Trade Agreement between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Swiss Confederation

Debate between Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top and Lord Wigley

Wednesday 1st May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, as a member of the sub-committee chaired so well by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, I am glad of the opportunity to pay tribute to him for his work as chair and to the work of the staff of the committee. A tremendous amount of work goes on and we, as a Chamber, are indebted to all the chairs who undertake such long and often painstaking work, over long hours, to ensure that the proper scrutiny goes on and that the work of the committees is effective.

In many ways, what we have before us today is a test vehicle, because many other treaties will follow and some of the points that have been made already, which I shall not repeat in detail, need to be dealt with now to ensure that we move things forward effectively. This matter is of interest to us all, whichever side we take on Brexit; we have to get the system to work whatever the settlement may be. I am very committed to the European Union, but I have to accept that it is important that we get things to work properly, whether fairly soon, after 31 October or whenever.

One question that clearly arises is our capacity to handle all these changes and all the discussions and investigations that have to go on—the capacity within Parliament on an elected level in the House of Commons and in our Chamber here, but also within the Civil Service. Do the Government have the capacity to handle things to the timescale within which they will have to be undertaken? Getting it wrong has a material effect on people involved in manufacturing, in trade and in services, so we have to get it right. It is better to get it right a little later than to be rushing in and getting it wrong soon.

The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, referred to getting the devolved Administrations involved. That does not mean just sending an email down the road to them and saying, “This is happening. Send your reply within three weeks and we await to hear that”; it means engaging with them and making sure that there is proper buy-in at that level. We need a harmonious approach so that some of the problems that may be seen from the devolved Administrations’ perspective are dealt with at the right time and do not trip us up later.

I stress again the question of differentiation between goods and services. I always thought that this was an artificial differentiation. It is even more so now, because we cannot just draw a line between them. We need a system that works not just for now but as things move forward. As what we have regarded as services in the past become an integral part of the goods that we may be dealing with, we have to ensure that our treaties are robust enough for those circumstances.

Will the Minister give some commitment as to whether the Government can deal with the trade implications of a no-deal scenario on 31 October? God help us that it does not come to that but if it does, can we realistically deal with it in a way that is fair and reasonable for all those diverse interests in our economy who depend on the answer?

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I too am a member of the European Union Select Committee—not of the same sub-committee as my noble friend Lord Whitty but of the External Affairs Sub-Committee. That committee has been considering several of the trade agreements. None of those that we have looked at deals with anything more than 0.1% of our trade. When I am feeling really cynical, I think that the amount of money we have spent getting to this stage of bringing the treaties to the House will probably be more than any of them bring in trade. Then I wonder at all this talk about saving so much money by coming out of the EU. Everything I hear contradicts that in all sorts of ways.

We are agreeing these treaties as emergency procedures to make sure that, if there was no deal, there would be some ability to continue to trade, but we have not had a real debate about what sort of relationship the Government foresee between this country and the rest of the world through trade. We have to think only of the Corn Laws and the huge divisions there were then: I often think we are in the same sort of period now, even though the world and trade have changed a great deal since the Corn Laws. We know that some members of the Government are speaking very loudly about totally free trade, where we can trade on our own terms with elsewhere in the world. I think that that is a fantasy; none the less, that is said by some Ministers, whereas others keep reassuring us that we will have regulatory standards that will protect the environment, food standards and so on.