Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response: International Agreement

Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Christopher Chope

Monday 17th April 2023 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Anne-Marie Trevelyan)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) for leading this debate on behalf of the Petitions Committee and, importantly, on behalf of the petitioners. I am also grateful for the contributions of all hon. Members, and I will try to respond as best I can. I will ask officials to write to Members to answer the questions to which I am unable to provide answers. In particular, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) has entirely unsurprisingly taken the opportunity to ask a series of questions on areas that the Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), would be highly capable of responding on. However, he is unable to be here due to other ministerial duties. I will ensure that responses are provided for those questions.

As covid-19 clearly demonstrated, it is in all our interests to invest in global health. The world was ill-prepared for the pandemic, which killed millions, wiped billions off the global economy and undid years of progress on our development goals. The three years since covid struck have been a wake-up call for the whole world. They have highlighted the importance of strong, resilient and inclusive health systems and have made clear that we need a co-ordinated approach across our work on human health, animal health and the environment. Covid also shone a spotlight on the need for agreed international protocols, so that information is shared in a timely fashion. It underlined how important it is that vaccines, treatments and tests are available to all who need them.

In short, we need collective international action, co-operation and mutual accountability to protect future generations from the catastrophic impacts of pandemics. Finding the best ways to manage communities of all economic strengths and resilient shapes and sizes is, of course, one critical part of that. That is why the UK is working with G7 partners and others to catalyse international efforts to try to help countries of all shapes and sizes to be better prepared.

As part of this, the former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), joined other world leaders in 2021 in calling for a new international instrument to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. All 194 WHO member states agreed by consensus to draft and negotiate a new pandemic instrument. There was a clear view that this could transform global health security and deliver the changes necessary to withstand health threats, for example, by making sure that the world has fit-for-purpose agreements in place for data-sharing and surveillance, to be able to help slow or contain the spread of disease and to support a speedy and effective response.

In November 2021, together with the other members of the World Health Organisation, the UK agreed to establish an intergovernmental body to draft and negotiate the new pandemic instrument, with a target date of May 2024.

To answer my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), that is being negotiated with a view to adoption under article 19 of the WHO constitution, but without prejudice to considering adoption under article 21 as negotiations progress, if that was to be the preferred decision of all member states in the consensus decision that they hope to reach.

The article 19 route would not negate the ability of each member state to accept it through their own national constitutional processes, which is a really important part of the question that I will refer to further. Whether agreed under article 19 or 21, both will be legally binding as a matter of international law.

As part of our wider efforts to improve global health security through strengthening international law, the UK is participating in parallel negotiations to update the international health regulations: the technical public health framework, which a number of colleagues referred to, that requires countries to report and respond to potential cross-border health threats.

Over the next year, UK officials will shape and negotiate a text with other WHO members to ensure that it delivers on our priorities. Those will include: working towards faster and more equitable access to affordable vaccines, treatments and tests; strengthening collaboration on scientific research and development, including clinical trials and data sharing; improving collaboration and co-ordination across the human, animal and environment health sectors to try to control threats from zoonotic diseases among those other threats that we know are out there; and building strong health systems to support populations to access the health services they need during and after a pandemic.

We are already demonstrating global leadership in those priority areas. Through our multilateral and bilateral investments, we are helping low and middle-income countries to develop resilient systems and services. For example, we trained more than 600 health workers in Côte d’Ivoire to strengthen surveillance, reached over 53,000 people in Cameroon through outreach campaigns led by civil society partners and substantially increased response times to reported public health events in Mali.

Through our “One Health” approach, we are working to monitor and control the spread of diseases between humans, animals and the environment. We supported Cameroon to carry out a simulation exercise that tested and refined plans to deal with disease outbreaks of zoonotic origin, including monkeypox. Meanwhile, our investments in research and development are increasing equitable access to vaccines, drugs and diagnostics. With UK support, the Medicines for Malaria Venture has developed and rolled out more than 13 new anti-malarials. To date, those medicines have saved an estimated 2.7 million lives.

In all of this, we are working in strong partnership with academic institutions, the private sector and other organisations. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations—CEPI, as it is known—is a great example of that partnership work, helping to ensure that medical innovations are affordable and accessible to those in need. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has committed £230 million to CEPI to support the development of vaccines for covid-19, which includes the covid-19 vaccine candidate developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, with support from the Department of Health and Social Care’s UK vaccine network. As we have seen, the Oxford-AstraZeneca covid-19 vaccine has saved lives worldwide.

The UK has been a global leader, working with CEPI, Gavi and the WHO to ensure that our scientific leaders can help tackle health crises. As Secretary of State for International Development back in early 2020, I was proud to lead the fundraising for Gavi and COVAX to ensure that vaccines—once, we hoped, they were found—could be delivered as quickly as possible through the incredible networks that organisations such as Gavi have to reach across the globe. When covid hit, it was clear, however, that stronger collective international action, co-operation and mutual accountability will be needed if we are to tackle to tackle more effectively the global health threats of the future. Sadly, as colleagues as have said, we know that we need to be prepared for them.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Does my right hon. Friend believe that China is complying with the requirements to be open and transparent, sharing all its data and letting everybody know exactly how the covid-19 virus began, or does she believe that China is covering it up?

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

My hon. Friend speaks with a passion that we all know and respect. I am not the expert on this, but there is much commentary on whether there is the full clarity and transparency that we have seen from some countries. Indeed, when I talk about wanting to be able to build stronger, collective co-operation and mutual accountability, that is one of the reasons why we want to support the development of this new pandemic instrument.

I will try to tackle some of the concerns about the proposed instrument that are raised and highlighted in the petition. First, I would like to be clear that no text has yet been agreed. The process of drafting and negotiating it is ongoing, and we certainly do not expect the text to be agreed before May next year. It is a member state-led process, with member states negotiating the treaty, not the WHO. The WHO secretariat is supporting the process; it is a technical and bureaucratic system.

Colleagues have mentioned changes to the international health regulations, which are an important legal framework intended to prevent, protect against, control and provide a public health response to the international spread of disease commensurate with the public health risk involved. Indeed, it also helps to avoid unnecessary interference with international trade flows, so economies continue to be as strong as they can be under such pressures.

The UK and other WHO member states adopted the current version of the IHRs in 2005. They came into force in UK law in 2007. Negotiations on targeted amendments are looking to improve the framework in the light of the covid-19 lessons learnt. To be clear, the UK is right at the heart of those negotiations. We will work for good outcomes for the UK and for all member states, which we wish to work with and support.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Christopher Chope

Wednesday 2nd November 2022 Commons Chamber

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

All matters of tax are for His Majesty’s Treasury, but it is clear that all our formerly fossil fuel companies are indeed energy companies, and they are investing incredibly heavily across the piece in renewables as well. We will continue to work with them to ensure that they invest their profits wisely.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

T4. When Ministers go to the COP27 conference, will they give the cold shoulder to Germany to show our country’s disapproval and disgust at it continuing a massive expansion in its use of lignite, which is the dirtiest way of generating electricity?

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

After the COP presidency is handed over to Egypt, we will ensure that we continue to work with all our international partners to find solutions that move to renewables and clean energy.

Steel Safeguards

Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Christopher Chope

Wednesday 29th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

The Department for International Trade has had no contact with Lord Geidt, although I understand that, obviously, the Prime Minister and his former adviser spoke regularly on a number of matters. The Government have a duty to use their democratic mandate to the greatest possible effect to protect the interests of the British people and provide leadership, and the balanced decision I have reached is that today’s course of action is the right one.

To my hon. Friend’s point, these measures are only temporary and can last only a further two years, so the challenges of solving some of the big structural questions are closer to us than ever before—they are not getting further away. We will continue to work closely with the industry, so that, as these safeguards fall away in due course, we support it to move towards becoming the modern steel industry we all need.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

May I thank my right hon. Friend on behalf of all those who work for REIDsteel, which is the largest private sector employer in Christchurch, manufacturing and supplying steel structures across the world? However, what will happen in two years’ time? Can she guarantee that REIDsteel will be able to get supplies of clean British steel in two years’ time? If not, will she not need to abandon this net zero doctrine? What is more important than actually being able to supply homegrown steel so that people in Christchurch can manufacture and export their products?

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

My hon. Friend is a champion for his constituents, and it is great to hear more about REIDsteel. As all downstream users look to meet their net zero commitments and demand cleaner steel, we will see industry changing. A healthy industry, as we see now, has both imports and exports. We export some of our British steel to the US for its defence industry—they do not make that particular specialist steel themselves. As in any good business, we are sharing our expertise with industries abroad. Equally, there are some steels that we do not make in the UK that we therefore import. As regards the category 12 steel safeguard, I have decided to extend the TRQ because downstream users have been clear to me that they need more of that steel. We do not produce it domestically in the quantities that would meet that need, so it is right to ensure that the balance of the market is right for our downstream users. I look forward to seeing REIDsteel continuing to thrive in the years ahead.

Value Added Tax Bill

Debate between Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Christopher Chope

Friday 8th February 2019 Commons Chamber

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)]

I want to highlight the point my hon. Friend is making. When the income tax rate went up to 50%, I had small businessmen come to me saying, “I’m not going to work any harder if I have to hand over 50%. I’ll work four days a week and play golf on Fridays. I’m not going to invest my capital in a business if the Treasury doesn’t understand the pressures of running a small business,” and they stepped away from increasing their productivity—indeed, went backwards—until we started to reduce the rate. Too often, we fail to understand the consequences of tax policy on behavioural patterns.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

My hon. Friend makes a brilliant point. This used to be at the heart of Conservative thinking and policy making on the Treasury Bench. It was that dynamic thinking that was behind past decisions to significantly reduce the top rates of tax. I hope we can rediscover that much more dynamic approach to the behavioural consequences of high taxes and artificial thresholds.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope), although I would highlight that I am a chartered account—and proud to be so. My training perhaps gives me a different perspective on politics, and I often from myself thinking in a different way from Members who are lawyers—not in a good or a bad way, but simply in a different way. Such training offers a breadth of policy, planning and thinking that we need to bring together. I am thrilled to speak on my hon. Friend’s important Value Added Tax Bill, and about how we might start to make significant improvements to this regressive and most punitive of taxes on the poorest, and on small businesses’ growth and productivity, after we leave the EU—very shortly, I hope—and are free to make such improvements once again.

I will address three areas of policy change proposed by the Bill, although there is much more I could discuss: VAT thresholds for small businesses; the flexibility of VAT rates on energy; and the big, thorny question of the sanitary products challenge that we have to solve. The first area on which this Bill offers an excellent improvement to our present VAT rules is the threshold for paying VAT. A small business whose main activity is one of human endeavour—the “services” part of goods and services—must monitor its monthly sales on a rolling 12-month basis these days, and must register to pay VAT as soon as the cumulative total reaches £85,000. Most small businesses that have many VAT-charged goods, such as plumbing businesses, are more likely to be VAT registered from the beginning, so such monitoring does not have to happen—those businesses are already in the VAT system because they want to reclaim the VAT on goods they have to use.

The threshold means that, overnight, a business suddenly goes from not being VAT registered to being VAT registered and having to charge an extra 20% on its bills. Imagine going in for a monthly haircut that used to cost £20 and suddenly finding that it costs £24. That business will then find that a smaller, non-VAT registered business down the road is more competitive, and it will immediately risk losing customers, so what does it do? Does it hold down prices by employing another staff member, at great speed, to increase business and grow the volume of sales, or does it stop accepting custom in order not to hit the threshold in the first place? My hon. Friend gave the example of cafés, but in Northumberland, there are tourism businesses that see the threshold coming and therefore slow down or close their doors early not to make further sales. This arrangement is simply anti-competitive and surely it is not the sort of business driver that any Conservative Government would mean to be encouraging.

A real-life example that highlights the problem is that of a young businesswoman with exactly this dilemma in my constituency. This young woman owns a small hairdressing business in a small town, and employs two stylists full time and one part time. Her turnover is about £100,000—above the £85,000 threshold—and she is therefore VAT registered. Her VAT payments to the Treasury are in the region of £16,000, leaving her with net sales of £84,000. A number of competitors have set up business in the area and purposely kept their audited income below the £85,000 threshold to avoid paying VAT, while still charging prices comparable to VAT-registered retailers. Of course, the clients do not know whether a business is VAT-registered in that small business environment, but there is a 20% advantage in favour of that non-VAT-registered business—20% more for doing less work. This young woman does not make any profit worth mentioning, but she pays herself a wage and keeps three trainees employed, and she enjoys her work. Her father, who is also a constituent, has advised her to close the business and save all the hassle that goes along with self-employment and running a business. Is it not a tragedy that a father feels he has to say that to his energetic and business-focused daughter?

Let us look at this woman’s options and the consequences. She could follow her father’s advice and close her business, putting four people out of work. That would involve vacating the premises and creating an empty shop on one of the small high streets in my constituency. She could lay off a member of staff to reduce the income to below the threshold and de-register for VAT, although perhaps still charge the VAT-hiked prices and see whether clients will pay. This is a simple but brutal example of the anti-business growth of our present VAT rules. I have been frustrated by this for a long time—as an accountant and in politics—because we have been trapped in this position. We have no control over it because we are operating under the EU VAT directive.

I would go further than my hon. Friend has proposed in his Bill so far. It is wonderful to have a Treasury Minister in the Chamber, because I have written a number of times to a number of Chancellors on this subject, and I have the opportunity to make my argument again verbally today. Where other thresholds exist, such as for income tax, national insurance and stamp duty, there is an exemption on charges for amounts up to the threshold, with payments made only against the remaining amount over the threshold limit. If, in the case of any small business, we made VAT payable only on income above the threshold, we would offer a sliding scale of price increases or sales volume that would support the business and encourage the employment of more staff, unlike with the disincentive of the dramatic cliff edge at £85,000. Whether we are talking about £100,000 or £20,000, the effect is the same: there is a cliff edge from paying no VAT to entering the VAT world, with all the commensurate costs, stress and extra time spent dealing with it. It seems odd that there is no threshold step for VAT, just a cliff edge.

In the context of small business as a whole, the threshold is very low, despite the fact that it is one of the higher ones in the EU. It is an excellent start to see the Bill’s proposal of, in the first instance, raising the threshold to £104,000. Should this excellent Bill gain Government support and make progress, however, I would propose to go further and call on the Treasury to make all income below the threshold exempt from VAT, with further turnover up to a certain point—for example, £150,000—having VAT charged only on that marginal trading activity. Businesses could then carry the sales tax burden across all sales without having to force it on the customer in the hard way that happens now. This is important for the small business cohort; we are not talking about businesses whose turnover has reached £1 million and are employing 10, 15, 20 or more people. We are talking about the small business that suddenly falls under the complex and heavy burden of VAT, which is genuinely having an anti-competitive effect on them. We are doing ourselves and our businesses no favours at all.

The approach I am setting out would give small businesses a window of growth and investment opportunity, and the chance to take on more staff, before being hit with a 20% surcharge on all sales. Such a fairer, graduated system would level the playing field between small below-the-threshold firms and those growing businesses. It would stimulate growth in the small independent retail sector and might even be a policy that could help to revitalise our empty high street shops.

The Bill offers much more besides increasing the threshold for VAT for small businesses, as it takes up the long-overdue opportunity to exempt some critical goods from VAT altogether once we have left the EU and the limitations that the EU’s VAT directive forced upon us in 2006. The directive aimed to harmonise VAT across the European Union. Although it makes cross-border sales activity easier and has some merit for the simplification of sales taxes, it has limited any individual country’s ability to determine whether or not to exempt goods from VAT. VAT on fuel has been a matter of contention for years. To his credit—everyone take note, because I am not going to say that very often—the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, brought that tax levy down to 5%, which was a very creditable decision, but under the EU directive, he had no independent authority to scrap it completely.

Let us consider the position for my poorest constituents in rural Northumberland—“deepest, darkest rural Northumberland”, as my mother refers to some of my more wonderful and hard-to-reach communities. In these areas, the choice in heating solutions is limited to wood, coal, expensive electric heating, which often does not work when the weather is really bad, or oil tanks, assuming the snow does not prevent the tanker from getting to a farm in the first place. There is no mains gas, so people do not have the opportunity of consumers in more urban areas of choosing a supplier from a competitive range of offers. The 5% VAT levy adds to their already higher than average heating cost burden, because all those other products are just more expensive. It would be a wise Government, after Brexit, who at last agreed that rural poverty—it has been ignored for far too long by Whitehall, in my humble opinion—could be alleviated in the first instance by removing this tax. As my hon. Friend identified, there might be an initial cost to the Exchequer of up to £1.6 billion, but the policy would have a broad range of principled and practical social and health benefits. The Government’s commitment to those is clear by their words, but such a change would make that clear by their actions, too.

If my rural constituents are disadvantaged by VAT on fuel supplies to keep their families warm, how much worse is it that our own Government could not unilaterally determine—nor indeed manage to persuade the EU while we have still been within its laws—that a 5% tax on sanitary products is a direct discriminatory charge against all women of menstruating age? A friend said to me on learning that I was going to speaking in support of my hon. Friend’s Bill today that

“women really ought to have tax deductions for being female—what with tampons and tights that ladder, being expected to wear makeup and have changes of wardrobe, you all should get a discount from the Government”

I concur wholeheartedly, as I am sure you do, Madam Deputy Speaker, although that might be a step too far for the Treasury. A small and immediately helpful step in that direction would be to scrap VAT on all sanitary products, and indeed on incontinence products, which are also listed in the Bill. This outrageous tax puts these things into the “luxury items” category of products and reminds me that we have far to go to make sure that policy making has common sense at its heart.

It is wonderful that, as in the battles for women’s voting rights 100 years ago, there are men like my hon. Friend leading the charge to change the law in support of women’s rights and fairness. There have been excellent campaigns from across this House in recent years to push the Government to effect change, and the Bill is the next step to get this VAT discrimination sorted out. By scrapping VAT on sanitary products and making them exempt, as is the case for food and children’s clothes, this Government would be sending a clear message that they understand that the tax system can be an incentiviser or a punisher. For too long, I have been shocked that the EU has chosen to continue to ignore this call for fairness, allowing—no, forcing—women to have to pay more for sanitary products, which are an indispensable part of our daily lives, to boost Treasury coffers across Europe. I look forward to hearing from the Treasury in the Budget that follows our departure from the EU that it has understood and will immediately remedy this discriminatory tax.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that if we do not leave on 29 March without a deal, people will have had their expectations raised that we will have left the EU, but will be frustrated by knowing that such issues cannot be resolved by this Parliament?

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Personally, I would rather leave with a deal that ensures that the bucket of issues that have to be sorted out are dealt with as we move forward from our legacy relationship into a new relationship, because that would make things easier for everybody, but the approach has to be right. The reality is that until we have left the EU, we have to follow the VAT directive, which means that we are not able to control that part of our tax law. I am grateful that we are leaving and that we will not move into the whole area of tax that the EU is looking to take control of across the board, which is a terrifying issue of taxation without representation. I am very glad that the British people have decided to step off the EU train before we move into that part of its policy making.

It would be a shocking failure not to remedy the discriminatory tax on sanitary products, so I hope that, in the most visible and practical of senses, the Government appreciate that constituents feel we have lost the ability to make good choices. We must take the opportunity, as soon as possible, to set the train in the right direction on this issue.

The VAT directive may not sound sexy or dramatic, but it has long been one of my most hated of all the directives under which we have had to work as members of the EU, as it emasculates Chancellors of whatever political colour in critical policy areas and disenfranchises us from being able to support small business, our poorest and, indeed, the female 52% of our population. It has meant that in a major area of tax policy, we have had to suffer taxation without representation for far too long. We will be able to send the clear message to the senior people in the EU Commission who determine, without oversight, what EU laws should be, that as in so many policy areas, the UK will lead the way in improving our citizens’ lives. I commend the Bill to the House and wish it every success in reaching deep into the Treasury’s conscience, which I know is there, so that we can make these proposals a reality after 29 March.