Brexit: World Trade Organization Rules

Debate between Lord Howell of Guildford and Lord Price

Monday 19th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Price]

I agree with the noble Lord that our ambition should be to increase our exports. At the moment the UK, regrettably, bats below where it should. We are sixth in the league table, below France and Germany, and we hope to rise above that through a number of initiatives. Pursuing all trade options with all countries should be the Government’s approach, to make it easy and straightforward for businesses to export and to make sure that we are equally open to other businesses, both in the EU and elsewhere, which want to export into the United Kingdom.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, further to my noble friend Lord Spicer’s question, as we are now told that more than half the total earnings of world exports come from services, intellectual property, information products, digital transfer and shared processes and not from traditional goods transfer, are we not reaching the point where the WTO rules—let alone the more outdated rules of the former single market and the customs union, which belong to past trade patterns—are of decreasing relevance to our trade prospects?

[Lord Price]

The noble Lord is certainly right that services are an increasingly important part of the UK economy, representing 80% of our GDP and 40% of our exports to the EU. However, I would not want to diminish the importance of goods transfer. The north-east of England is the second largest exporter of cars in the EU—it exports more cars than Italy. It is important for us to hold on to the fact that we produce goods in the UK and export goods from the UK. That must not be diminished as we pursue our agenda to increase our services around the world.

China: Market Economy Status

Debate between Lord Howell of Guildford and Lord Price

Monday 9th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Price]

I thank the noble Baroness for her question about the EU and the north-east. The Government believe that the country is far stronger inside the EU than outside it, for a whole host of reasons, which have now been well documented by the Prime Minister and others.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on his new post but is he aware that although EU-China trade has been growing, particularly in goods, in fact the Commonwealth’s trade with China has increased by 14 times since 2000? The pattern is one of growth all round but the weak point is inward investment into China, which has fallen quite sharply, and of course services to China, where we have considerable difficulty. Since we are an 80% service economy, it is really in our interest to expand that side, particularly given that the EU services single market is not very active and quite difficult to get into.

[Lord Price]

My noble friend is right that it would be good to see the United Kingdom exporting more services to China. The good news is that we have now moved to number four with China in our goods exports, and China is currently the seventh-largest market for our goods and services exports. However, we believe that as the Chinese economy develops into more of a service economy, we will indeed be able to do more.