Trade Bill

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments & Ping Pong (Hansard) & Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 2nd February 2021 Lords Chamber

On other matters, maintaining standards is one of the things the British public expect of government—and it is mighty difficult, when you are involved in negotiations, not to retreat even slightly from them.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to support my noble friend Lady Thornton and to agree with my noble friend Lady Kennedy. I obviously listened with great care to what the Minister said, and the reassurance that he gave, but I hope that in winding up he will actually respond to the points raised by noble Lords. Essentially, he is asking us to take this on trust, but the problem is that, in relation to the issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, talked about, the same argument could be just as well used in relation to health issues.

As the BMA has pointed out, unless the health and social care sectors are specifically carved out from the scope of deals, common elements within free trade deals, such as standstill and ratchet clauses, could lock in and deepen the fragmentation of services. That could block new models of care. Other unintended effects might be to prevent NHS hospitals bringing support services back in-house, as they now seek to do.

Investor protection and dispute resolution mechanisms in UK trade deals open the door to the Government being sued for making legitimate public procurement and regulatory decisions. We heard of the Canadian example, but another is that of an EU investment treaty which resulted in the Slovakian Government being ordered to pay over €22 million in damages to a foreign private health insurance firm after they decided to reverse the privatisation of their national sickness insurance market. Investor protection mechanisms have also been extensively used to challenge public health initiatives such as plain packaging for tobacco.

I really must endorse the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, because it is exactly as she said: there are necessary interventions in health in relation to, say, issues of pricing and other things on foods that we might regard as harmful, but this can be extended to other health interventions as well. The noble Baroness talked about clever corporate lawyers, but take, for instance, the tobacco companies; globally, they fight their corner very fiercely indeed. The idea that they would use some free trade agreements to argue against some of the protections that the Government might want to put in strikes fear into my heart.

As my noble friend Lady Thornton said, we know that UK and US negotiators have had conversations about the health service. The US has also made clear its desire for the UK to change its drug-pricing mechanism. I am certainly with those noble Lords who say that trade deals could risk compromising the safe storage and processing of health data. We will hear from the noble Lord, Lord Freyberg, in a moment and I will be very interested in his remarks.

In the end, this amendment cuts to the chase of the debate about whether the NHS is on the table in trade negotiations. I am convinced that it has to be taken off the table; that is the only way that we will protect it. In this short debate, frankly, we have exposed the arguments of the Minister. I say this to him: we deserve an answer, because it is no good giving bland assurances about the Government’s intent. A lot of this is about unintended consequences, with the examples there are now globally of how trade deals can impact on the sovereignty of individual national Parliaments. I will not put Brexit in at this stage, but how ironic indeed that the Government who talked about taking back control are busy agreeing trade deals where they are in fact at great risk of losing control.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is obviously a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. He told me off earlier for giving the Government a hard time. I thought about that and, in fact, until very recently, if I criticised the Government, I always offered another policy, a greener idea. I tried to be positive towards the Government, but I am afraid that my optimism is failing me. I shall come back to that.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on her incredibly hard work, nudging the Government towards a more ethical stance on the protection of children. I hope that she can get them over the line. If she puts her amendment to a vote, I shall of course vote for it. The noble Baronesses, Lady Kennedy and Lady Boycott, gave such good ideas and sound arguments that it is difficult to imagine that the Government can overrule them.

There is a lot in this non-regression area. I assure noble Lords, as the only Green allowed to speak in this debate today, that Greens very much support the NHS, which has done the most incredible job during the pandemic and is now doing a fantastic job of vaccinating the population.

Children, animal welfare and human rights are all very close to my heart—but I shall speak about the environment. Environmental protections are always in danger, with any government, because it is so hard to understand how you can change from where we are now to where we really ought to be, given the climate emergency that we are all facing. I hope that the Dasgupta review that has been published will help all of us to understand the threat that we face.

I welcome the review—the good thing is that it actually uses the language that most politicians use, and it looks at the economic value of nature and natural resources. Greens tend to use the phrase “natural capital”. The Dasgupta review stresses that the economy is a complete subset of the environment and not the other way around. It uses the language that growth-oriented 19th-century political perspectives can get a handle on. When it says things like, “we can’t exist without a healthy world”, that is not only about air, water and having enough pandas and elephants and things like that; natural capital includes the soil and geology—it includes everything that we are destroying very fast. That review could be a moment when all politicians make the seismic shift to understanding that it is not all about growth. Quite honestly, with the Trade Bill, you really have to have that understanding. Embedding environmental considerations into our current systems will not work; you actually have to change the systems. We have already overshot our planetary limits—we are already in huge danger, and we are still failing to meet the basic needs of billions of people all over the world.

These amendments are absolutely crucial, not only for individuals but for every part of our planet, our system and our society. I really hope that we have another massive defeat for the Government on this, so that they might have pause in their complete lack of understanding of green issues.