Trade Agreement between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Swiss Confederation

Lord Wigley Excerpts

Wednesday 1st May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, unlike many previous speakers in this debate, I am not a member of the sub-committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, although I do strongly agree with and support his Motion to Regret. I should declare an interest. My noble friend Lord Kerr of Kinlochard referred to the good will we generated when the east Europeans, Cyprus and Malta came into the Community. We also generated quite a lot of good will in 1972, when I was a member of the team that negotiated the first free trade area agreement between Switzerland and the European Union. We were on our way in then, not trying to get out of the door, so no doubt there was even more good will around.

Like almost every speaker in this debate so far, I think that it has demonstrated how totally inadequate the procedures we are applying to this agreement are for parliamentary scrutiny of trade policy in the future. It will be of great benefit to us all, including the Minister, I hope, to have noted how toothless and useless this process is—other than to employ us all on an early summer afternoon in debating the matter—because there is absolutely no leverage here whatever. We can pass a Motion to Regret or we can reject the whole agreement, the first of which would be sensible and the second of which would be silly. However, what we cannot do is to influence the debate in any way.

Here I take up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, who is not in his place, when he said that Parliament cannot be a negotiator of a trade agreement. Of course he is right, but that is not what is at issue. What is at issue, as it was when the Trade Bill was discussed at huge length in this House, is whether some process could be put in place by which Parliament could have a say in the basis for the negotiation before it began, could be briefed constantly during that negotiation and could have a reasonable opportunity to influence the outcome. The Minister will know of the amendment passed by this House, which went to the other place six or eight weeks ago. It has been some time now and I would be grateful if, when she winds up at the end of this debate, she can tell us how the Government’s thinking is coming along on that matter because it will be rather important to know that. We may of course never see that legislation again, in which case it might be a waste of time, but that crucial point has been brought out by this debate.

The other point which has come out clearly is the lack of coverage of services, which really is crucial. The figure quoted most often is that 80% of our economy now consists of services; a very large amount of that consists of internationally traded services. In the absence of any coverage of them here or, far more importantly, in the political declaration agreed between the Government and the European Union—not yet and perhaps never to be approved by Parliament—the provisions for services are either absent or totally vestigial. That is an astonishing situation. It is often said, quite wrongly, that the European Union has not got very far on freeing up trade in services. That is complete rubbish; it has got a rather long way in so doing and has a long way further to go. We have been beneficiaries of the first part of that and we need to be part of the second because it is crucial to our future prosperity.

The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, spoke about the insurance industry. That is just one example but there are any number of others. Whether we talk about road transport, air transport, professional services, the legal profession, banking or the creative industries, there are huge areas of our economy which are simply not covered. I wonder why that is the case. Why is nothing said about this? Enough has probably been said about this agreement to enable all of us to realise that it is not a thing of great beauty. I suppose the best thing I could hope for is that it never enters into force.

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, as a member of the sub-committee chaired so well by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, I am glad of the opportunity to pay tribute to him for his work as chair and to the work of the staff of the committee. A tremendous amount of work goes on and we, as a Chamber, are indebted to all the chairs who undertake such long and often painstaking work, over long hours, to ensure that the proper scrutiny goes on and that the work of the committees is effective.

In many ways, what we have before us today is a test vehicle, because many other treaties will follow and some of the points that have been made already, which I shall not repeat in detail, need to be dealt with now to ensure that we move things forward effectively. This matter is of interest to us all, whichever side we take on Brexit; we have to get the system to work whatever the settlement may be. I am very committed to the European Union, but I have to accept that it is important that we get things to work properly, whether fairly soon, after 31 October or whenever.

One question that clearly arises is our capacity to handle all these changes and all the discussions and investigations that have to go on—the capacity within Parliament on an elected level in the House of Commons and in our Chamber here, but also within the Civil Service. Do the Government have the capacity to handle things to the timescale within which they will have to be undertaken? Getting it wrong has a material effect on people involved in manufacturing, in trade and in services, so we have to get it right. It is better to get it right a little later than to be rushing in and getting it wrong soon.

The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, referred to getting the devolved Administrations involved. That does not mean just sending an email down the road to them and saying, “This is happening. Send your reply within three weeks and we await to hear that”; it means engaging with them and making sure that there is proper buy-in at that level. We need a harmonious approach so that some of the problems that may be seen from the devolved Administrations’ perspective are dealt with at the right time and do not trip us up later.

I stress again the question of differentiation between goods and services. I always thought that this was an artificial differentiation. It is even more so now, because we cannot just draw a line between them. We need a system that works not just for now but as things move forward. As what we have regarded as services in the past become an integral part of the goods that we may be dealing with, we have to ensure that our treaties are robust enough for those circumstances.

Will the Minister give some commitment as to whether the Government can deal with the trade implications of a no-deal scenario on 31 October? God help us that it does not come to that but if it does, can we realistically deal with it in a way that is fair and reasonable for all those diverse interests in our economy who depend on the answer?

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I too am a member of the European Union Select Committee—not of the same sub-committee as my noble friend Lord Whitty but of the External Affairs Sub-Committee. That committee has been considering several of the trade agreements. None of those that we have looked at deals with anything more than 0.1% of our trade. When I am feeling really cynical, I think that the amount of money we have spent getting to this stage of bringing the treaties to the House will probably be more than any of them bring in trade. Then I wonder at all this talk about saving so much money by coming out of the EU. Everything I hear contradicts that in all sorts of ways.

We are agreeing these treaties as emergency procedures to make sure that, if there was no deal, there would be some ability to continue to trade, but we have not had a real debate about what sort of relationship the Government foresee between this country and the rest of the world through trade. We have to think only of the Corn Laws and the huge divisions there were then: I often think we are in the same sort of period now, even though the world and trade have changed a great deal since the Corn Laws. We know that some members of the Government are speaking very loudly about totally free trade, where we can trade on our own terms with elsewhere in the world. I think that that is a fantasy; none the less, that is said by some Ministers, whereas others keep reassuring us that we will have regulatory standards that will protect the environment, food standards and so on.