Cost of Living Increases

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Ben Lake

Monday 24th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Ben Lake]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. Like him, I represent a rural constituency, where concern about rising petrol and diesel costs is bearing down heavily on families. For people in Ceredigion private cars continue to account for the overwhelming majority of commutes. Indeed, in Wales as a whole about 80% of people have to commute by car. Sadly, for people in Wales, and particularly in rural areas, there is no short-term alternative to using private cars, so those rising fuel costs are having a devastating impact. Of course the long-term solution would be greater investment in public transport infrastructure, but, as an MP representing a rural area, I know how devastating cuts to bus services have been in the last decade so, sadly, for the time being using the bus instead of a private car is not a viable option.

The crisis has also demonstrated the need for longer-term action, such as action to boost productivity, and green solutions to help address the energy supply emergency and in so doing to alleviate stagnating living wages. We can ease the crisis in the long term by reducing energy demand. We have discussed that often in this place and debates have also been held in the Senedd in Cardiff. If we reduce fuel and energy demand, we also reduce fuel bills.

A good place to start is with the simple measure of improving household heating efficiency. At the autumn Budget I called on the Chancellor to make a £3.6 billion investment over 10 years, in conjunction with the Welsh Government and the private sector, to improve home insulation in Wales. It is well-documented that the quality of Welsh housing stock is poor by both British and European standards, and its energy efficiency is, sadly, a sight to behold. Introducing measures to improve the heat and energy efficiency of our homes would not only boost employment in areas that are desperately in need of levelling up through the retrofitting schemes, but would also address fuel poverty. A report by the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales has suggested that with such a package of investment over 10 years we would be able to end fuel poverty in Wales, producing average annual savings of £418.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

One great problem is inequality —there is always a fuel poverty issue in good times as well as bad times in the United Kingdom. I was Chair of the Energy and Climate Change Committee. We visited the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen and a Conservative member asked an academic there about fuel poverty in Denmark; the response was, “In Denmark, folk can afford stuff.” There is a structural problem in the UK in that the problems are not always acute but are always there.

[Ben Lake]

I agree with my hon. Friend. He makes an important point. Those who had the fortune of being able to listen to the debate in the Welsh Grand Committee last week will have heard that this matter as it relates to Wales was looked into in great detail. Sadly, we have a situation where, too often, I can walk to a petrol station in London, for example, and the price of energy, of petrol from the pump, is the same or cheaper than it is at a place in Felinfach in my constituency, and yet London has the benefit of the tube, the overground and regular bus services, whereas Felinfach is lucky to have two services a day.

To conclude—I have spoken for some time already—we must also bolster local renewable energy supply if we are serious about tackling the longer-term issues of our fuel and energy supply. In closing, I raise Plaid Cymru’s call for the devolution of the management of the Crown estate in Wales. Simply put, with many colleagues from Scotland in attendance this afternoon, if Scotland can, why not Wales? Devolving the management of the Crown estate in Wales would bolster Welsh revenues, increase our bargaining power with the private sector and support renewable energy deployment, all the while ensuring that the communities in which this energy is generated will be where its benefits are enjoyed the most.

In sum, the Government need urgently to do more to tackle the immediate crisis. The cost of living crisis is worsening, not abating, and households and businesses need support now—but let us not forget about the longer-term action that is required if we are not to find ourselves in this situation again in future.

Refugee Family Reunion

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Ben Lake

Thursday 20th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)]

I agree with the hon. Lady on what she said. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the current situation has been exacerbated by the UK’s decision to opt out of applying article 10 of the EU directive on family reunion, which would have allowed unaccompanied children to act as sponsors for their family members?

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. I am glad I have taken both interventions together, because they overlap neatly. This perhaps dovetails into something else, which is that the UK opted out of some EU directives; if only Scotland could opt out of some UK directives. We will park that one there, but it does show that the idea of Brexit—[Interruption.] We had better park that one as well. The hon. Lady and hon. Gentleman got it right, as did the British Red Cross policy briefing for this debate.

The Red Cross recommendations are:

“Give adult refugees the right to sponsor their parents, siblings and children up to the age of 25 to join them in the UK under family reunification rules.”

That is normal in other places in Europe—places that have not opted out. It is the norm. The second recommendation is:

“Give child refugees the right to sponsor their parents as well as any siblings up to the age of 25 to join them in the UK under family reunification rules.”

The third recommendation is:

“Reintroduce legal aid for family reunion applications.”

Members will not be surprised to learn that those recommendations mirror closely, if not precisely, what my Bill set out to do. I refer to the Bill that has been choked by the Government in this House of Commons, despite the fact that it has had laudable and welcome support from Members from Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Change UK, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National party, and from luminaries among the Conservative Back Benchers. All those voices from across the political spectrum were supporting the Bill.

I just want to say one thing to the Government and to colleagues across this House, as I know you want me to speak for only 12 to 15 minutes, Madam Deputy Speaker—[Interruption.] I should have mentioned that the Democratic Unionist party is supporting my Bill. Indeed, the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) is here, so thank goodness I remembered before I was reminded; otherwise, we might have had an Adjournment debate on the issue. The Bill has been supported across the House, and the plea I make to colleagues is that if the Government do not move on this now—there will be reshuffles, so there will be different personnel at the Home Office and things might move on a bit better—whoever else comes out at the beginning of the ballot in the next Parliament should be willing and open to move forward on this Bill, because it is shameful that the Government have not moved with this. Time in politics is short and time in government is even shorter, and things could have been done that have not happened. The Government could have looked back proudly had they reacted and done this, but I hope, and warn them, that this will not be the only time; I expect this to come forward again.

Future Free Trade Agreements

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Ben Lake

Thursday 21st February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I will take cognisance of the fact that I started at 2.7 pm and will look to not to be too long. I want to thank the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), who reminded me as he was speaking that I had not arranged for somebody to feed my sheep this morning. My 81-year-old neighbour Iain MacLean stepped into the breach quite admirably, but only because I was reminded by the hon. Gentleman.

I was talking earlier about how citrus fruit may not be an offensive trade interest, but I have just heard that the weather today in Aboyne, Lossiemouth and Altnaharra in the highlands of Scotland is about 17° C or 18° C. It is a summer’s day in Scotland, so anybody watching who is looking to have a decent half-term break should head to Scotland and forget about going anywhere else. It seems to be the place to go for the temperatures. I note that the Conservative Benches are empty, but perhaps they are in Val d’Isère taking advantage of free movement while it still exists. This may be the Brexiteers’ last holiday.

I also thank the hon. Member for Brent North for his frank honesty. I was talking earlier about damage to GDP and gains through the trade agreements. Of course, a no-deal Brexit and crashing out would, according to the UK Government, damage UK GDP by 8%. Now, the gain in GDP would be about 0.2% from a USA-style trade agreement, but that would mean we would need 40 USA-style trade agreements to make up the gap. There is only one problem. The USA accounts for over a quarter of the world’s GDP, so needing 40 USAs means that we will have to find 10 planets of people as wealthy as Americans in 2019—not 1919 or 1819, but as wealthy as they are today.

If there is an FTA, which is the route the Government want to take after kicking the can down the road for another 21 months of European Union membership—putting the pain off for another wee while—there would be a 6% hit to GDP. We would then need 30 USA-style agreements, or seven and a half planets.

If we follow Labour’s policy of a customs union only—I pay tribute to the honesty and candour with which the hon. Gentleman admitted this—there would be a 4% hit to GDP, requiring 20 USA-style agreements, or five planets, to make up for the lost GDP caused by ripping up our current deal with the European Union.

It is important to bear that in mind. It is nice to talk about flashy new trade agreements and trade policies but, in actual fact, trade is what drives all this. As I said to the Secretary of State, people who are selling shellfish or frozen fish, as people I know in the north-west of Scotland are, will not be able to do their rotations to Europe because of the barriers and all the paperwork listed by the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr Fysh), and they cannot exactly drive their lorry on a rotation to New Zealand, South America, Chile or wherever else in the CPTPP, or wherever else we might find ourselves having an accidental trade agreement.

As Chair of the International Trade Committee, I welcome this opportunity to debate these potential free trade agreements with the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and to debate possible UK accession to CPTPP. The Government initiated consultations on these potential trade agreements last summer and, despite having closed four months ago, we have yet to see the Government’s response, which would have helped to inform this debate. The Government received a vast number of responses to the consultations, but I understand that many of those 600,000 responses were duplicates. I hope we will see the responses soon.

The Committee recently went to the World Trade Organisation in Geneva, where there is much bemusement as to what the UK is doing. Trading on WTO terms is the most expensive form of trade, and the deputy director general of the WTO, Alan Wolff, said that if we trade on WTO terms, or something close to it, rather than the open single market we currently have, a “Brexit gap” in economic performance would damage our GDP. That is a good way of seeing it, because we are talking about a 4%, 6% or 8% Brexit gap in our economic performance.

It is good that we are having this debate, because the Committee published a report in December titled, “UK trade policy transparency and scrutiny,” which made a host of recommendations on Parliament’s role in future free trade agreements. One recommendation is that Parliament should have an opportunity to debate the Government’s negotiating mandate, or “outline approach” to use the terminology that the Department for International Trade favours, on a substantive motion before negotiations begin on the free trade agreements. I think negotiators would find it useful to have such a steer on the will of Parliament as to what they should progress in any negotiation.

An example of how not to do it is the Prime Minister’s approach to her international agreement with 27 other actors under one umbrella, the European Union. She came back to Parliament and found herself with a whole range of people, from Yeovil to the north of Scotland, ranged against her for various reasons. Had she tried to carry Parliament with her from the beginning, she might have found herself in a different position. We should be adopting such an approach to future trade agreements. Governments come and Governments go, and an awful lot of work might be done before being stopped and wasted. The resource of trade negotiators is few and far between, and they take a long time, so we do not want to negotiate something for three or four years and then find ourselves having to scrap it—assuming we Scots are still here, because independence may well be around the corner for us.

My Committee also recommended that devolved Governments should be consulted on this, as Canada and other countries tend to do. We have to make sure that we have as big a buy-in as possible. As we are seeing with Honda and Japan at the moment, there can be winners and losers in these agreements. As I said to the hon. Member for Brent North, the automotive sector in the midlands of England has perhaps lost out in the EU-Japan agreement.

If there are to be losers, how do we compensate them? If the UK enters a free trade agreement that, say, benefits the south-east of England and destroys, for instance, Welsh lamb, is there any idea of fiscal transfer or compensation for the sacrifice of the Welsh for the south-east of England? Do not think these are esoteric, way-out-there possibilities, because the air agreements that the UK entered into after 1945 specifically mentioned international flights only flying into London airports, which damaged the north of England, Wales, western England, central Scotland, northern Scotland and many other places. Iceland, for obvious reasons of its geography, was one of the first to break that. Having created the advantage of a transport hub in the south-east of England, there was a huge reluctance to cough up for the sacrifice imposed on others.

There are trade-offs in the decisions and directions that Governments take. Interestingly, of course, the Irish Government were quite different during that period. Rather than centralising around Dublin, they actively promoted the west, which is why Shannon airport is still the destination it is, and Knock airport in the north-west has also benefited.

The Committee feels that the Government should publish a trade policy strategy that articulates a vision for the UK as an independent trading nation—if all those things come into being—and outlines the UK’s immediate and future trade priorities at bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral levels. We propose that such a strategy should outline the UK’s key objectives, interests and priorities in respect of its trade policy. Sadly, we have yet to see such a strategy, so I urge the Government to publish one, as it would allow potential new FTAs, such as the ones we are debating today, to be seen in a wider context.

The UK has been spoken of as being a dwarf in comparison with the US, and the Secretary of State robustly jumped to the Dispatch Box to say that the UK is absolutely not a dwarf compared with the United States and that it is the fifth largest economy. When we actually look at it, the United States makes up about 28% of global GDP—about a quarter, as I said earlier—and the United Kingdom is about 2.3% of global GDP, so it is about a twelfth of America. If I came across somebody 12 times taller than me, I might feel rather dwarfish. We might find that the muscle that can be applied in trade negotiations by a grouping 12 times larger than us is somewhat more substantial than what we bring to the table ourselves.

[Ben Lake]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about how many other nations will look at the market size of the UK and will perhaps consider that they do not want to concede in the same way in these negotiations as they perhaps would have if we were still a member of the European Union. Perhaps that goes some way towards explaining some of the difficulties that the UK Government are having in trying to sign off on some of these roll-over agreements.

[Angus Brendan MacNeil]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. There are 40 such agreements with about 70 countries, and the UK’s hope is that we can stand on the shoulders of the European Union and roll over that work, which of course relies on 70 other countries not seeing a possible advantage in getting better trading terms, as a number of them certainly do. A negotiator who wants to be promoted within their trade negotiating structure will, when the UK appears over the horizon with probably not the most experienced negotiators—they certainly will not have the same track record on international negotiations—see too great an opportunity to resist.

Interestingly, I note that the countries that have concluded the much-trumpeted trade agreements are ones with a tremendous balance of exports in their favour. Chile’s is about £150 million to £200 million in its favour, but the outstanding winner here has to be the Faroe Islands; I like to blow the Faroes’s trumpet as chair of the all-party group on the Faroe Islands, but my goodness! It exports £229 million-worth into the UK while importing only £16 million-worth back. So not only have the Faroes got themselves up the scales of acknowledgement, but they have done themselves a fantastic piece of business by rolling over what was already a very advantageous trade agreement. So well done the Faroe Islands, and I hope the welcome in Tórshavn will be as good as it always is.

Let me now look at UK-US trade relations. When we went to the US the farm lobby asked, “Why folks? Why have you done this?” They were just bemused. Ford said that for it, “The UK-US is incremental, but the UK-EU is existential, particularly the interplay with the UK-EU and Turkey. The tariffs that could be accumulated in that direction could be problematic.”

The International Trade Committee’s key recommendation was that

“the Government should undertake detailed work modelling the potential effects of a UK-US agreement on the economy.”

Evidence to the inquiry regarding the impact on GDP varied, but it was about 0.2%. We also have to make decisions about whether we have some increase in regulatory barriers with the EU in exchange for the removal of barriers with the US, and what the overall benefit of that is. As someone who keeps a few sheep, as I mentioned to the hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford), I can see a huge problem if we find ourselves putting up barriers to the EU to please some Americans and the American Administration in order to wave a piece of paper and say, “Trade agreements in our time.” That huge danger presents itself to a UK Government who might rush into trade agreements for the sake of it.