Secretary of State for International Trade: Visits

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fairhead]

New Zealand is indeed one of the countries that we hope to have an early free trade agreement with. It is one of the nations with which we have trade and investment working groups. We have 14 of those and 21 countries are participating. It is clear that they are engaging with us. We are working with them very actively and they are looking to work with us on areas and sectors. The noble Lord shakes his head but I know that these trade and investment working groups are having an effect and people are starting to focus on specific areas where we will be able to start negotiating. As the noble Lord knows, we are unable to negotiate any future free trade agreements while we remain a member of the EU.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, last month’s official data from the EU showed that UK exports to non-EU countries fell by 8% over the last year; to the EU they grew by 6%. The Government’s position to turn this around is that there will be trade deals with non-EU countries that we are not currently part of in the EU in operation immediately after the Brexit period. However, her predecessor said in an interview with the Guardian on Friday that,

“it will take three to five years. It won’t happen overnight and in the interim companies might think twice about investing and consumers might decide they want to be more cautious”.


Is the noble Lord, Lord Price, right?

[Baroness Fairhead]

Exports grew overall by more than 10% last year so there has been growth. Regarding how long it will take a free trade agreement to come into effect, we will be able to negotiate future free trade agreements from March next year as part of the implementation period. We will be able to negotiate, sign and ratify without implementing. There are a whole range of free trade agreements that can take anything from a year to multiple years. There are also many other types of cooperation that we are looking at, as noble Lords will be aware, such as joint trade reviews, economic partnerships and mutual recognition agreements. There are a whole series of trade arrangements we can have with other countries and we are looking at those. Our drive will be what is in the best interest overall of the UK and UK business.