Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership

Debate between John Spellar and Daniel Zeichner

Thursday 10th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

I, too, thank my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) and the Backbench Business Committee for initiating this important debate.

TTIP may not be on the lips of everyone in every constituency, but there is great interest in it in my constituency, so much so that during the general election campaign, when I was pleased to be joined on the campaign trail by the wife of the then Leader of the Opposition, she was absolutely amazed to find that the inhabitants of the first three houses whose doors we knocked on all wanted to talk to her about TTIP. I think she went away appreciating that Cambridge is a very special city indeed.

Such is the interest in the city that we have had a series of public meetings, one of which I organised. I was very pleased to welcome my colleagues Richard Howitt and Lucy Anderson, who are both Members of the European Parliament, to help throw light on what for many people is still a deeply opaque process.

Of course, I agree with other hon. Members that trade agreements are important, but they are also intricate and complicated, perhaps inevitably so. For many of our citizens they seem very remote, and they are often negotiated under wraps. Even to those of us who are following the detail, TTIP can seem fiendishly complex, but it is so important that it cannot be ignored, which is why we must keep asking questions and make sure that they are answered to our satisfaction.

As other hon. Members have pointed out, of course we are in favour of trade agreements. They bring significant benefits and boost trade and growth, and they should secure and create jobs, bring down costs and extend choice for consumers. The Government tell us that an ambitious agreement could add as much as £10 billion annually to the UK economy in the long term, which would be good for jobs and good for consumers. That would, indeed, be welcome, but those economic benefits are contested, and I suspect that, in truth, the reality is that there is simply no way of knowing for sure at this stage what the potential gains may be. We should beware of hyperbole. We need to be able to weigh the possible benefits against the possible risks, which is why the Government should assess, in a transparent, comprehensive manner, what the real economic impact might be. I understand the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee has recommended that this assessment should set out the potential benefits and risks on a sector-by-sector basis, which would probably provide much sought-after clarity.

There are many concerns about TTIP, and they have been well rehearsed in this debate. I share with many hon. Friends the concerns about the impact on public services, particularly the national health service. The investor-state dispute settlement mechanism might gift transnational corporations the power to sue countries for profits that have been lost as a result of that country’s policy decisions. There is a very real fear that the inclusion of the ISDS mechanism will prevent a future Labour Government from reversing the Health and Social Care Act 2012 in England owing to the fear of the cost of legal challenges they may face.

[Mr Spellar]

If companies have existing contracts as a result of privatisation, can they not, under contract law, take action in the domestic courts? Is that not the problem, rather than that there will be a new legal procedure?

[Daniel Zeichner]

I certainly agree with my right hon. Friend that real problems are created by our own Government, and we do not just have to fear TTIP, but TTIP might make the situation worse. As someone who endured the horrors of a tortuous and expensive tendering process for our health services in Cambridgeshire during the past few years and has seen it collapse spectacularly and expensively in recent weeks, my advice to the House is: “Don’t go there.”

We have had reassurances from Ministers. Recently, the Minister for Skills said that

“the Government were entirely satisfied that the position regarding TTIP would not threaten the public status of our NHS or other public services. We were entirely satisfied that there was absolutely no intention on the part of the Commission in negotiating the agreement, or on the part of any other EU member state, to allow the status of either our public services or theirs to be threatened.”—[Official Report, 9 July 2015; Vol. 598, c. 568.]

I must say that I am not so sure, not just because of who told us that, but because, from what I have heard, my constituents are not satisfied and because we will not be satisfied until we have concrete proof that a TTIP deal would not irreversibly expose the NHS to competition and threaten its very basis as a public service.

Finally, TTIP is no ordinary trade agreement. Its prime objective is the removal of regulatory barriers to trade, but there is a significant gap between EU and US regulations in a host of areas—safety at work, food production, the use of pesticides and GM crops are just some of them. The danger is that instead of TTIP harmonising regulations upwards to remove regulatory barriers, it will seek the mutual recognition of regulations between the EU and the US. That will inevitably lead to pressure for deregulation in the EU, as EU businesses find that they can no longer compete against US companies that operate to inferior standards of environmental protection and health and safety legislation.