Trade Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 29th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Balfe (Con) [V]]

My concerns are rather general. I have been associated with the European Union for a very long time, as many people know: since 1979. I was at the TUC when Jacques Delors came and won the TUC over to the fact that the European Union could lay down standards which would benefit working people all over Europe, not just in Britain. I am very concerned that the Bill should not weaken any of those standards.

I am not going to point a finger at the Government and say, “Oh, that's what they are trying to”, but I would welcome a clear statement from the Minister that the Bill does not aim to give British working people lower standards or enable people to work around the standards that have been laid down and enjoyed for a long period. That is a fundamental matter.

When we look at where those standards come from—I follow the noble Lord, Lord Judd, in this—we see that the International Labour Organization has played an historic and noble role in working people’s standards for the past 100 years. It is the only part of the League of Nations that is still in being in its original state. The ILO and its conventions must be at the centre of any trade agreement negotiated by the British Government. If we are to have trade agreements, we cannot ignore the ILO’s standards or the basic standards of human and workers’ rights, and this is one way in which we can do it.

We heard a lot in the referendum, after the referendum and in the election about taking back control, but I hope that we are not going to be taking back control in order to weaken standards which have been hard won over the years. One of those standards is the democratic participation of Parliament in lawmaking and the making of trade agreements. This is highlighted in Amendment 100, and I share the sentiments of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who said how important it is that each House of Parliament has a say. We cannot delegate democracy. If we are a two-part Parliament, this House must also have an input.

What concerns me about the whole approach is that we are not taking back control to Parliament; we are taking back control from a Parliament, the European Parliament, and seem to be putting it quite firmly into Whitehall—largely, it would seem, in an unaccountable manner. I hope that the Minister will be able to assure us that there will be a central role for both Houses of Parliament in how the trade agreements to be negotiated under the many clauses of this Bill are implemented.

The final point I want to make is this. The noble Lord, Lord Lennie, mentioned the TUC. I have not heard a word from the TUC so I put it to its representatives, who I presume will be monitoring this debate, that if they want to protect workers’ rights, they should remember that a third of all workers do not vote for the Labour Party, they vote for the Conservative Party, a good number of them vote for Plaid Cymru and a fair number vote for the Green Party, the SNP or the parties in the north of Ireland. I would say to the TUC, “If you are issuing briefs, please issue them to everyone. If you’re not, please wake up”, because this Bill has enormous import for the future of workers in Britain and they deserve the TUC to be a little more proactive than it has been up to now.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, I wish to address Amendment 6, referred to my noble friend Lord Fox, and to support Amendment 3, spoken to by my noble friend Lady Birt and to which she has put her name. In so doing, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, for supporting in principle the idea that we are asking the Government to outline how they will be supporting British business to take advantage of the GPA agreement of which we are now a member in our own right as agreed by the other members. I reassure her that this Bill will never be long enough to address all the fears that me and my colleagues may have of this Government, but the amendment is practical, sensible and simply asks the Government to be clear. We will not rely on the Minister’s winding-up speech in this short debate in Grand Committee; rather, as my noble friend Lord Fox has indicated, we are asking for a proper report from the Government setting out how they will support our businesses.

We want the UK to prosper and our businesses to benefit from any new opportunities while also not being burdened if trading relations with our biggest market in Europe are harder. Procurement is one area where our businesses can seek contracting opportunities across all the GPA members, but there are practical barriers to those, whether it is language, knowledge of that country’s government procurement system, having local partners or legal protections. These are just some of the factors among many and it is a complex area in which to do business.

According to the OECD, taxpayers’ money that is spent by the Government on goods, services and infrastructure such as roads, hospitals and schools accounts for over 13% of gross domestic product, so there is a huge market. I can reference Amendment 51 in a later group, but let me refer to the NHS here at home. My noble friend Lord Fox gave the figure of £67 billion of UK procurement. NHS England spends around £27 billion on goods and services every year. Ward consumables are delivered through the American-founded and German-owned DHL. Mental health beds are operated by American companies providing about 13% of in-patient beds in England. In some areas, the proportion of US-owned mental healthcare facilities is much higher. In Manchester, patients have a 50:50 chance of being admitted to a privately owned hospital and a one in four chance of that bed being provided by an American-owned company. Patients think that the NHS is purely British from beginning to end, but services are being provided by an American-owned company. There is thus no question about the need for the British Government to provide more support for British companies to take up opportunities abroad. The Government strategy is for the NHS supply chain to be expanded and to make it easier for companies around the world both to bid for and to secure NHS services within this country. Of course, they will assist British businesses in doing the same but—I am not necessarily critical of this—the Government operate a level playing field.

The US sees this market as a valuable one because it is colossal, so it is no surprise that it has within its negotiating mandate with the United Kingdom to ease barriers so that its companies can benefit from greater market access to provide over £30 billion-worth of basics and consumables in addition to £7 billion in deals for capital contracts. It has been interesting to note that procurement opportunities within the UK have expanded and that that is positive. It opens up the UK to more international co-operation, but as my noble friend Lady Birt, has said, we want to see greater support for British businesses to enable them to take up some of these opportunities too.

It is interesting to note that the European Union has emphasised that the final market access offer presented by the UK for membership of the GPA was

“commercially credible and viable, replicating the UK’s current coverage under the EU schedule with minor technical adjustments.”

The EU was a fairly enthusiastic supporter of the UK application, and why would it not be? It replicates the same basis as it has at the moment.

I note that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, asked the Minister about the thresholds. She referred to $130,000 being the threshold. That is the threshold of every single GPA member other than Japan and Aruba, which have it set at $100,000. Can the Minister say, if we are to have opportunities in our own right, why that threshold is the same as what we had within the European Union?

The reason the WTO and the EU were enthusiastic about replicating what we have at the moment is because the WTO said when it approved our GPA membership in our own right

“It was underlined that the United Kingdom accounts for over a quarter of the EU’s total procurements covered by the GPA and that, when taking into account just central government entities, the UK accounts for nearly half of the EU’s covered procurements.”


There is no doubt that the EU is happy because it has retained market access to nearly half of all of that covered within the EU.

We were led to believe that the Government would negotiate nothing without using British leverage to get a better deal for Britain. Can the Minister explain what we have done with that? The Government did not include procurement in their mandate for a future relationship with the EU, while the EU’s mandate did. It wanted to go beyond the GPA, including utilities and supplementing the GPA with additional areas of coverage which would have opened up the European market for British businesses under procurement. But, no, the Government wish to go on the GPA model, which means that the European Union has in effect preferential access to UK procurement where we have not sought to open up some of the barriers to the European market.

I have a final question to ask the Minister regarding what is happening here at home. The 1998 devolution settlement means that public procurement is an area of responsibility for devolved government in Scotland and Wales. The Government have indicated that they wish to seek divergence in our current approach to procurement. How would this be seen in the devolved areas? I know this as a former constituency Member in the Scottish borders who fought many campaigns on the issue of being against centralisation and the Government centralising procurement policy and bundling up contracts, which makes it harder for smaller, local businesses, as my noble friend Lady Birt has indicated. The White Paper states

“For both goods and services, these provisions will be supplemented by the non-discrimination principle. For goods, non-discrimination will apply within certain excluded areas such as procurement.”


Paragraph 145 goes on to say that the Government are considering

“whether and to what extent it should apply to public procurement, in particular for above-threshold procurements.”

That means that, in effect, the UK Government for England can decide what the threshold levels and the policies for procurement would be for the devolved Administrations. No reference is made to procurement in the Bill, so can the Minister clarify the position on procurement within the internal market?