Professional Qualifications Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Purvis of Tweed and Lord Duncan of Springbank

Committee stage
Tuesday 22nd June 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)]

My Lords, I have received two requests to speak after the Minister, from the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town. I will call them in that order.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, on the Australian point, I think the Statement on the Australian agreement will be repeated in this House, and I will pursue that aspect with the Minister there; so he has advance notice. What he just said at the Dispatch Box does not tally with what he sent me in letters, with accompanying documentation, about services and the recognition of professional qualifications. My questions to the Minister are on the back of this.

This place will scrutinise legislation but also the Government’s proposals. We have no proposals from the Government to scrutinise because they have not brought forward proposals on what they want to do with some of these powers, so we are struggling. On the specific point of the list, it is not just the regulator bodies that should be on a list. The list is meaningful if we know what the bodies are with regards to the professional qualifications.

On the regulated professions database, the entry for pig farmers shows that they are regulated by legislation. No one has ever denied that is the case because anybody involved in livestock maintenance or husbandry in this country operates under the welfare of farmed animals regulations. On the database, there are the Welfare of Farmed Animals (England) Regulations, the Welfare of Farmed Animals (Scotland) Regulations—there is no reference to any for Scotland on the list—the Welfare of Farmed Animals (Wales) Regulations, and the Welfare of Farmed Animals Regulations (Northern Ireland). Further down it has a box:

“Qualification level: NA—Not applicable”.


If the Bill is about recognising professional qualifications for someone wanting to become a pig farmer in any component part of the United Kingdom, and there are no applicable qualifications for it, why is it on this list? We know that a farmer is regulated by laws, and lots of them, but that is irrelevant for the purposes of the Bill. It is of concern because, if it is in the Bill, it will fall foul of all the different requirements under the Bill.

I want to ask a second question with regard to the list and say why it has to be meaningful. Incidentally, we have raised farriers previously; the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, did so. Farriers remain on the list, so I looked up the Farriers Registration Council. It says that the route to be a farrier is through an apprenticeship; there is no qualification route as an automatic mechanism which can be recognised by someone else. All the professions under the list which have apprenticeship routes are not covered by Clause 1, so where would they be covered? That is the concern that this list generates. It is not just about what is or is not on it; what does it mean by being on it?

Trade Bill

Debate between Lord Purvis of Tweed and Lord Duncan of Springbank

Consideration of Commons amendments
Tuesday 23rd February 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)]

My Lords, at this point I must ask if there is anyone else present in the Chamber who wishes to contribute to the debate. No? In which case, I shall call the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, characteristically, this has been another powerful debate with, inevitably, a degree of emotion—but less emotion and more considered judgment, which is appropriate at this stage of the Bill.

My view is that the UK can act; and when we act, many people still look at how we pass our legislation in this Parliament and at our behaviour around the world. We can lead by example and, in many cases, we have done so. If it were argued that proposals on human trafficking and forced labour should not reach beyond UK businesses operating globally, and that we should act only in a multilateral forum, other countries would not follow. The UK’s record on human rights has been good but should be better. This debate, because it is on the Trade Bill, is about how we interact with our views of human rights and what triggers exist to remove preferential trading arrangements from countries that are in gross dereliction of their duty on human rights, regardless, in many respects, of a flawed decision by an international tribunal. Ultimately, it is the UK that makes its decisions.

Five years ago, President Xi was addressing both Houses next door in the Royal Gallery. I shall refer to China first and then open up my argument to the wider area of human rights. A joint statement was issued by the UK Government and the Chinese Government, and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, had his beady eye on it then. The communiqué, issued on 22 October 2015 stated:

“The UK and China commit to building a global comprehensive strategic partnership for the 21st Century. This visit opens a golden era in UK-China relations featuring enduring, inclusive and win-win cooperation.”


“Win-win cooperation” is a classic Chinese line. The statement continues:

“In the last decade, the bilateral relationship has flourished and matured with close high-level exchanges, deeper political trust, fruitful economic cooperation and wider people-to-people contact.”


Some of those factors remain the case but some have been significantly damaged, as noble Lords have indicated and as the Foreign Secretary highlighted. That joint communiqué highlighted seven co-operation agreements, covering £30 billion of trade, strategic partnership agreements and joint alliances providing preferential relationships. However, it did not include a free-trade agreement. We have more than £30 billion of trade covering a whole separate area.

Trade Bill

Debate between Lord Purvis of Tweed and Lord Duncan of Springbank

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

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)]

Does anyone else in the Chamber wish to speak? No—good. That is that “name that Peer” round over, so that is excellent. I call the next speaker, the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl. On this issue we share a great deal of common ground, although on other issues perhaps not, and I agree with his remarks about the procedures on these stages.

It has been a pleasure to work with the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, who suggested that this was like “Groundhog Day”. That fantastic film had an element of things changing in each of the days that the character relived. If that was the equivalent of the Trade Bill, we would see the incremental changes that make for a happy ending at the end of the movie. If the Government see sense and accept the noble Lord’s wise words, we will see that incremental change with a happy ending, as in “Groundhog Day”.

The noble Lord referenced previous stages, and I quote from a previous stage in Hansard, where it says:

“We talk about taking back control, but Parliament has got to stop giving its decision-making powers away. If we want to be respected in this Parliament, we have to be the ultimate arbiters of the decisions and direction of travel of our country. We can have those powers. I say to the Minister for Trade Policy that we have had these discussions. I hope that the Government will bring forward mechanisms that allow the House to have much greater scrutiny at the outset of a trade negotiation to set those ethical parameters”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/1/21; col. 812.]


That was not from me, although I have called for similar during previous stages in the Trade Bill. That was from Dr Liam Fox on 19 January, when the Government rejected Lords Amendments 1 and 5 and gave the same reasons for rejecting both. I hope that, as there is growing consensus on this issue, the Government can at least listen to Dr Fox, if not to myself or to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley.

Dr Fox also said:

“Those who had discussions with me when I was Trade Secretary will know that my preference … was for us to have a meaningful debate on a motion that was amendable at the outset for the mandate of trade discussions. That would have enabled the House to set the ethical parameters within which we would operate, and then the Government would have gone ahead and carried out the negotiation”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/1/21; col. 811.]


That is very interesting to have learned. There has clearly been a position within the Government whereby they look to see how open they are at the stage of setting the parameters or mandates for opening negotiations. So I hope that the noble Lord’s amendment is not that far from a great deal of thinking within the Government, if that had been the position of the Trade Secretary then.

It is not just Dr Fox—yesterday, on the very good and open Zoom meeting that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, hosted on the amendments that we will discuss in the next group, Sir Iain Duncan Smith said that Parliament should give the go ahead on a trade deal. He made it clear that it would not affect the prerogative power. So I think that there is cross-party support in this area, on a greater setting of the mandate. Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Dr Liam Fox and many Members of this House during the passage of this Bill have expressed a belief that it is in the Government’s and our country’s interest, so that these negotiations are stronger.

On the next element of the consultation, I welcome what the Minister said about the new page on GOV.UK on the ministerial forum, which we have debated during previous stages of this Bill. What the Minister mentioned is to be welcomed, but I think that the Government could still, in looking at legislation for international trading agreements, move the same mechanism that they put in place in the internal market Bill for our domestic trading relationships. In that Bill, there was a time-limited period of consultation with the devolved Administrations for regulations for the implementation of trading arrangements. However, I hear what the Minister said, and I hope that aspect is something on which, at this late hour, the Government could still think again.

Agriculture Bill

Debate between Lord Purvis of Tweed and Lord Duncan of Springbank

Committee stage & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 28th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Purvis of Tweed]

I know that the Minister will be relieved that I am in the last chunk of speakers on this group. The degree of consensus across the Chamber in support of Amendments 270 and 271, in particular, has been quite remarkable, and those are the amendments that I wish to address.

With regard to Amendment 270, much of what I was going to say has been said, so, perhaps untraditionally in the House of Lords, I will not say it. However, I have two questions which I do not think have been raised. First, when I helped to scrutinise the Trade Bill, with great fanfare the Government announced the UK strategic trade advisory group. It was designed to be permanent, have regular meetings and support the consideration of standards. I would be interested to know how that will interact with the Trade and Agriculture Commission. There is a standing group. Is the expectation that the commission will be absorbed into that group?

Secondly, we have a network—again, launched with great fanfare—of international trade commissioners around the world, but I am still unsure what their role will be when other trade commissioners are appointed by the Secretary of State. Will they have any interaction with this issue? I suspect not, but if that can be clarified, I will be grateful.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Henig, and others have mentioned, these issues were raised in our debates on the Trade Bill. However, when they were, the Minister said that that Bill was not the appropriate place for them. As we have heard, when they have been raised in debates on the Agriculture Bill, it has been said that this Bill is not the appropriate place for them either. At some stage, we will have to find an appropriate place for these issues, as has been made clear in the Committee. I suspect that this Bill is that place.

This House expressed its opinion and passed an amendment on standards during discussions on the Trade Bill. I wrote to the Trade Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, when he was appointed, asking why the Government had reintroduced the Trade Bill stripping out the amendments that the Lords had made to it. He said in his reply to me that the amendments that the Lords had passed were “otiose”. After looking up that word—I confess to the Committee—I was disappointed to hear what the Minister had said, but this is now the time and place, and I do not think that this issue is otiose.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, who is not in his place, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, who is, for their contributions. I suspect they are more in tune with the feelings of Conservative Back-Benchers in the other place than here. It is worth listening to what they say because I suspect that they speak for the authentic view of the Conservative Party this year in many respects when it comes to trade. I am sorry to disappoint the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering; I wish that hers was the authentic voice but, because we cannot guarantee that, we must have some protections in place in this legislation.

What struck me was that both the noble Viscount and the noble Lord tried to say, in the false narrative that they perpetuate, that there are now clear distinctions and indeed contradictions between producer interest, consumer interest, environmental interest and animal welfare interest. They are all now combined and cannot be easily separated, as in the past. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, reminded us of the establishment of the WTO in 1990. He did not mention another piece of pioneering development in 1990, when he was Trade and Industry Secretary: the Food Safety Act. He felt no contradiction at the time between putting enhanced standards for food safety for our consumers on the statute book and being the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Perhaps he has forgotten about that—but he is not here to intervene, even if that was allowed under the rules. We now need a system where we have strict enforcement of high standards for our market, we stop illegal activity and avoid those illegitimate goods coming in and we do not diminish and devalue market access, which is a cherished commercial benefit for our country.

There is still the narrative of differential—you can buy premium products for food if you pay extra because they have that extra bit of safety added to them—but we should have got rid of that concept a long time ago. If you go to Tesco and buy any good egg there—and surely they should all be good—the chances are that it was laid in my former constituency in the Scottish Borders just outside Peebles. If you visit the website of the farm company that produces most of Tesco’s eggs across the whole of the United Kingdom, the very first thing that comes up on the home page is that it adheres to the British Lion quality standard, the award assured by the British Retail Consortium and the RSPCA. They are not necessarily statutory but they are industry standards that add reassurance for the consumer.

There has been a lot of reference to the United States and I want to say a couple of things about the relationship with the United States. In the US, as we have seen, many states have lower labour rights, and therefore cheaper labour costs, than we have. That may be regretted by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, and others, but it is the case. Feed is cheaper, they can reuse their litter and they use massively cross-subsidised soy and grain production for feed, so they have cheaper inputs and they would already be uncompetitive for us for those reasons. However, the US, in its negotiating mandate with its UK, seeks

“comprehensive market access for U.S. agricultural goods in the UK”,

including by eliminating

“Non-tariff barriers that discriminate against U.S. agricultural goods”.


What are these areas? Not all of them are statutory. Yes, we have inherited elements from the EU, such as the EU broiler welfare directive on stock density, and we monitor welfare and environmental outcomes such as CO₂ levels. There is no equivalent of those in any part of the United States. We have non-legislative standards that have no US equivalent, which they see as barriers but we see as something to be protected—and, I say to the noble Earl, Lord Devon, promoted—such as on the welfare of farmed animals and on the condition of animals. We have salmonella control for food safety; we have antibiotic stewardship, where we collect data for good practice not required by law; and we have a farm assurance scheme that 90% of our chickens, turkeys and ducks are reared to.

Finally, I will turn to an element that still puzzles me greatly about negotiations with the EU. This is where I think we get to the nub of some of the concerns. The US is asking of us what it is asking of the EU, which effectively is to remove some of these barriers, which are protections for standards, thus enabling American producers to be more competitive with us—in effect, making their products cheaper. However, in our negotiations with the EU, the draft text that the Government published states that they are not seeking mutual recognition for testing and certification for foodstuffs. In practice, that means a great burden for our food exporters, who will have to provide prior approval with the supplier along with compliant testing certificates, which are linked to the comments of my noble friend Lord Bruce. We do not seek mutual recognition of this testing and compliance regime. Could it possibly be that Dominic Cummings thinks that if we did do this, it would reduce our scope to agree a trade deal with China or with America, where our standards framework, our testing and our certification are seen as less of a barrier? I hope the Minister will state that that is not the case.

Simply repeating that we would not see legislative reductions is not sufficient. We have to have the protections that the amendments would put in the Bill. This is not an otiose issue. The time is now and the time is right under this Bill to amend it.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committee (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)]

The House will be pleased to know that we are returning to the noble Lord, Lord Flight.