answer is to go back to the EU, which has many of the problems associated with these trade deals. Trade deals are not easy, whoever we do them with. Can we just dump the ideology a bit and focus on the practicalities, for the benefit of our people not just in rural areas, very important though they are, but in our great towns and cities across the country?

Free Trade Agreements: Parliamentary Scrutiny

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker—I remember many a ding-dong that we had on Brexit, as you may recall. I thank the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers) for what he said. He is right—I point out the facts and numbers around Brexit, and they are not good. I compare Brexit to going to the horse-racing with £500 and coming back with trade deals worth £2 or £8 or whatever—we are still £490-odd down, but I will leave that there in deference to the hon. Gentleman.

The hon. Gentleman is right that a majority of the Committee want to reset that, and under the circumstances in which we find ourselves, we want to see trade deals. The question is about the terms of those trade deals, and that is where the House should be involved. That is why we look at trade deals that the European Union might achieve with New Zealand or Australia, versus what we have achieved, and we must also remember the words of the Prime Minister, who said that those deals are “one-sided”.

I was speaking to a member of the Trade and Agriculture Commission who said that—I had better phrase it this way—the Australia trade deal was the biggest giveaway of agricultural liberalisation that has been seen in any trade agreement. We should remember that free trade agreements are not about free trade; they are about bureaucratic trade, and they usually replace tariffs with bits of paper. There is nowhere where trade occurs as freely—to return to that word—as it did with the European Union before Brexit.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Members on both side of the House share some concerns about the performance of previous Trade Ministers—not only their attitudes to the way deals were conducted, but their relations with this House. May I also express disappointment with the position of the Committee, and perhaps strike a note that dissents from the general congratulatory tone? The Chair rightly identified the issue of questioning Government strategy, but I am not clear what the strategy and trade policy of the International Trade Committee is. I heard nothing in the contribution to outline a recognition that trade has been of enormous benefit to humankind over centuries, and particularly since the second world war, in bringing hundreds of millions, if not billions of people across the planet out of poverty, and nothing about the opportunities for trade. Those who argued for us staying in the EU were surely arguing about the benefits of trade.

I also do not see any indication of the countries with which we ought to be doing trade deals, and I would like a response on that. If we are not able to do trade deals with countries such as Australia and New Zealand with which we share history, family, strategic, security and defence relations, who can we make agreements with? Please do not just tell me it is the EU. We need to look in government but also, I would argue, in the Committee, at having a consistent trade policy, and I look forward to that in future debates.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman —it is good to be criticised, because that forces people to look inwards and see exactly what is happening and what needs to be done. The role of the Committee is first to scrutinise and sometimes to help the Government, and indeed, as the Minister will know, perhaps to chide them. It is also to set the agenda at times—that alludes to other countries, as the right hon. Gentleman says. We can trade with countries without trade deals, but the terms of trade vary. We pay tariffs, and usually when we get rid of those in a trade agreement we have bureaucracy instead.

The right hon. Gentleman gives me the opportunity to raise an important point on the Floor of the House, which is about resources. He is asking the Committee to do more. Yes, the Committee can do more. We are aware we can do more, but we are very aware that our workload leaves a heavy burden on Committee staff. If he can add his voice to other voices to ensure that the Committee is well resourced, we will be eternally grateful to our critical friend on the Labour Back Benches.

Trade (Australia and New Zealand) Bill

Lord Spellar Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 6th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and, indeed, for his incredible work in the Department over the last year to help us to grow our export opportunities for businesses. He is absolutely right: one of the key opportunities for our service sectors is negotiating that mutual recognition of qualifications, which removes a market access barrier to enable businesses to share their expertise more widely. Not only in the Australia and New Zealand trade deals, but as we work in places such as Canada and the USA, those are key areas where we can genuinely rocket-boost what our businesses will be able to do in taking their expertise across the world.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

The right hon. Lady is talking about businesses, but is this not also about individuals in these jurisdictions who have the qualifications and skills? There will be a greater mutual benefit, not just a benefit to the UK. This will grow the economies of the free world and enable our citizens, and those of Australia and New Zealand, to develop their careers and opportunities.

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. A key element of the Australia and New Zealand trade deals is the improved mobility arrangements, which will not only give those under 35 much more flexibility, but will mean that those with professional skills can move much more easily between our countries, for exactly that reason: to help their skills as individuals, as he says, and as part of businesses to grow those economies mutually. Our trade deals are all about mutual benefit and picking countries with which we have strong ties and want to grow our economies together.

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[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

I thank the hon. Member for his congratulations on my biography of Harold Wilson; that is greatly appreciated. On scrutiny, if only the Prime Minister had held the trade brief in the past and been able to do something about it then.

Is not the truth perhaps that the Government are running away from scrutiny because they are failing to support exporters properly? The Opposition have been arguing that the Government are not doing enough to support exporters, and over the summer that became clear. The former Minister for exports, the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer)—he intervened on the Secretary of State but is no longer in his place—appears to agree. He argued that the trade access programme is underfunded and said of it:

“We support too few shows, we don’t send enough business, our pavilions are often decent but overshadowed by bigger and better ones from our competitors.”

Perhaps it is therefore no surprise that there has been failure in the Department for International Trade.

We then have what the Secretary of State said about her own Minister for Trade Policy, who I think is still the Minister for Trade Policy today. She said:

“There have been a number of times when she hasn’t been available, which would have been useful, and other Ministers have picked up the pieces.”

The former Chancellor says that Conservative trade policy is letting down farmers, the former Minister for Exports says that the Government are not supporting exporters as they should be, and the Secretary of State is criticising the performance of one of her own Ministers. This is not the good ship Britannia delivering trade for global Britain; it is more like “Pirates of the Caribbean”, with a ghost ship manned by a zombie Government beset by infighting, mutiny and dishonesty. The calamity might have been mildly amusing were it not so serious a matter for our country’s future, with people across our nation needing a trade policy that delivers for them.

In other negotiations and future negotiations, countries will look at what was conceded in these negotiations and take that as a starting point. We already have a UK-Japan trade deal that benefits Japanese exporters five times as much as UK exporters. On the Australia deal, the Government’s impact assessment shows a £94 million hit to our farming, forestry and fishing sectors and a £225 million hit to our semi-processed food industry. On the New Zealand deal, the Government’s impact assessment states that

“part of the gains results from a reallocation of resources away from agriculture, forestry, and fishing”,

which will take a £48 million hit, “and semi-processed foods”, a £97 million hit.

The Opposition will press four issues in Committee: farming and animal welfare; climate change; labour standards and workers’ rights; and, as has been raised in interventions, the role of the devolved Administrations in the process of negotiation and ratification, and the protection of geographical indicators. Let me deal first with farming and animal welfare. Labour is proud of our farmers and the high standards that they uphold, and we are confident in British produce to be popular in new markets, but we also recognise the need for a level playing field for our farmers.

The Government claim that they are trying to mitigate the impact of the two deals with tariff-free access being phased in. In the New Zealand deal, there are tariff rate quotas and product-specific safeguards that last 15 years. Similarly, in the Australia deal, the phasing-in period on beef and sheepmeat is 15 years, but the quotas set by the Government for imports from Australia are far higher than current imports. As I have previously pointed out in the House, on beef imports, when Japan negotiated a trade deal with Australia, it limited the tariff-free increase in the first year to 10% on the previous year. South Korea achieved something similar in negotiations and limited the increase to 7%. But the Government have negotiated a first year tariff-free allowance with a 6,000% increase on the amount of beef that the UK currently imports from Australia. On sheepmeat, they have conceded a 67% increase in the first year of the deal.

It is not as if other countries have not done significantly better—they have—so why did our trade Ministers not achieve the same as Japan’s and South Korea’s? Why have our Ministers failed to ensure that Australian agricultural corporations are not held to the same high standards as our farmers?

The Government have agreed to a non-regression clause on animal welfare. To be clear, that does not mean equality of standards across the two countries—it is not fair competition. What will actually happen is that meat produced to far lower animal welfare standards will get tariff-free access to the UK market.

[John Spellar]

Has it not been a long-standing problem—even within the EU—that different animal welfare standards have allowed our farmers to be undercut? On beef, might it not be farmers in the Irish Republic who face greater competition? After all, why would people want to send meat to the UK all the way from Australia rather than get it from just down the road? Should we not be looking at supporting our industry domestically, particularly through public sector procurement?

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

My right hon. Friend is right to raise what we should do domestically. He also illustrates another point. There is a history of trade negotiations, including on different standards of animal welfare, that Ministers could have taken heed of, sought to learn lessons from and put into these negotiations.

The now Prime Minister said that the Government had no intention of striking any deals that did not benefit our farmers, but the reality is that the vast majority of trade deals, which she trumpeted in her leadership campaign, were roll-over deals replicating existing EU agreements—not so much an exercise in driving a hard bargain as a national exercise in cut-and-paste with accompanying photographs on Instagram.

Perhaps it is no surprise that the Prime Minister’s own colleagues have been so critical of her approach to trade. The right hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said that he faced “challenges” in trying to get her to enshrine animal welfare in deals. No wonder the NFU said that it saw

“almost nothing in the deal that will prevent an increase in imports of food produced well below the production standards required of UK farmers”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If the Government do not give that commitment, we will bring forward an amendment in Committee to seek that commitment.

[John Spellar]

Can we slay this particular red herring, which was also mentioned in relation to the US trade deal? It is not about privatising the NHS. All the Americans said, and in this they were right, was, “We are not saying what you should do with the health service; we are saying that if you decide to privatise it”—which we should not do—“then we want to be treated as equal partners.” That has nothing to do with trade; it is to do with the Government’s health policy. We should not mix up the two, following a political campaign on it.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds]

It is not the threat of the American Government to our NHS that worries me; it is the threat of the Tory Government to the NHS. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to make that distinction.

--- Later in debate ---

[Drew Hendry]

The right hon. Member is skating over the fact that the Tory Government have neglected their tree-planting duties in terms of their actions on climate change. [Interruption.] Perhaps—if he will stop chuntering from a sedentary position—he should also have a conversation with Irish farmers to see what their position is on this matter.

As we have already heard, but I will now repeat it, the Government’s own trade impact analysis shows that the Australia deal will mean a £94 million hit per year to farming, forestry and fishing, and the New Zealand deal will mean a hit of £145 million to agriculture and food-related sectors. The New Zealand media have been reporting that New Zealand farmers are jubilant about the deal. They are nonplussed; they cannot understand it; they are baffled by this, because, as they have pointed out, the benefits to the UK are negligible.

The UK Government are kicking Scottish farmers while they are down. Farmers are gasping for air, and they already face spiralling uncapped energy costs, crops rotting in fields owing to a lack of pickers, rising diesel costs, the loss of EU farming subsidies, and rocketing fertiliser costs. I can assure the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) that the sector in Scotland will not forgive this. Food and drink manufacture is twice as important to the Scottish economy as it is to the UK economy. As we have heard, even the recent Tory Chancellor, who lost the race to the new Prime Minister by the slimmest of margins, has said that the deal is bad for farmers.

The news for consumers is, of course, not much better. Because we do not know what the split is across the nations and regions of the UK, we cannot say what the impact on people will be, but the best that the UK Government can come up with as a justification for the deal is a prediction that UK households will save £1.20, on average.

[John Spellar]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Drew Hendry]

I will in a minute.

Perhaps households can get together to buy a single cup of coffee at Starbucks if they pool their resources—

[Drew Hendry]

Or a unit of electricity, as my hon. Friend has chimed in to suggest.

[John Spellar]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Drew Hendry]

I have said to the right hon. Gentleman that I will give way, but not at this particular moment. If he does not mind, I will continue with the point that I was going to make.

I have just talked about the risible benefits, in this crisis, to UK households. Perhaps the Government are counting on the fact that farmers, and others who are losing out, can drown their sorrows with 20p off a bottle of Jacob’s Creek. Now I will allow the right hon. Gentleman to intervene.

[John Spellar]

I thank the hon. Gentleman. Can he make it clear to us whether he thinks we should have free trade agreements on agricultural products with any countries? If he thinks we should have them, why should we not have them with our great ally Australia? If he thinks we should not have such agreements with Australia or New Zealand, which countries does he think we should have them with?

[Drew Hendry]

I think we should have free trade deals with countries—of course we should—but we should take into consideration whether we will win or lose from them. Those deals should be scrutinised by the parliamentarians who are elected to scrutinise them on behalf of their constituents.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

I think we should initially recognise that trade does not exist in a vacuum. It is about relationships and trust, and which country is better to trust than Australia? In April, we have the Anzac Day commemoration in Whitehall, where we acknowledge and remember the hundreds of years of joint working and joint operations against tyranny and dictatorship. We have the long-standing and deep Five Eyes intelligence relationship, which also underpins our defence of our freedoms, and only this morning the Defence Committee was conducting an inquiry into the AUKUS agreement. We also have much wider relationships—family, political, trading, business, trade union, cultural and sporting—and of course a common basis in the common law.

Therefore, if we are going to do trade deals with anyone—and this is what has always surprised me about the opposition shown by some on the Opposition Benches—it should be a deal with Australia, as we have so much in common. That is why the contribution from the shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds), was so welcome today. It had a very different tone from some speeches we have heard previously, and it is all the more welcome for that.

We have to recognise—and I forget which colleague mentioned this—that there is always a dynamic between free trade and fair trade. It is a debate that has dominated British politics from time to time over the last 150 or so years, and it has even twice torn the Conservative party apart. It is right to have such a debate, and we therefore need to focus on the details and on the principles, because such agreements cannot be an open door to pillage. We also have to make sure that the other parties are living up to the commitments they make in these agreements. Probably the most telling example is the accession of China to the World Trade Organisation, in that the great failure of the WTO and partner countries has been the failure to hold China to the commitments it made in joining that organisation.

At the same time, unlike some on the right and left of politics who seem to be opposed to trade in and of itself, we should recognise the huge benefits that trade has brought throughout history. Otherwise, we would have to go back to the days before the industrial revolution, when not only did trade drive the growth of Britain as the world’s leading industrial power, but imports of food from the new world fed the new urban masses running such industries. We cannot ignore that.

Equally, while we should not dismiss some of the particular impacts of trade—with sometimes the movement of work and sometimes the exploitation of those opportunities—we should recognise the huge reduction in poverty worldwide post war through the growth in trade. That is especially so, frankly, in China, where hundreds of millions have moved out of poverty in what is probably the biggest move out of poverty in history. Our starting point should be to encourage the development of trade, but with caution. We should not have predatory trade, and certainly not trade based on a race to the bottom on standards.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

Does the right hon. Member agree that the trade pursued by the European Union with Australia and New Zealand, which will see economic growth, has on the face of it been done with less risk to certain sectors, including the agriculture sector? Yes, trade is good, but there is also what we are throwing away, and the UK Government have admitted that they are throwing away a few tens of millions on agriculture in the New Zealand deal alone. There was a better balance to have been reached, but in being too keen on getting into the CPTPP and other things, the UK has just thrown the baby out with the bathwater, unfortunately.

[John Spellar]

I have always believed in the basic principle in any negotiations: that it is the terms of the deal, not the fact of the deal, that matter. Too often in takeover bids in this country, the intermediaries are far keener to get the deal done than to make sure it is a good deal for the participants.

However, I also caution the hon. Gentleman that in terms of meat production, we ought to be looking more at the problems posed by, for example, Brazil, or indeed the EU—in many cases there has been EU competition with less favourable animal standards than we have in this country. We should recognise that this is not unique in any way to the Australian agreement. I also point out that some of the hon. Gentleman’s arguments about percentages may also apply in meat terms to these two trade deals.

Returning to the topic of basic standards, particularly workers’ standards, a welcome development in international trade discussions has been the strong position taken by the Biden Administration in making sure that the beneficiaries are the working class—middle class in American terms—who have built the trade union movement in America and built America, and also workers in other countries. The British Government should note that. I am pleased that the TUC has been brought along to the trade talks with the United States in both Baltimore and Scotland; I fear that was probably at the insistence of the United States rather than willingly from the UK, but it is a good precedent and I hope it will be applied in other trade talks, particularly with Australia and New Zealand.

Australia and New Zealand have strong trade union movements and high labour standards. This deal is not about making ourselves liable to face undercutting competition; this is about opportunity and the ability of firms to trade, perhaps on much more equal terms than with some other countries.

That was touched on earlier in the debate, in relation to the movement—particularly in services and professional areas, but also in manufacturing—of skilled and technical workers. The Minister must acknowledge that previous Home Office restrictions on visas have been a real point of friction with both the Australian and New Zealand Governments. It would be a welcome development if other Government Departments influenced and pressurised the Home Office about that, not just for the economies on both sides but for individual development and to give skilled and professional workers in all three countries the opportunity to move and develop their careers and experience.

Alongside that, I hope there will be mutual recognition of qualifications. Instead of, frankly, allowing professional bodies’ self-interest to override that, we should look at where there is enough common ground and make sure that retraining and recertification, if needed, is very limited rather than taking a blanket approach. As I said earlier, the fact that we are common-law countries should help to facilitate that.

Political, geopolitical and trade interests often meet. For example, China has launched a massive campaign against Australian wine to put pressure on Australia on policy issues. We should work with the Australians as much as we can to facilitate our ability to import Australian wine, although not to the detriment of the growing number of British vineyards, obviously. That would have the side benefit of getting the attention of the Australian trade Minister, Senator Farrell, who represents the great wine-producing state of South Australia.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a great point. Australian wine producers have argued that Treasury banding undermines the spirit of the agreement. To those who are exporting to another country, it would feel like a bit of skulduggery if that country’s Treasury undermined the agreement.

[John Spellar]

The Chair of the International Trade Committee makes the exact point made to me by Senator Farrell. I hope that that was heard by those on the Government Benches.

To broaden that point, with reference to AUKUS, following the Russian assault on Ukraine, there is a much deeper understanding across the world of the fragility of supply chains and the imperative of supply chain resilience. That is about not just physical industrial capacity, but a skilled workforce. Indeed, AUKUS is in part about the movement of skilled workers in the defence industry to sustain the agreement. It is also about critical materials, such as rare earths. Actually, they are not particularly rare, and Australia has the ores in abundance, but China has consolidated them—often through unfair competition and under-pricing competition —by dominating the refining capacity. Those are areas where we need to work with our security allies, but they also need to be our trade allies. Of course, that is also about trusted suppliers, so there could not be, for example, a “buy America first” policy. There is one level of understanding of that in the United States, but there needs to be greater understanding. That must be an objective of Government.

We should welcome the deepening of relations with our Australian friends and, in particular, with the new Government and Prime Minister Albanese. We look forward to building on that for a successful and shared future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gareth Thomas]

My hon. Friend is right to highlight that ongoing concern. His intervention reminds me that it would be remiss of me not to praise the International Trade Committee, whose work on the deal, notwithstanding all the difficulties that it has faced, is an example of the very best of our Select Committee system at work. Indeed, I say gently to its Chair that perhaps his Committee’s work is one small example of how the UK is stronger together.

I sympathise with the frustration of cross-party Committee members that no cohesive strategy for trade negotiations has been published, making it that little bit easier for Ministers to be pushed and pulled in whatever direction those with whom we are negotiating want. I hope that whoever is confirmed as Secretary of State for International Trade will address that key issue quickly. Why has there been such a contrast between what was promised to the House for such key deals and what has happened? Is it just incompetence, laziness or poor performance from individual Ministers, or is there something more profound here? Is it that the implications for procurement, British agriculture and tenant farmers—the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson) and others flagged up that issue—as well as for our food standards, for labour and human rights, for action on climate change, for buying British and for good digital regulation are so significant that Ministers felt it better to try to discourage a sustained look at the provisions in these deals?

The Australia and New Zealand trade deals are not going to deliver the sustained boost to economic growth that the country needs. Many have made that point. Welcome as the deals will nevertheless be, they will deliver at best marginal benefits for business, limited gains for consumers and few additional jobs. In the post-truth world that the Conservative party now sadly inhabits, the deals have been sold to us all as the start of a brave, amazing, fantastical post-Brexit era for British trade and growth. One can only wish that the same effort had been put into the actual negotiations as into the stories being told about these deals.

To be fair, there is genuine excitement from some about these deals: Australian farmers, Australian negotiators and New Zealand farmers were all delighted. On the upside, too, the deals have not led to the value of the pound dropping or a decline in foreign investment, and British farming and food businesses have not seen an immediate hit to their contracts. That, at least, is an improvement on the trade deal that the previous Prime Minister negotiated with the European Union. The overwhelming sense of the trade deals—with Australia in particular, and with New Zealand—is of deals done in a rush, with the now Prime Minister desperate for any deal, at almost any cost.

Some commentators have suggested—this point has been echoed by many in the debate—that in the rush to sign off the two new free trade agreements and bring the Bill to the Floor of the House, Ministers have failed to grasp how the deals leave Britain badly exposed for future negotiations with, for example, the US or Brazil. They argue that by undermining our food, animal welfare and environmental standards, the deals create difficult precedents in key parts of our economy, and that English farmers—and those in the devolved nations too—have been left most at risk of a long-term cumulative hit to their, and our country’s, economic interests, with the terms of these deals being used against us in even more significant negotiations.

It is, I have to say, extraordinary that Ministers made such a big offer to Australian farmers and got so little in return. The unconditional abolition of tariffs on Australian farm produce with few safeguards—a very big concession—is particularly surprising given that Ministers did not even negotiate basic protections for our most famous products, a point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) and the SNP spokesman, the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry). Why did Ministers not prioritise protections of UK geographical indicators for our most iconic brands, such as Scotch whisky, Swaledale cheese, traditional Grimsby smoked fish, Yorkshire Wensleydale and Cornish pasties, to name just a few?

It is not just in Australia and New Zealand that Ministers cannot negotiate protections for our country’s best brands. Ministers still have not secured GI status in Japan for half the products they claimed they would. Indeed, ironically it appears Ministers are hoping their failure here will be partially put right through the knock-on impact of the EU’s negotiations with Australia.

[John Spellar]

My hon. Friend rightly concentrates on the Government’s deficiencies in handling the negotiations on agriculture, but, as a Member of Parliament representing the heartland of the industrial revolution, does he not see advantages for British industry in this agreement?

[Gareth Thomas]

Absolutely, I see advantages for British exporters, which is why, in my praise for my right hon. Friend in the opening part of my speech, I underlined that we want to see increased trade with Australia and New Zealand going forward.

Given the huge concessions Ministers made on access to our agricultural markets, it is frankly also surprising that they did not insist on more protection against competition from food imports produced to lower standards. Human rights, labour rights and climate change have also been largely unmentioned.

Turning specifically and lastly to the Bill, it gives Australia and New Zealand better access to our Government procurement market, worth almost £300 billion, in return for our firms getting a little better access to their procurement markets, worth just £200 billion together. We will seek to amend the Bill in Committee to ensure there is better scrutiny of the procurement sections of both UK trade deals. The Conservative party has been missing while the people of our country are struggling to make ends meet and deeply worried about how their businesses and other businesses will survive. The Bill will make little substantial difference to those challenges. A more robust trade strategy to generate wealth and share it more fairly is long overdue, and much more robust parliamentary scrutiny needs to be one of the lessons that Ministers learn from the passage of these two deals. We want greater trade with both Australia and New Zealand. We will not oppose the Bill tonight, but we will seek to amend it during its remaining stages.

UK-Australia Free Trade Agreement

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Wednesday 5th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

I welcome a trade deal with our allies, friends and family in Australia, especially for the motor industry. Along with AUKUS, I hope it will provide a renewed international democratic dynamic and closer working for more resilient supply chains in both goods and raw materials. I am concerned that Ministers may have been desperate to do any deal, rather than getting the best deal. If there are concerns about meat imports, will the Secretary of State press other Departments, the NHS and schools to prioritise local meat, just as every other country does?

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his support and enthusiasm for this important deal with one of our closest allies and partners. Indeed, the AUKUS relationship is now developing and will be a very long-standing and close relationship, as we have had in many other ways. He raises an important point about local supply chains and the use of local goods, and I will make sure that that is passed on to my relevant colleagues.

Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Fox]

I cannot think what my hon. Friend is alluding to, but it is certainly true that consumers will have access to far greater choice. Look at the range of consumer goods that we have—all sorts of white goods, not just vans. Look at the quality of what we have in terms of household appliances. They are cheaper and better quality, and they have a greater technology than they would otherwise. That is what free trade means. The trouble with free trade is that its benefits are very widely spread to consumers, whereas any difficulties to producers tend to fall on very narrow sectors and are therefore used politically by the Opposition to promote their anti-trade policies.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr Fox]

I will in a moment. Five years ago this morning, those of us who campaigned to leave the European Union were awakening on that great historic day to realise that we had won the referendum and that Britain would have a very different future. The free trade policy that it allowed us was very specific in terms of the benefits that we could have: it would allow us to shape a policy in the interests of not only the United Kingdom but free trade, in which we as a country profoundly believe, or at least used to all believe, in the political consensus in this country.

It is a freedom to shape global policy that leads to greater liberalisation in all its forms. I am glad to see the Chair of the International Trade Committee present. He has heard me say this before, so I apologise to him for repeating myself, but there is a clear hierarchy in liberalisation. The greatest liberalisation comes from multilateral global agreements, which is where we should all be going; it is the gold standard. The next level down is the level of plurilateral agreements; if we cannot get multilateral agreement, we can at least make progress towards it with those who are willing to see liberalisation take place. The next level down is the geographical grouping, where countries can come together to create a more open market. Finally, there are the bilateral free trade agreements, which, although they are easier to get, tend to produce less in terms of liberalisation. It is important that we understand that there is a hierarchy in all of that.

[John Spellar]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr Fox]

I will, as I said I would; my memory is not yet that short. It is important that we understand what the opportunities are in a free trade policy outside the European Union in relation to those four categories in that free trade hierarchy.

[John Spellar]

The right hon. Gentleman knows that I am very supportive of trade and trade agreements. Equally, I was rather surprised by his response to the hon. Member for Dudley North (Marco Longhi). Should we not be encouraging people to buy white vans made in Luton, and trying to ensure that St George’s flags are made and sold in the United Kingdom?

[Dr Fox]

The right hon. Gentleman is quite right that we should ensure that as much is made in the United Kingdom as possible. The point is that consumers should be free to choose what they buy with their own money. If we can manufacture goods and services in the United Kingdom of the appropriate quality, and at the appropriate price, I am quite sure that British consumers would choose to buy those, but I do not believe in restricting the choice for British consumers because we are unable in certain sectors to produce those things.

Another important element of policy outside the European Union is our ability to help rebalance the global trading economy. That is why CPTPP is so important. The CPTPP, were the United Kingdom to join it, has about the same proportion of global GDP as the European Union minus the UK. It will provide us with an ability to rebalance within that. Why does that matter? It might help us get momentum in some of the areas that matter, where we were unable to get traction inside the European Union. We might get traction on a global agreement on e-commerce, for example, or an agreement on environmentally friendly goods—the environmental goods agreement—which is barely in existence or has any life at the moment. In this era, if we cannot agree to take tariffs off solar panels or wind turbines, what can we agree at a multilateral level? Putting our energies into groupings that may drive that forward is extremely important, not just for the UK, but beyond.

The final point that I want to make is that the real advantage of CPTPP is not what proportion of GDP it adds in value; it is strategic. CPTPP is primarily, in my view, a strategic alliance, and it relates to how we think about the issue of China. China promotes its agenda of state capitalism—though “state capitalism” is an oxymoron; capitalism has to be independent of state control—but, at present, sits inside the World Trade Organisation without having made the adjustments to market mechanisms that are required for the proper functioning of members inside the organisation. The measures that we have tried have not been successful in bringing China into a more acceptable position. The WTO has been unable to cope effectively with the abuse of state subsidies. The OECD has done a lot of work studying the data available across borders and looking at measurements of production, which offer some help, but the WTO seems incapable at present of dealing with the China question.

The United States was unable to deal with the China question through tariffs. All that President Trump’s tariffs on China did was reduce the trade deficit with China, but it did not reduce America’s trade deficit overall, because when consumers did not buy Chinese goods because they were too expensive in the United States, they bought them from elsewhere. The use of tariff policy to drive global trade in a particular way only results in trade distortion and diversion, exactly as we discovered.

If we were able to join CPTPP, there would be another prize, which the Secretary of State did not mention but I am sure she believes in: the ability to attract the United States back to the partnership. The decision by the Trump Administration to leave the trans-Pacific partnership was, in my view, a completely wrong decision. If we are able to get United Kingdom membership, the United States joining CPTPP becomes a lot more attractive to Members across the parties in Congress. The UK plus the United States joining CPTPP would take us to about 40% to 43% of global GDP, which is a much better counterbalancing measure to China than anything that we have seen so far.

I am therefore 100% behind my right hon. Friends the Secretary of State and the Minister for Trade Policy in taking this policy forward. Five years ago, we were on different sides of the debate in the European Union referendum, but there is nothing like the zeal of converts to take us forward. I congratulate the Secretary of State and the Minister of State—one of the finest Ministers I ever worked with—on taking this agenda forward. It is the right thing for the United Kingdom and, much more importantly, it is the right thing for global trade and to ensure that the developing world has a chance of finding a sustainable way out of poverty in the long term.

--- Later in debate ---

[Drew Hendry]

It is a no.

What assessment has been made of the failed TTIP deal, on which the CPTPP is based? It contains a TTIP-style regulatory co-operation chapter, risking the abandonment of standards through forums that were notoriously devoid of any scrutiny. The Tories have had plenty of opportunity to enshrine current standards of consumer protections—including for agricultural produce, pesticides and animal rights, and also for digital rights, workers’ rights, environmental standards and the independence of public services such as the NHS—yet they have failed to do so at every turn. The Home Secretary herself is on record as saying that Brexit was an opportunity for widespread deregulation, and of course she was not alone. It is easy to see why the Scottish public do not trust them over the warm words they put forward.

An investor-state dispute mechanism is a key provision within the CPTPP. It allows firms to sue Governments for measures that harm their profits. This can result in very negative impacts on the environment and regulation designed to combat climate change. There is also evidence of ISDS being used to challenge health provision and labour rights. Will the Minister confirm that the UK will not agree to ISDS as part of the CPTPP? It is likely that CPTPP membership would see a rise in the amount of pesticides and antibiotics in food imports. Thousands of times the amount of carcinogens such as iprodione are allowed in produce from CPTPP members as they are in current UK equivalent foodstuffs. One hundred and nineteen pesticides currently banned in the UK are allowed for use by certain CPTPP members. How can the UK Government exclude those products and guarantee that they will never appear on our supermarket shelves if they sign up? Of course, they cannot. Malaysia, a CPTPP member, is actively manoeuvring to reverse the ban on palm oil extracts, which are notorious for causing deforestation, leading to increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

[John Spellar]

Can the hon. Member tell us which countries he thinks Britain can do trade deals with?

--- Later in debate ---

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

I am a strong believer in free trade—I think it is a very good idea. However, the priority has to be the terms of the deal, not just the fact of doing a deal. It is the same as in business: too often, for the advisers, the lawyers and often even the chief executives, it is doing the deal that matters, but for the business and its workers it is the terms of the deal that matter. This is also about Government managing the follow-through. Let us be clear: one reason why free trade has a bad name in this country and in the United States, but particularly here, is that it has become a free-for-all. For the British Government, we buy trains, boats, military planes, ambulances, police cars and so on from anywhere in the world. No other country behaves like that. That is about decisions of Ministers. Frankly, unless Ministers develop some backbone and start to instruct their civil servants to support British industry, trade will continue to be mired in controversy in this country.

That is a great shame, because trade has made a transformation in the lives of hundreds of million—probably billions—of people around the world, particularly in China and Asia. It has raised living standards and aspirations. Barriers to trade, financial, physical or administrative, reduce living standards, as we are finding out and as a number of colleagues have mentioned. When talking about trade, we should remember that we have a massive trade deficit with the EU, which is why it should be negotiating more realistically with us—our Ministers should not be grandstanding, and should also be negotiating realistically with the EU.

We also have to recognise that all change comes with associated costs and disruption. Look at the industrial revolution, the agricultural revolution and the corn laws in this country, which caused massive issues. We should learn the lessons of history and look at how we manage the transition, but that will require an active role for the Government; I know that is against their ideology, but it is absolutely necessary in order to deal with this fast-changing world.

Finally, there are a lot of problems all around the world with the unequal distribution of income arising from change, and particularly from the current technological revolution. The best way to deal with it is to support workers’ rights in these agreements and support trade union rights and free trade unions. Joe Biden has said that very clearly, but the message has to get through to our Government. There is a new sheriff in town in Washington, and we ought to be supporting him in backing workers’ rights around the world.

Free Trade Agreement Negotiations: Australia

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Thursday 17th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

I know my hon. Friend believes in both beef and liberty, and I can assure him that that is exactly what this deal delivers. There are huge opportunities overseas for our beef farmers, and that is what we are seeking to open up, of course. We opened up the US market last year, and we now have beef going from England, Wales and Northern Ireland into the United States. I agree with him: I think there are huge opportunities for our farmers, freed from the common agricultural policy, which has held them back, and with a new pro-animal welfare, pro-environment policy here in the United Kingdom.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Australia, like Canada, is one of our oldest and closest allies, and many of us have family and friends there, so does the Secretary of State share my concern that the anti-trade lobby does not want us to do a trade deal with either of them, nor indeed with the United States and Singapore for that matter? Has she had any indication from the anti-trade lobby about which countries it thinks we can and should do trade deals with?

[Elizabeth Truss]

What a welcome voice from the Opposition Benches! If only the right hon. Gentleman could be promoted to a position on the Front Bench—[Hon. Members: “Make him leader!”] Or even leader; that is a good idea. If that happened, we might see a more sensible, pro-growth, pro-trade policy on the Opposition Benches. It seems to me that the only group the Opposition want us to do a deal with is the EU. In fact, they want us to rejoin the EU. That is the strong message I am getting from the Opposition.

UK-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Wednesday 25th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Secretary of State for International Trade (Elizabeth Truss)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the UK-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement.

I am delighted to open this debate on the UK-Japan comprehensive economic partnership agreement, otherwise known as CEPA, in a landmark moment for our national trading history. This is the first debate we are having on a new trade deal since our departure from the European Union. This is the first time we have been able to have such a discussion in the House of Commons for nearly 50 years. It was not possible when Brussels represented us in trade negotiations, but things have changed. We now have a deal directly negotiated between London and Tokyo, and the whole House will be glad to know that this will be the first of many debates about our independently negotiated trade agreements. There will be more to come as we pursue gold-standard deals with Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

The right hon. Lady is right in one respect, but we have had many debates recently on trade deals. Indeed, we had a veto on those trade deals between the EU and other partners, and views were expressed. I suspect that we were on the same side on the Canada and Singapore trade deals. We have had those debates. This should be about the principles of trade, rather than just the niceties of whether we are in or out of the EU.

[Elizabeth Truss]

I observe that the right hon. Gentleman did support many of those deals. I afraid that the same cannot be said for most of the members of his party, who did not support, for example, the Japan trade deal when it previously went through the House. We are in a completely different position. From 1 January next year, we will be operating our own independent trade policies, we will be setting our own tariffs and we will be operating our own trade agreements. That is a huge step forward for the UK as an independent trading nation. Next year, we will be talking about our accession to the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership, but today we are here to talk about Japan.

The UK-Japan agreement is a British-shaped deal going further and faster than the EU deal in areas such as data and digital, services, advanced manufacturing and food and drink. The deal has been welcomed across the board, from the CBI to techUK and the National Farmers Union. It was even welcomed by the Labour party—although rather tepidly and although Labour did not actually vote for the original Japan deal.

The deal is estimated to add over £15 billion in trade to our already growing trading relationship with the third largest economy in the world. We expect it to be even more. We have asked Professor Tony Venables from Oxford University to lead a review of our future modelling to ensure that it accounts for our world-leading digital and data trade. The United States recent study of its deal with Mexico and Canada found that the biggest economic benefit of that deal came from the provisions on digital trade, and we are confident that this is the case for the agreement with Japan, which is why we want to better quantify the benefits of future free trade agreements.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

I am pleased to be making this speech in this debate tonight—I was hoping to make it last night. I declare an interest as a vice-chairman of the all-party group on Japan. May I also take slight issue with my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel), who criticised some parts of the agreement for plagiarism? Personally, I think plagiarism is much underestimated. I am very much with Tom Lehrer:

“Plagiarize! Plagiarize. Let no one else’s work evade your eyes…Only be sure always to call it please ‘research’.”

I join my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) in welcoming the agreement while recognising that there is considerable work still to be done. I will come back to that point in a minute.

My interest in Japan—I am pleased to see the chairman of the all-party group on Japan, the right hon. Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt), in his place— primarily stems from working in the electricians’ union. We were involved with many of the Japanese electronic and car companies that came in, bringing not just product but a whole new mindset to engineering and manufacturing. Mention has been made of Margaret Thatcher bringing Nissan to Sunderland, which has been a huge boost to that region, along with Toyota and Honda—although Honda, unfortunately, will be departing in the near future. There is a book about Toyota, “The Machine that Changed the World”. Toyota certainly changed the British motor industry. It had an enormous effect on the success of the industry, which has driven much of our engineering. We all benefited from that engagement and involvement. The trade union movement was also involved in a way that, very often in those days, did not happen with British companies.

I want the Government to look not just at the agreement, but at the follow through. I wish they would show concern about that. Hitachi came to Newton Aycliffe and built a major train manufacturing unit, employing large numbers of people, but who did we give the next agreement for trains to? To Siemens, which did not have any manufacturing capability in the UK. We need much more joined-up government. That is what other countries, particularly Japan but many others, expect of us.

There was mention of Canada and New Zealand. The detail is very important, and I fully accept many of the key points that have been made, but so is the context. Trade is important for economies, but it also binds together countries and societies. That is why the role of the Japanese embassy here, and the work of Paul Madden and the British embassy in Japan, is enormously important in establishing cultural and economic links, building unity among liberal and economically liberal industrial societies. That is very important in relation to Japan. We have looked at the work being done in industry and in Japanese finance houses here, but also many specialist companies.

We have many things in common with Japan. We are both island peoples with limited national resources. Both of our countries have had to live on the ingenuity and technology of our people and our nations. Incidentally, there seems to be a liking for rugby and the Japanese have had great success in rugby. We both like beer, to the extent that they even bought Fuller’s brewery, and we drink tea. However, with the autocracies around the world flexing their muscles and engaging together, the unity of liberal democracies around the world is enormously important. Trade deals are a significant part of that, and we therefore need to be working together with not only Japan and the other major countries, but those countries that wish to join that democratic caucus. Otherwise, the rules of not only world trade, but international engagement and society will be set by the autocracies. That will not be good for our country and it will not be good for the world.

UK-US Trade Deal

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2020 Commons Chamber

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Along with a majority of Labour MPs, I voted for the Canadian trade deal. The debate on that treaty was beset by disinformation campaigns by many non-governmental organisations, as was the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership deal. Frankly, the Government did precious little to rebut them.

Currently, one of the concerns is whether drug prices will rise in the UK; the Secretary of State touched on that. Is there not a great desire across the United States, in fact, to achieve the same excellent deal as the NHS has secured? I doubt whether, in election year, even Donald Trump will die in a ditch for big pharma. Will the Secretary of State see this as a political campaign and not just a narrow, dry trade negotiation?

[Elizabeth Truss]

The right hon. Gentleman is a great champion of free trade on the Labour Benches, and I hope that his views prevail and become more mainstream in Labour party opinion. He makes a good point. Of course, there are strong economics behind this trade deal as we have outlined today. But there are those who seek to undermine the proposals and the benefits for British businesses with various smears and scare stories about the NHS, animal welfare standards or other issues. Those people damage the potential for British businesses and our economy. We are determined to rebut the false stories that they are putting out and to make sure that we put across the positive case for the whole UK.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Spellar Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Fox]

It is important that we take climate issues seriously. Whether or not individuals accept the current scientific consensus on the causes of climate change, it is sensible for everyone to use finite resources in a responsible way. The United Kingdom was the first country to establish legally binding emission targets, through the Climate Change Act 2008, and we have reduced emissions faster than any other G7 country. We are leaders in clean energy production, and it is estimated that $11.5 trillion is likely to be invested globally in clean energy between now and 2050. That represents an enormous opportunity and the potential for more jobs in the United Kingdom, which, as I have said, is already a global leader in terms of both practice and exports.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

T4. May I ask the Secretary of State to welcome Anzac day, and our long-standing friendship with Australia and New Zealand? May I also ask whether he recognises what every major economy understands—that in order to export, firms need a strong domestic market, including public sector contracts? Rather than believing that we are the only ones in step and lecturing other countries about changing their ways, should we not face reality? Will the Secretary of State urge his Cabinet colleagues to put British firms and British workers first and, in public sector contracts, to put Britain first?

[Dr Fox]

There is also the small matter of putting British taxpayers first, and ensuring that they are getting value for money from any contracts that we award. However, I entirely agree with what the right hon. Gentleman said about Anzac day. In fact, may I take the opportunity to invite colleagues to join me and others at the wreath-laying ceremony that will take place at the Cenotaph at 10.30 this morning, and the service at Westminster Abbey that will follow it?