Future Free Trade Agreements

Andrew Griffiths Excerpts

Thursday 21st February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffiths (Burton) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Chi Onwurah]

I will give way, but I do not wish to emulate others in making long speeches.

[Andrew Griffiths]

The hon. Lady mentioned businesses that are not prepared to go on the record. I quote:

“This is not a Brexit-related issue for us”,

and this decision is “being made” on the basis of “global…changes”—those are the words of Ian Howells, Honda’s senior vice-president for Europe. It is clearly disingenuous to suggest that Honda’s decision was based on Brexit. Does she accept that, because Ian Howells says so?

[Chi Onwurah]

I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman was in his place when I started speaking, but I acknowledge that Honda’s decision is not entirely based on Brexit. However, as we have been discussing, the uncertainty in the business environment caused by Brexit has an impact on investment. The Minister stated that investment was not down, but investment in the automotive industry has gone down by almost 50% in the last year. At the same time, components worth £35 million are delivered from the European Union every day. That partly reflects the way in which our supply chains are integrated.

Government Members, many of whom pride themselves on their business experience, seem to fail to understand that supply chains—as a chartered engineer, I have been involved in many supply chains—such as the automotive supply chain are highly integrated and highly just-in-time. We have automotive supply chains that cross the channel backwards and forwards multiple times—for example, a crankshaft can be made in France, go to the west midlands to be drilled and milled and then sent to Munich to be put in an engine, which then comes back to Oxford—and the channel would be a tariff border. Such integration requires not only frictionless borders, but agreed standards to define everything from the acceptable frequency of electromagnetic radiation to the atomic composition of a given chemical. In leaving the European Union, what the Government apparently want is not less regulation, but simply more duplication, setting up new regulatory bodies to recreate existing European agencies and regulations. Far from Brussels imposing regulation on the European Union, it was often acting as an outsourcer for regulation that we would need in any case.

The automotive industry delivers not gig economy or minimum wage jobs, but good, well-paid jobs, and we in the north-east, particularly as the only region in the country that still exports more than it imports—we are very proud to have the most productive Nissan plant in the world in our region—refuse to envisage the future that the Government seem to desire, whereby our manufacturing is undermined by taking us out of the biggest free trade area in the world, one which is absolutely essential to us.