Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 4th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak very briefly to reinforce the point made by a number of the speakers on all sides of the House, particularly by my noble friends Lord Browne and Lord Whitty: that we share the view of many people that this Bill is inexplicably linked to the Trade Bill. As I will be leading for the Opposition on that Bill, I thought I would dwell on a couple of the points that link the two Bills, in a way that I hope will be helpful to the future debate.

Having said that, it is important to recognise that the Bill as drafted is, in the narrow sense, a supply Bill—it undeniably deals with taxation issues and tariff arrangements—but it lacks a wider context in which these things can be properly assessed. Scrutiny would have been one way forward on that, but I think there will be room within the Trade Bill to pick up on some of the points made today. I give notice to the Government that, given that the Trade Remedies Authority is dealt with in the Trade Bill, it would seem possible to amend that Bill and thereby change what is currently going through in the customs Bill before us.

This has been a good debate, which has exposed many issues that will need to be returned to during the Trade Bill debate or elsewhere. Like many others, I do not think there is much point in repeating those issues here. For me, what still needs to be addressed, perhaps during that Bill’s Second Reading next week, is: what exactly constitutes a trade Bill appropriate for an independent United Kingdom? I say this not in any political sense but because there has been an absence of debate and discussion on this throughout the country since we lost direct responsibility for it in 1972. During that period, two big things have happened.

First, people have become more interested in trade as a social policy issue—something that needs to be looked at and interrogated more directly than it currently is. Within that, there needs to be further consideration of how to get away from understanding trade in terms of a physical movement of goods. Clearly, services are heavily involved and need their own consideration, but opportunities are now rare to purchase goods without having to consider the services that relate to them. However, it is not restricted to that. As the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, said, we have to think carefully now about other barriers to trade. Whether they are regulatory or done to restrict access or use, all these things have an impact on trade which will not be dealt with if we focus only on the tariffs to be charged, now or on behalf of others, then collected and passed on.

Secondly, we have to look at trade policy as decisions on it are taken which affect other aspects such as employment, development impacts in third countries, impacts on the environment and human rights. These issues are much more widely discussed and debated in civic society today; many Members of the House will have been lobbied in anticipation of the Trade Bill, which will raise these issues. I am not saying that we will necessarily want to espouse all of them, as some involve rather narrow interests. Nevertheless, they raise a rather wider context in which we have to debate our trade policy and we must not ignore them.

On the narrow point of the role and function of the Trade Remedies Authority, there will be a series of debates on amendments which will be brought forward. They will look at its independence and explore what these two new concepts of public interest and economic interest will be in practice because without understanding those, it is not possible to understand how decisions will be taken by that body and what impact they will have on our trade activities.

We have touched in a number of ways on the role of the devolved Administrations in trade policy. If that is to be brought back from Brussels and given to the devolved Administrations, it must follow that structural changes will be needed in how we organise matters relating to trade policy to accommodate their views and aspirations, and the changes that they would like to see. At the moment, the Board of Trade is a possible way in which to do that but there are other issues, which I know the Government are thinking about. We will need to have more detail about committee structures in Parliament and on whether there will be something jointly between the two Houses, or perhaps a role for the House of Lords to develop its expertise, pursuant to the loss of work that will come through for the European Union committees. It could have a role in sectoral issues and of course in geographical issues, which will need to be brought forward. In any case, if we are to at least emulate what is happening in Europe on trade policy at the moment, we will need to find ways of bringing into the process the civic society elements which are currently excluded from discussions on trade policy in the UK. A role must be found for them: whether that is through some form of joint committee, or a process which will allow those who have views to take them forward in some form of debate or discussion, has yet to be decided.

Looking back on the history of this Bill, we are perhaps omitting from our debate today the fact that it had to be stopped earlier in the process because it was felt that it would not be able to deal with the issues that had been raised. It is a mystery to me why the Government decided that they were in a position to get the Bill through and that there would be some value in that result. Perhaps they might still consider whether there would be some benefit if this whole Bill were subsumed into the Trade Bill, and consideration given in the round as we go forward. It may be too late to stop the machine in its tracks—I do not look hopefully at the Minister for that—but it would be wrong to make a decision about a Bill dealing with a narrow issue when there is the prospect of a wider debate and discussion on the Trade Bill, which is coming down the track.