EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I think these two agreements lack two fundamental things without which they will be much poorer than they would otherwise be. First, there is no cost-benefit analysis at all, and there should be for any great venture of this kind. As we know, we left the European Union very much on the basis of very extravagant promises: we were going to have much more money, there were going to be enormous increases in the budgets available for the NHS, and so forth. Nothing has been seen of these promises since, and the fact that there is no cost-benefit analysis will, I am afraid, lead only to greater cynicism in this country about the political system.

The other thing that is extraordinary is that while there is a great deal about goods in this agreement, there is virtually nothing on services, although services are our great forte, representing nearly 90% of our GDP. That is an extraordinary order of priorities. I am aware, of course, that the Government have now entered into negotiations about financial services and the regulation and supervision of financial services companies on the basis of equivalence. I doubt that very much will come of this, because I think the continentals, quite reasonably and rightly—I think we would have exactly the same attitude if we were in their shoes—wish to use Brexit as an opportunity to encourage more and more firms currently working in this country to move their operations, their capital and their personnel to the European continent. If they want to do that, they are rather unlikely, it seems to me, to be prepared to accommodate us on the matter of equivalence.