UK Trade Performance

Debate between Baroness Winterton of Doncaster and Liam Byrne

Wednesday 1st May 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the Chair of the Business and Trade Committee.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

It is good to see the Secretary of State in the House again. I know she has a difference of opinion sometimes with the Office for Budget Responsibility, but can she confirm that the OBR’s figures for March 2024 show that the UK has the lowest trade intensity in the G7? There was important progress, as she has reported today, but much of it rests on progress in our services trade, which provokes the question of why we are not pursuing services-only trade agreements in a more expansive way, not least as the Minister for Trade Policy was unable to confirm whether any comprehensive free trade deals would be signed before the election when he came before the Committee yesterday. He said that services-only deals were not allowed under World Trade Organisation rules, which of course is flat-out wrong.

The question I want to put to the Secretary of State is about our goods trade. The Office for National Statistics figures show that our goods exports have fallen by about £31 billion over a year. The risk is that that number will be hit even harder by the chaos at the border. The new border operating model involves data that is submitted by traders, but then not shared with ports; sometimes two hours’ notice is needed for a journey that only takes 90 minutes; there is no standardisation of inspection charges; and British Chambers of Commerce says that many businesses will be hit by thousands of pounds-worth of customs bills that they did not know they were on the hook for.

The question is this: did the Secretary of State warn her colleagues in Cabinet that there would be complete chaos, and that the EU checks that we are introducing would be a disaster? That is what small business is saying to me, and I know it is what small business is saying to her.

Post Office (Horizon System) Offences Bill

Debate between Baroness Winterton of Doncaster and Liam Byrne

Committee of the whole House
Monday 29th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. Before I call the next speaker, I remind the Committee that this debate has to finish at 9 o’clock. I know some of the points are very detailed, but I am conscious that I have the four Members who are standing and the shadow Minister to get in. Colleagues should bear that in mind, because I cannot impose a time limit. It is about making sure that everyone has a chance to speak.

[Liam Byrne]

Thank you, Dame Rosie. It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship.

I will be very brief, because some of my points have been covered through interventions. There has been good progress since the Bill was published, which is testament to the Minister’s leadership and his officials’ support. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) said, the more that we have heard in the inquiry and through the media since the Bill’s publication, the more horrified and more determined we have become to hold individuals, including the former chief executive of the Post Office, to account. It is pretty clear to many of us that the evidence she gave to the Select Committee on 3 February 2015 and 24 June 2020 has been flatly contradicted by the Channel 4 revelations that were published on 27 March. I hope the Select Committee will be able to bring options for the House to consider as soon as possible.

I wish to touch on three points quickly: the speed of redress, the stress of redress, and the scope of this scheme. The point about speed is lit up by a single fact: the total budget for compensation is about £1.2 billion, but as of last Wednesday £196 million has been paid out. The implication of that is that 80% of the compensation budget has not been paid out, after all this time, and all the heartbreak, trauma and scandal. This Bill will correct that imbalance substantially; about £780 million of the budget is earmarked for overturning convictions and this Bill allows us to move that money much faster. However, I remain concerned by what the Minister said today about the lack of any service level agreements for paying more out for the overturning convictions scheme. I would have expected a timetable for paying out that redress alongside this Bill today.

We should be concerned about that because the track record of making payments is not good. For example, if we look at the claims in the Horizon shortfall scheme submitted by the original deadline in November 2020—three and a half years ago—we see that 362 people have still not been paid, which is a sixth of applicants. If we look at the late claims, all 667 of them, we see that three quarters of them have not been paid. That is why the Select Committee looked hard at how we could introduce some strictures to ensure that people were paid much faster.

Since then, my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), who has more experience in this House than pretty much anybody else, and indeed the Minister, raised serious and wise concerns about the risks of putting a legally binding deadline on the entire timetable. I have listened to those concerns with care, which is why the way that my amendment on this has been drafted takes aim at one part of the process: the timeframe between a legitimate claim being submitted and a first offer being made. The Minister’s target is four weeks and we are getting close to that now, but the reality is that a significant number of people are still not being paid within that timeframe.

In some of the anonymised evidence the Minister provided to the Committee, we can see that 13% of claimants in the GLO scheme are waiting more than 40 days, with 2% waiting more than 100 days. If my amendments, as I have drafted them, are not right and still run risks, I appeal to the other place to work harder on this to ensure that there is some legally binding stricture on the Department that means that when, God forbid, the Minister is no longer in his position, and we do not have his emollience and tenacity to rely on, his successor, whoever that may be, is bound by some kind of timeframe that ensures we are not still having this debate in years to come.

To check the point, I contacted a number of Select Committee witnesses this morning and found that there was some evidence that the speed of claims was improving. However, new issues were emerging; I am told that the time taken to table a second offer when the first is rejected is, frankly, not fast enough. There have been delays of up to three months or more in offering dates through remediation hearings, so the process is still running too slow. If I have failed to persuade the Committee today, I appeal to the other place to help us to find some legal mechanisms to ensure that there is stiffer timetable to which the Department must adhere.

My second point is about the stress that many people will face when putting claims in. Many people will not put claims in because legal assistance is not available before the claim is submitted. Many people, such as Christopher Head, are going out of their way to provide pro bono assistance to people in putting claims together, but often it will take hours and hours of work to get a claim form in and many people simply will not be up for that, as they do not have the patience and they want to put this behind them. They certainly will not have the legal assistance available to them. That is why I hope the Department will consider publishing some kind of tariff to help people ensure that they are claiming for the full amount. The Minister may well say that there is a risk that people will then under-claim, but I checked that with some of the lawyers this morning. Their response was expressed in rather unparliamentary language, I am afraid, Dame Rosie, but the upshot was that such an objection was utter nonsense.

I know that a lot of thought is going on in the Department about the way to do this, and I welcome the letter from the Post Office publishing average offers around the heads of loss that have been set out. Obviously, there will be bandings that are more appropriate, and perhaps that is a way to publish these things. Obviously, there is a judgment the Department is relying on—the Dyson judgment—and the neutral evaluation, which is not publicly available, for good reason. However, my plea to the Minister is this: let us try to make much clearer to claimants the full measure of redress that they should have available. If there are issues in people needing extra help before the claim form is put in, please let us make sure that that help is available right at the beginning of the stage and not simply made available once the claim is in and a contest is under way about what should be paid.

My final point is about scope, which we have already got into. There is a case for the Government to think again about the cases that have already gone to the Court of Appeal and were refused or were not given leave to appeal. The best evidence for that is the Chair of the Justice Committee’s excellent letter, in which he says:

“The Bill is in effect treating cases where the CCRC had credible evidence that Horizon data might have been essential to the prosecution case less favourably than those that the CCRC considered had no credible evidence and therefore no basis upon which to refer to the Court of Appeal.”

That is an extremely important point.

I can see what the Minister is trying to do. He is conjuring here with very radical legal remedies, and that is not something we want to be expansive, but the risk we are running is that we leave an injustice that takes years and years to work through. He has addressed some of the points the Chair of the Justice Committee made in his letter, but he has not addressed that one in writing. The objection and the goal of my amendments still stand. I will not press my amendments to a vote, because we are trying to maximise the spirit of collegiate working. I accept that my amendments, particularly on the issue of speed, may not yet be at the state of perfection that they would satisfy everyone in the Committee, especially those Members with more experience of working on these cases than I have.

However, the problem is there: people are not being paid fast enough; they are not being supplied with the right amount of information up front at the beginning of their claim; and the scope of the Bill has been drawn too narrowly. I look forward to working with the other place to try to get amendments in place that can improve the Bill and commend the consent of Members from all parties.

Points of Order

Debate between Baroness Winterton of Doncaster and Liam Byrne

Tuesday 23rd April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I thank the hon. Lady for her point of order and for giving notice of it. The Speaker has no power to compel the Prime Minister to come to the House. However, it is an important principle, set out in the ministerial code, that when Parliament is in session the most important announcements of Government policy should be made in the first instance in Parliament. The Speaker has been clear about that. I am sure those on the Treasury Bench will have noted the hon. Lady’s remarks—I can see them focusing on me—and will feed that back.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I seek your counsel? My Business and Trade Committee now has oversight of arms control, and is stepping up to its duty by holding tomorrow its first hearing on arms exports to Israel. Some 20 days ago, we requested that Ministers from the Department for Business and Trade and the Foreign Office come and give evidence. They did not reply; they had to be chased last week, and on Friday told us they were not prepared to attend. This is a topic of importance to the House, and it is also important that Ministers, in fulfilling their legal responsibility, are politically accountable. What advice can you give me, at this late stage, to try to ensure that we have Ministers in front of the Select Committee tomorrow morning?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order and for giving me notice of it. Again, attendance by Ministers before a Select Committee is not a matter for me or for the Speaker, but it is certainly true that Select Committees are entitled to expect timely replies from Ministers to invitations. Again, I very much hope that those on the Treasury Bench have noted the points that the right hon. Gentleman has raised and will feed them back. My other advice would be perhaps to raise the matter with the Leader of the House, who might be able to assist; I suggest he pursues the matter that way.

Points of Order

Debate between Baroness Winterton of Doncaster and Liam Byrne

Wednesday 21st February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I thank the hon. Lady for her point of order. It really is not a matter for the Chair, but she has come in very quickly after Prime Minister’s questions to put her point on the record, and I know that it will have been heard by those on the Treasury Bench.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Could you advise me on how we can get to the bottom of exactly what is going on with our Canadian trade talks? On 25 January, Politico broke a story about a breakdown in our trade talks with Canada. When I asked the Secretary of State for Business and Trade about this, she said:

“This is a good opportunity for me to state explicitly that the talks have not broken down.”—[Official Report, 29 January 2024; Vol. 744, c. 657.]

On the Business and Trade Committee, we trust but verify. Madam Deputy Speaker, you will be as surprised as I was to hear the following relayed in a letter from the Canadian high commissioner:

“As far as I am aware, since the U.K. announced its pause on January 25th, there have been neither negotiations nor technical discussions with respect to any of the outstanding issues”.

Canada is a NATO ally, a Commonwealth partner and one of our biggest export markets. How do we get to the bottom of whether these trade talks are going on in the Secretary of State’s mind or happening in real life?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his point of order and for giving notice of it. As he knows, I am not responsible for the accuracy of Ministers’ statements in the House, but I am sure, again, that those on the Treasury Bench will have heard his remarks. As Chair of the Select Committee, he will have further opportunities to pursue the matter directly with the Secretary of State. I am pretty sure that is what he intends to do.

Points of Order

Debate between Baroness Winterton of Doncaster and Liam Byrne

Tuesday 18th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Good. As she knows, Ministers are responsible for the accuracy of their statements, not the Chair. That said, if a mistake has been made, a correction should be given. However, that is a judgment for the Minister to make, rather than the Chair, but the hon. Lady has put her view on the record and I am sure that those on the Treasury Bench will hear what she has said.

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I ask for your advice. On a shameful day in 2021, the Treasury issued a sanctions waiver for Yevgeny Prigozhin to hire lawyers from England to sue Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat. In January, the Exchequer Secretary said that that was a civil service decision and nothing to do with Ministers. Civil servants then replied to my freedom of information request to say that the framework was advice to Ministers and could not be released.

Now, the Treasury has issued new guidance to me in reply to my freedom of information request. In it, on six of the nine criteria, the decision should have gone to a Minister. The question is, why are Ministers not revealing the original framework by which the decision was taken? What are they trying to hide? We in this House cannot ensure that our sanctions policy is good and sound unless we can see the way that sanctions waiver decisions are taken. What would you advise me to do to ensure that this House is put in full knowledge of how that disgraceful decision was taken?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for giving notice of his point of order. I am sure he is aware that responses to FOI requests are a matter for the Government, not the Chair. Rather than saying that incorrect information has been provided, I think he is saying that not enough information has been provided about the reasons for the decision. I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman is very skilled in different ways of eliciting information from Ministers. He has made his point, and I hope that those on the Treasury Bench will take it back and that Ministers will have heard what he has said.

Bill Presented

Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (Status) No. 2 Bill

Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)

Dame Maria Miller, supported by Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger, Chris Elmore, Steve Brine, Julie Elliott, Harriett Baldwin, Bob Blackman, Layla Moran, Taiwo Owatemi, Sir James Duddridge and Dr Lisa Cameron, presented a Bill to provide for corporate status of and for certain privileges and immunities to be accorded to the international inter-parliamentary organisation of national and sub-national legislatures of Commonwealth countries known as the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association and to its Secretary-General; and for connected purposes.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 16 June, and to be printed (Bill 292).

Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill

Debate between Baroness Winterton of Doncaster and Liam Byrne

Report stage
Wednesday 25th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I have now to announce the result of today’s deferred Divisions.

On the draft Environmental Targets (Biodiversity) (England) Regulations 2022, the Ayes were 302 and the Noes were 166, so the Ayes have it.

On the draft Environmental Targets (Woodland and Trees Outside Woodland) (England) Regulations 2022, the Ayes were 302, the Noes were 166, so the Ayes have it.

On the draft Environmental Targets (Water) (England) Regulations 2022, the Ayes were 300, the Noes were 170, so the Ayes have it.

On the draft Environmental Targets (Fine Particulate Matter) (England) Regulations 2022, the Ayes were 301 and the Noes were 170, so the Ayes have it.

On the draft Environmental Targets (Residual Waste) (England) Regulations 2022, the Ayes were 301 and the Noes were 170, so the Ayes have it.

[The Division list is published at the end of today’s debates.]

[Liam Byrne]

It is a pleasure to speak to new clauses 1 and 2 in my name and those of many others, and it is a pleasure to follow so many excellent contributions to the debate. I hope it has become clear that there is a wide and deep cross-party consensus about the need to take this overdue Bill and repower it with not only good laws but proper resourcing so that we can begin to ensure that economic criminals in this country are put under rather more pressure.

A lot is in a name, and the Bill’s name is the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill. As the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mary Robinson) pointed out, what is crucial to ensuring the corporate transparency we need to police economic crime is information. Much of that information comes from whistleblowers and, crucially, from courageous journalists who are prepared to take tremendous risks and go to tremendous lengths to pursue the truth, publish the truth and hold the guilty to account.

The challenge we have is that we know we cannot police economic crime without such transparency, but that old advice to journalists to follow the money in pursuit of the truth is becoming almost impossible because our courts—English courts, London courts, which were sanctuaries for justice for 1,000 years—are becoming the strike point of choice for oligarchs around the world to intimidate, to cow and to deter journalists from publishing the truth with the threat of sky-high legal costs. My friend the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who is not in his place, and I, together with the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), have been pushing this argument for almost a year. Yesterday, the hon. Member for Isle of Wight presented to the House a first-class private Member’s Bill, which I was proud to sign. I commend the Minister for the work that he did when he was Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee on ensuring that the cancer of strategic legal action against public participants is something that we know about and are collectively determined to act on.

Within the sub judice rules and exemptions that govern the debate, I can talk about some of the evidence that we now have on the record. There are now so many cases that it has become clear that there is a playbook for oligarchs. It is a playbook that all of them know and all of them follow. It is a playbook that is now predictable, and it is a playbook that we must draw to a close. We could draw it to a close this afternoon by agreeing to the amendments that we have tabled with cross-party support.

The first step in the playbook is to target the individual. Do not target the company, because companies are strong and individuals are weak. That is exactly why Arron Banks went for Carole Cadwalladr. He did not want to go for The Guardian or the Scott Trust; he wanted to go for an individual journalist. That is exactly why Prigozhin, as we now learn, decided to target Eliot Higgins and not Bellingcat, because of course an individual is always more vulnerable than a corporate organisation. In most of these cases, we see an oligarch taking aim fair and square at an individual and not the corporate organisation behind them to maximise the power of intimidation.

Secondly, having identified the individual, the task is to maximise the intimidation. Let us look at what Tom Burgis had to go through when he was writing his book about the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation. The bad guys whom he was trying to expose actually went to the lengths of tapping his phone and bugging him. They must have done—that was the only way in which their investigators could turn up to a secret meeting that he was having with former Government officials in a car park. Those are the lengths that these people will go to.

Thirdly, there is the business of exaggerating the claims: taking some aside in a bit of written material and exaggerating it ridiculously to try to multiply legal costs. We saw that in particular with Mr Abramovich in his case against Catherine Belton and HarperCollins. It was a ridiculously exaggerated claim. Of course, the objective for Mr Abramovich was not to win his case. All he sought to do was maximise the legal costs for HarperCollins and Catherine Belton.

We see that now in a case in the Royal Courts of Justice, which I will not name but which I sat through a couple of weeks ago. That case is so thin. It entails an oligarch basically trying to claim that a number of emails that have been sent are in effect tantamount to a publication. Even though he is unable to name and specify the harm that has been done, he is seeking to bring a case for defamation. It is the flimsiest of cases anyone could imagine, yet hundreds of thousands of pounds have now been racked up in legal costs in an attempt to intimidate someone out of telling the truth.

Step four is to co-ordinate with others, which we saw in particular with Mr Abramovich, who decided to round up a number of his old mates to try to bring some kind of collective action—not just in this country, by the way, but in other countries such as Australia. That was a way to double the legal costs and maximise the pain against Catherine Belton and HarperCollins.

Then we have the attempts to rack up costs even though the grounds may be as flimsy as anything. Forensic News, for example, is being sued by Walter Soriano. Forensic News has a total of 12 subscribers in this country, yet Walter Soriano has been allowed to prosecute the case because of those 12 subscribers. Why could he possibly be doing that? Is it, as the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden described, because our legal costs are so high that the pain can be maximised by bringing a case here?

We see the same in the case referred to by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) of the former rulers of Kazakhstan, who have brought a SLAPPs case against the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and openDemocracy. That was because openDemocracy had the temerity to expose the $8 billion siphoned off through Jusan Technologies, which is somehow now claiming that its economic interests in the UK have been damaged and therefore it is entitled to bring a case in the Royal Courts of Justice. As a result, openDemocracy and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism are forking out thousands of pounds to defend themselves against this onslaught.

The situation we now have in this country is so appalling that, as we heard in the urgent question this afternoon, we have the spectacle of a Russian warlord being licensed by His Majesty’s Treasury to fly his lawyers to London to polish a case to sue an English journalist in an English court in order to undermine the sanctions this country has imposed on him. That is how ridiculous, corroded and broken our system has become. An exemption was licensed by a servant of the Crown to spend thousands of pounds flying lawyers to service the needs of the head of the Wagner Group in St Petersburg and to refine a lawfare case in an English court.