Trade Deals: Parliamentary Scrutiny

Anthony Mangnall Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2022 Westminster Hall

[Anthony Mangnall (Totnes) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered parliamentary scrutiny of trade deals.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Elliott. I am delighted that I have been able to secure this debate, and I am particularly grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting me the opportunity to talk about trade deals and the scrutiny process that goes with them. I am also very grateful to right hon. and hon. Members, who have heard me pontificate on this subject at great length on a number of occasions over the last two years. I should say that I am a member of the International Trade Committee.

I welcome the Minister back to his position as a Trade Minister. He is a friend and an extremely able Minister, and we are all delighted to see him back in his position, where he so rightly belongs. We very much look forward to working with him, both in Committee and in the main Chamber, where we will, I hope, have more opportunity to debate our trade deals.

I should start by saying that I am universally pro free trade and in favour of the Government’s agenda in the trade deals that they are signing. Our trade agreements have been an absolute litany of successes. Not only have we rolled over 70 trade agreements since our departure from the European Union, but we have signed deals with Australia and New Zealand. There are discussions under way about joining the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership, and signing deals with the Gulf Cooperation Council, India and Canada. We have successfully signed a trade agreement with Singapore on a digital partnership basis, which is viewed as the gold standard in digital trade. We have signed a trade agreement with Japan, which is already opening up new markets and setting benchmark rates around digital concepts.

Those are all incredibly important agreements, and they matter because they make a huge difference to our economy, to how the Government interact with their allies around the world and to the businesses in our respective constituencies. They offer each and every one of us the opportunity to trade, to create global harmony and to open up opportunities for those who live and work in the United Kingdom, and those with whom we have signed trade deals. This is an important part of what was promised when we left the European Union, and I believe that we are being extremely successful in tackling the new trade agreements, although there have obviously been a few pitfalls along the way.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Anthony Mangnall]

I would be humbled and delighted to do so.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

The hon. Gentleman and I sit on the International Trade Committee, and he is making a very good defence of the Government’s work. We heard in the Trade (Australia and New Zealand) Bill Committee only an hour or so ago—it finished only 20 minutes ago—that British firms bidding in Australia will have disadvantageous terms compared with those of French companies, because the Australian deal weakens the global baseline.

These things are probably technical errors. They are things that were probably overlooked and that I hope are great mistakes; if they are not, someone in the Government should be hanging their head in shame. I think these mistakes would have been picked up with proper parliamentary scrutiny during negotiations, before the deal was signed or even ratified—just as happens in America and the European Union, and just as the French, Germans and most developed countries get in their national Parliaments. The International Trade Committee should be involved in the detail of the work on the negotiations before the text is published in camera, but this Government continue to refuse to allow that.

[Anthony Mangnall]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman on literally nothing apart from this point about scrutiny. I thoroughly enjoy working with him on this issue, because there is genuine cross-party consensus about the need for scrutiny. I say in response to him that trade deals are not static. We should not view them as static, because they can evolve and improve. To the point he just made, where there are pitfalls we should look to improve them, and to see how we can develop the agreements in the future. He is absolutely right; had we been given due process when we signed the free trade agreement with Australia, Parliament would have been able to debate this issue at length and we could have rooted out some of the issues before we ratified the agreement.

As we sign all the trade agreements, there is good news to be told, but a cloud has hung over all the excellent work. I want to raise four points—I am conscious that a number of Members of Parliament want to speak—that the Minister might consider and respond to. First, we must ensure that there is a long-term strategy for trade negotiations. We need better clarity. It is clear that the Government have a big appetite to sign new trade deals, and therefore they must consider how they will convey to Members of Parliament, trade bodies and the general public an understanding of their ambition. If we have a long-term strategy, we can at least understand the Government’s direction of travel, and we can scrutinise it to better effect to see whether the goals have been met. I really cannot think that any Member in this room is against the United Kingdom signing trade deals, but we need to understand whether we are meeting those goals and whether the Department for International Trade is improving or worsening in its ability to take on new trade agreements.

My second point is about issues on which our provision would not change in any circumstance, such as human rights. It is essential that there is a standard level of human rights clauses in our trade agreements. There is a moral obligation for us to do that.

My third and perhaps most lengthy point is about something that came into being in 1924, the whole premise and purpose of which was to give us a say over international agreements that were signed. It was updated in the late 2000s by the Labour Government in something called the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, which basically said that we would have 21 days to ratify a new trade agreement. Within that, Members would be given time in Parliament to debate and vote on the issue, with a votable motion at the end of the debates. If it were rejected, there would be an extension of a further 21 days before ratification.

The previous three International Trade Secretaries have all affirmed the existence and the importance of CRaG and the need to use proper parliamentary scrutiny to get into the weeds of our trade agreements. In fact, the previous Secretary of State for International Trade said that CRaG provides a sound framework to scrutinise treaties that is less than a decade old. That is of real importance. Successive Ministers, including the Minister who is here today, have talked about the value of CRaG in ensuring that we, as Back-Bench Members of Parliament who are not in Government, can justify the agreements that we are passing and ensure that due process has taken place.

To the point made by the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) just a moment ago, the scrutiny has taken place; the value is there for British taxpayers, businesses and residents; and we are signing good deals. Ultimately, if we get these agreements right, we will only get better at this. If Members from all parts of the House are given due process to scrutinise trade agreements, we will only make better and more successful ones.

On 9 February, the Minister said that we have a robust scrutiny arrangement that allows Parliament to hold the Government to account. Let us take the Australia-UK free trade agreement, for which we were not given due warning of the CRaG process starting. There was not enough time for Ministers to come before the International Trade Committee to discuss the terms of the Australia free trade agreement. In fact, the previous Secretary of State was invited eight times and did not attend. When the CRaG process was started, the International Trade Committee had not even had time to publish its report. That is not the way it should be.

Let me make it crystal clear that the International Trade Committee should be given the right to publish its report before the start of the 21-sitting-day CRaG period, to ensure that due process is followed and that Members from across the House can read the report, digest it and prepare to debate and vote on the trade deal in Parliament. Can the Minister guarantee that a Secretary of State will appear before the Committee to discuss a trade deal ahead of our publication of any report on it? It should not be hard for us to secure a Secretary of State to discuss these trade deals of which we should, rightly, be so proud.

The important point, from my perspective, is that I am not asking for a veto. In fact, a vote to delay ratification does not change the terms of an agreement. It just delays it, and sends a very clear message that, should we sign another trade agreement, certain principles and concepts should be thought about again. We have to take that into account. I am not an extremist about the need for Parliament to come in, rip up trade agreements and decide what goes in or out of them. I am simply making the point that we must ensure that we have a say. We must have an opportunity to be constructive in a way that allows us to justify the creation of our trade deals and scrutinise their components.

Compared to other countries, we are behind the times on this issue. America has a more rigorous system. In Canada, Parliament has an opportunity to debate and—in some instances, although not in statute—to vote on trade agreements. Let us catch up with them. Let us justify it, because it will only improve the process.

[Julian Sturdy (York Outer) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful argument, with which I entirely agree. The UK has not done trade deals for many years, and there seems to be a slight lack of expertise out there, which is no fault of Government or Ministers. Does he think that that is a reason to have extra time for scrutiny? Also, there is plenty of expertise in the international businesses and industries that operate in the UK. Does he think that the Government should use that expertise more readily?

[Anthony Mangnall]

I thank my hon. Friend for his incredibly helpful intervention. Yes, I do. The International Trade Committee has sizeable limitations, and a number of trade deals are being signed. If we are able to discuss such matters with more people, open this up, and allow people to debate and scrutinise, we will be able to improve the actual process. If hon. Members were to ask anyone in the Department for International Trade whether they had learned lessons between the signing of the Australia trade agreement and the signing of the New Zealand trade agreement, they would clearly see that lessons have been learned: the situation has improved, and we are getting better and better. From the officials that have come before the International Trade Committee, it is clear that the Department is doing a fantastic job in tackling international trade agreements. It is learning each day how to do it, in a way that we have not had to for the last 40 years. It is right that we use the expertise in both Parliament and trade bodies across the country.

My last point is around the International Trade Committee’s resources. An extraordinary, dedicated group of people works to help us, as Members of Parliament, do our duty on that Committee. We have found it incredibly frustrating to see their hard work sometimes ignored and sometimes rubbished, because we have not had the access and due process—which was always promised to us, I hasten to add—to ensure that our reports can be produced, read and valued by Members of Parliament. We must change that system; otherwise, the International Trade Committee is completely redundant. I ask the Minister to listen carefully to what we are asking for. We are asking for access to Ministers and for time to produce our reports. We are asking for CRaG to be amended to include debates and voteable motions, so that we, as Members of Parliament, have opportunities to debate trade agreements.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I invite the hon. Gentleman to offer a view on whether there might be a fifth point for consideration. What has come out of the India discussions shows us that we must have a domestic politics that mirrors the approach in international trade. Otherwise, we will not have successful trade negotiations.

[Anthony Mangnall]

The right hon. Gentleman caught me from a surprise angle here. I do not know exactly what is in the India trade agreement, other than the rumours that have been reported. Our discussions about it have very much been on the basis of speculation rather than the reality of it. In all seriousness, if that is the case, it is something that we need to look at further.

There is value in ensuring that we get this issue right. We can improve the system, improve the value of trade agreements and ensure that there is greater buy-in from Members of Parliament. I hope the Minister will understand where I am coming from. I am not attacking the Government’s agenda, and I am not attacking the trade deals we are signing; I am merely asking that Back Benchers are given an opportunity to have their day in Parliament to discuss these very important trade agreements.

[Julie Elliott (in the Chair)]

Before I call Back Benchers in to speak, I am hoping to bring Front Benchers in by eight minutes past the hour, if you can bear that in mind while you are speaking.

--- Later in debate ---

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairpersonship, Ms Elliott.

I pay huge tribute to the hon. Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) for securing this debate and for his excellent speech, much if not most of which I agreed with. Like him, I am a free trader. Free trade is massively important, and not just for prosperity; if we had more free trade with the markets on our doorstep, the cost of living crisis would not be as bad as it is.

Free trade is important for fairness and prosperity, but also for peace, because it integrates countries and makes conflicts between them seem much less plausible and more unthinkable. Let us remember that the European Coal and Steel Community, in its first few years in the 1950s, was about knitting together countries that had been at war. The accession of the eastern European states through the ’90s and noughties was about knitting together countries that had been enemies on either side of the cold war.

Free trade is dead important, and my criticism of the Australia and New Zealand deals is a criticism not of free trade but of deals that are not free—if they are not fair, they are not free. It is absolutely right that, as a country that has taken back control as a sovereign nation, we should be able to dictate the negotiating terms on which we go about setting up trade deals. How could Parliament have dealt with this better or be given the power to deal with it better? Most MPs on both sides of the House wanted Parliament to do its job better than it was allowed to, particularly on the New Zealand and Australia trade deals.

Better scrutiny means that Parliament should be able to sign off the negotiating mandate, and then sign off the deal itself. Surely, as the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes) said, we have a right as a country to dictate the terms on human rights, animal welfare, environmental issues and carbon reduction. They should surely underpin the negotiating mandate of any trade deal. Then, when a vote is taken, it must not be taken after the damage has been done.

The Conservative party’s 2019 manifesto stated:

“In all of our trade negotiations, we will not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards.”

That is not true. That manifesto commitment has been broken.

Let us look in particular at the deal with Australia. The average suckler beef herd in Britain is 30 cows. In Australia, it is hundreds upon thousands of cattle. It is not that Australians are brutes and terrible at animal welfare, but the nature of farming in Australia means that it is cheaper per unit and crueller in practice. The same animal husbandry cannot be done for 1,000 cattle as for 30.

[Anthony Mangnall]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very good speech, but I urge a bit of caution on that point, because we would never sign trade agreements with other countries if we expect them to have exactly the same standards. As he rightly pointed out, we have the highest standards in animal welfare around the world. The hope is that, if we sign trade agreements with places such as Australia, they can start seeing how they can match our standards and rise up to them, rather than us lowering ours, because there is absolutely no intention of us doing that.

[Tim Farron]

Well, that is the theory, but the Government’s own figures and modelling show that the Australia trade deal, for the very reasons I was just setting out, will give a £94 million hit to British farming. There is no doubt that the deal has sold out and—in the words of Minette Batters, the excellent president of the National Farmers Union—betrayed British farmers. The impact of the trade deal undermines British farming and the standards and ethics of the United Kingdom in general—in particular of the way we farm. That is added to a set of assaults on British farming.

The transition to the new farm payments scheme is in complete chaos. The removal of direct payments—20% by this Christmas—will plunge many farmers into poverty. Meanwhile, many farms are trying to engage with the new environmental land management system. Two years down the road, they will change their businesses, and now they do not know what to do. The Government have sort of part-listened and have thrown everything up in the air; it is total chaos. There is chaos in farming and in the market.

The greenest thing that the British Government could do is keep Britain’s farmers farming, because without farmers we cannot deliver the environmental goods. Likewise, we cannot deliver the food that we all rely on. If we become less and less self-sufficient, that has a moral impact as we push up the price of commodities for the poorest counties in the world. The failure to conduct fair and transparent trade deals with the scrutiny of this Parliament undermines British farming in general and puts at risk our environmental imperatives, our food production and, by connection, the poorest people in the world, whose food prices will go up because we cannot feed ourselves. That is why we must get it right next time. Free trade is important, but we must not throw our farmers under the bus in the process. Free trade that is not fair is not free in the first place.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Trade Policy (Greg Hands)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Elliott. It is great to be back at the Department for International Trade after a one-year gap. It is good to engage on a huge number of the issues that I used to engage on—I have had a quick crash course to bring myself up to speed after the last year.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) on securing the debate. He is a genuine champion for global Britain and brings great energy to the International Trade Committee—something I remember from when I appeared before the Committee a number of times. The Committee is extremely important to the work of the Department for International Trade, as is the Lord’s International Agreements Committee. Many important points have been raised during the debate, and I will strive to cover as many as I can. First, I will lay out a little context, but most of my speech will deal with the points that have been raised.

For the first time in nearly half a century, the UK is free to negotiate its own free trade agreements with the world’s fastest-growing economies. The rewards will be significant: higher wages, more jobs and more growth, with agreements specifically tailored to the needs of the United Kingdom. However, given that our free trade agreements equate to a significant shift in trade policy and in how this country does its trade policy, it is right that Parliament has the opportunity to fully examine them.

My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes rightly says that the CRaG process came in during the last days of the Labour Government, in 2010. CRaG ensures that Parliament has 21 sitting days to consider a deal before it can be ratified. Only once that period has passed without either House resolving against the deal can it proceed towards ratification. The Government believe that CRaG continues to provide a robust framework, but we have added, in addition to CRaG, some important parts to this process. In both respects, the need for parliamentary scrutiny and the Government’s constitutional right to negotiate international agreements under the royal prerogative—

[Anthony Mangnall]

I am sorry to interrupt, but the Minister is making the point that Parliament has the ability to consider these things under CRaG. Parliament only has that ability if the Government allow time for us debate and vote. We did not have that for the Australia agreement. I think most of us want the Minister to say today that, on the New Zealand agreement and the subsequent trade agreements, we will have that time allocated, as outlined under CRaG.

[Greg Hands]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Of course, I have only been back at the Department two days now, but I will carefully consider the representations that he has made on parliamentary scrutiny. As I am laying out, CRaG is a process that, I believe, works well overall. We have added elements to CRaG, on top of the situation we inherited in 2010.

I should stress that no international treaty—we saw this in the House earlier in the Committee stage of the Trade (Australia and New Zealand) Bill—can of itself change the UK’s laws. That can be done only by Parliament. What is more, it is the long-standing practice of successive Governments to ratify treaties only once relevant domestic implementing legislation is in place. As my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes knows, the Australia free trade agreement is not actually ratified yet, because the domestic legislation is not yet in place.

My hon. Friend made an excellent speech. He rightly praised a litany of successes and the importance of our trade policy in making a difference to businesses, exporters, and consumers. Having read through quite a few of these free trade agreements and international trade agreements, I can say that there is no point negotiating just for the sake of producing a doorstep-style document. The point is to have an agreement that works for our exporters, consumers and producers, as rightly pointed out by various hon. Members.

May I give some praise to my officials? I was a little perturbed by the points raised by the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle). Whatever officials may or may not have advised Ministers in the past, it is unfair to attack them if Ministers chose not to follow that advice or did something else. I am sure the hon. Gentleman will want to think about that and perhaps intervene on me to clarify what he meant.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anthony Mangnall]

I thank the Minister for his response, and I will write to him with the points that I have raised. Hon. Members might like to feed into that.

I might just say to the hon. Gentleman from Scotland that if he wants to come and talk to—

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

West Dunbartonshire.

[Anthony Mangnall]

I beg the hon. Gentleman’s pardon. If he wants to come and talk to the International Trade Committee about human rights, we will raise it when we discuss the India trade agreement. I am trying to work on a cross-party basis, and we will raise that point.

When the Minister compares us with other countries—