Public Procurement (International Trade Agreements) (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, although, unlike his interesting and wide-ranging remarks, I am afraid that that I am going to be very specific and quite pedantic. This is not in any particular spirit of criticism of these regulations; in introducing them, my noble friend was clear about their purposes. They are indeed entirely noncontroversial and, to a large extent, much anticipated and much welcomed to implement the continuity agreement so far as government procurement and access to public procurement in the United Kingdom is concerned.

I want to make two points. The first is for those who are often prone to saying that it is our Government’s intention to expose the National Health Service to competition pressures. Whether or not they think that is detrimental, I will not argue; the point is that, here, as in other public procurement measures, the Government have taken the opportunity to make specific exemptions for clinical healthcare services, which indeed they did in the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. So those who talk about the exposure of the NHS to competition should look at that and recognise that the Government have, if anything, moved in the opposite direction.

The pedantic point I want to make is that, in introducing the instrument, my noble friend reflected what is said at paragraph 7.2 of the Explanatory Memorandum, which may have been the intention when it was written:

“This instrument will only affect trade agreements that have already been scrutinised via the procedure set out in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act”—


that is, CRaG. This is almost entirely true, but it is not true in relation to the agreement with Serbia. The Serbia agreement was signed on 16 April using powers under Section 2 of the Trade Act, which was given Royal Assent on 29 April. This statutory instrument was created and laid on 13 May. The Serbia agreement was laid under CRaG on 11 May and, I understand, was provisionally applied on 20 May; the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee and the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments looked at it on 25 and 26 May. It might have been anticipated that the CRaG scrutiny period would have ended by now but it has not because the Whit Recess intervened and the CRaG scrutiny period expires on 23 June. The International Agreements Committee, of which I am a member, will examine the UK agreement with Serbia tomorrow. So there is an exception to this point.

Does it matter? I think the short answer is that it does not. The provisional application is in place, as one would expect in order to minimise any discontinuity in our trading relationship with Serbia because we have been operating on quasi-WTO rules since the turn of the year and the provisional application was quite right. So it does not matter but there is a point here: if instruments are laid with Explanatory Notes, the timing and sequencing need to be very clear. In this case there is, I think, no controversy, but if there were controversy, and if we were in a position where the House was being asked to put in place implementing legislation in circumstances where the CRaG scrutiny had not concluded, that would be regrettable. I just want to note this because we are all finding our way with all these processes but I hope that care will be taken to understand the sequencing for future occasions.