Trade (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Kerr of Kinlochard and Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town

Committee stage
Thursday 14th December 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendments 25 and 30 and then touch even more briefly on Amendments 13 and 14.

Amendment 30, which will shortly be spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, calls for a parliamentary debate on a CPTPP impact assessment. This is really important, because the influence of this House is not in the big decisions we take but over the Government—although it is too late when they have already signed a treaty—and the House of Commons. Although we do not normally tell the House of Commons what to do—I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, chose his words very carefully—in this circumstance it is really important.

In addition to the impact assessment, the International Agreements Committee, which the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and I sit on, will also write a report on the treaty. We can get that to influence the real decision-makers down the Corridor only if this amendment is agreed and we ensure that a debate happens there. The request for an impact assessment is a nice little segue into a debate on our report as well. By concentrating on the wider impact assessment, it also allows a wider range of issues to be considered, such as prices. Nobody ever talks about the impact of these agreements on prices. We hope that and other issues will be very good for consumers but we need to see that, so a debate will be important.

Amendment 25, which my noble friend Lord McNicol will speak to, requests an impact assessment on labour and ILO standards. This is key. We want this and any other FTA not just to maintain but, we hope, to bolster ILO standards—not just through paper adherence but enforcement. I think we all agree that trade is good for jobs, consumers, our exports and the economy, but that must not be at any price. It cannot undermine any ILO standards. Indeed, I hope it will enable us and others to be rather more observant of them.

Very briefly on Amendments 13 and 14, I strongly concur with the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, about the importance of increasing investment. As I will make a wider point, I declare that I am a leaseholder and am on the board of the ABI, but I bring to the Committee an issue of core importance to prospective overseas investors that I have read about in the financial and specialist press rather than know about through any personal connection. In a completely different part of government, there is an attempt, with leasehold reform, to make retrospective legislation to reduce ground rents to peppercorn rents. That is very attractive for lots of people, but there is a real clash with the desire to increase overseas investment via the CPTPP, because many overseas investors—to say nothing of our domestic pension schemes—are concerned about non-compensated loss of property rights or contracts if their ground rents are suddenly taken away from them retrospectively.

That retrospective nature could undermine the Government’s welcome attempts to get more international investment into the country, because the attractions are not just over trade agreements such as this but over all the other things that we know we are known and valued for: stability, certainty and the rule of law. That needs to go hand in hand if the objectives of this deal are to be taken into account.

That was a little off-piste, but I could not resist it. My real point is that we need to know far more at a more granular level and after the event about what this agreement has produced. That needs to be debated in this House and elsewhere so that the influence of, in particular, my colleagues and the specialists we have heard from, who put so much into this, can be heard at the other end of the building.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, who was an extremely effective chairman of the International Agreements Committee. I have only two points.

First, in response to overwhelming demand across the Committee, I have agreed to repeat the extraordinarily boring technical point I made in our first day in Committee about deadlines. The majority of the amendments in this group set deadlines that hang on the passing of the Act. I respectfully suggest that what matters for reports is the date on which our accession takes effect. That might be in the course of next year—I hope it will be—but that is not certain. Some of these amendments would call for reports almost certainly before we have actually acceded. Accession takes place when the last ratification is received by the depositary power, so the right peg to hang it on is not the passing of the Act, which permits us to ratify, nor our ratification, but the 12th ratification, which allows us in. I know that these are mostly probing amendments, but I suggest to their drafters that it might be a good idea to use the peg of our actual accession rather than the passage of the Bill. I exempt some of the amendments in this group; this is only for the ones that hang on performance and how it is working out, because it would be well for us to be in before we require the Government to report on how being in is working out.

Secondly, I am a little concerned about Amendment 32— the accession amendment in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Purvis of Tweed and Lord Foster of Bath. It would require the Secretary of State to produce

“an impact assessment of the impact on the United Kingdom of the accession of countries that have submitted a request … to accede to the CPTPP within the last five years”.

That would include us; it would be jolly useful to have an impact assessment for us, but I do not think that is the purpose of the amendment. The deadline is

“within three months of the passing of this Act”,

which is the wrong deadline, for the reason I gave.

However, my point is more substantive than that. Apart from us, there are six countries whose applications to join the CPTPP have been received in the last five years: Ecuador, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Ukraine, China and Taiwan. The rules of the game, of course, are that consensus is required before a negotiation starts with any applicant country and consensus is required before a negotiation is closed, completed, and then the ratification process starts. It is also the case—not so much in our case but in previous cases—that there have been a lot of side letters and deals done in the margins of the main accession negotiation.

It is misleading to call for an impact assessment of what would be the impact of the outcome of any of these six negotiations. One cannot do that now. A very good moment for dialogue with the Government would be when CPTPP was considering whether to open negotiations. It seems that three months after the passing of the Act, one simply does not know. I add, on a personal basis, that I do not think that six negotiations will start in the foreseeable future. The applications of three of these countries pose serious political problems. In one case, there will be an enormous change to the nature of the CPTPP if the accession took place—a change that I think would be undesirable and, I believe, a majority of members think would be undesirable. There are, however, two other cases where considerable political problems arise.

Setting early deadlines and calling for the Government to go public with their analysis, which would in fact present the Government’s negotiating position, would be unwise. I do not think that we should ask our Government to go on the record in advance about a hypothetical negotiation which, in my view, in three of the six cases is unlikely to start in the foreseeable future. The Government would not be wise to act on that requirement, so I hope that they will resist that requirement—or, rather, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, will have second thoughts about Amendment 32.