Trade (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) Bill [HL]

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always nice to follow the noble Lord, Lord Frost. We sparred a few times on Brexit, and as he was running the Scotch Whisky Association and I was running Alcohol Concern, noble Lords will not be surprised that we have slightly different views about the duty on whisky. In welcoming the new Foreign Secretary, I assure him, as the first woman to be able to welcome him today, that he will find that we are a quarter of this House and are normally far more in evidence than perhaps we have been. If he thinks he is going to get away with gentlemanly behaviour in the future, he may find that we also have a voice.

I am particularly pleased that the Foreign Secretary made his maiden speech on the CPTPP, as it is the flagship of the post-Brexit policy that followed after he had left No. 10—despite, as we have heard, its very modest impact on our current trade arrangements. That is partly because, as we have heard from a number of speakers, we already have agreements with the majority of the 11 members, particularly Japan of course, but also Australia and New Zealand, the FTAs with which we have looked at the FTAs in this House quite recently.

I know that, in welcoming the new Foreign Secretary, the Lib Dem Benches will be particularly pleased to be reminded by these Benches that they were once in coalition with him in government, something they often fail to declare. However, my Labour colleagues and I of course welcome him. He has a vital role to play, partly in rebuilding trust and confidence in the UK following Boris Johnson’s attempts when he was Prime Minister to break international law by threatening to abrogate part of a treaty he had so recently signed, and today, at a time when the Government are threatening to renege on international law and our own legislation and common law in their desperate desire to fight an election with pictures of planes taking off to Rwanda. I hope that the Foreign Secretary, whom we know is an honourable man, will help to restore trust and decency in the Government and thus re-establish confidence in the bona fides of the country that we all love and want to serve.

The Foreign Secretary will by now have been well briefed—we hear from the usual reliable sources that he is very well briefed and reads everything—on the intricacies of the CPTPP. It was a pre-cooked agreement which involved us merely joining rather than being able to negotiate, as with other agreements. It is, as a number of speakers have said, a significant partnership. It embraces 11 countries stretching from Vietnam to Peru, many of which, if not all, are experiencing growth and—of particular relevance to this country—are increasing potential markets for the products and services for which we are so well known.

However, to make this work for our exporters, which is the important issue, the Department for Business and Trade will have to step up the support which it offers to companies and individuals who want to do business in a CPTPP country. The Bill hardly touches that side of the main part of the partnership agreement, which we trust will be fully debated here, as has been mentioned already. The Bill really just deals with three issues which require some tweaks to our legislation, whereas the majority of the agreement does not need any legislative changes, hence the need for a fuller debate.

When I was still chairing the International Agreements Committee some two years ago, it examined the negotiating objectives and there was very broad support for accession at that moment. Nothing seems to have diminished that, according to the evidence submitted to the new inquiry. Indeed, our committee’s current inquiry, as described by my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith, is into the outcome of negotiations. Some of the stuff we have been looking at already suggests that some of the major questions are about the practicalities. Those include whether the lack of a fully functioning and permanent secretariat to this rather complex agreement will suffice to iron out the technical and other issues that are bound to develop not just with our accession but with its continuing growth; and, I am afraid to say, why the department’s recent dialogue with stakeholders appears to been so dismal just when business most needs help to plan for and get help with our accession. The benefits of this agreement will be realised only with considerable assistance from the Government so that businesses can take advantage of what is there in the new trade freedoms.

The British Chambers of Commerce, which supports the “speedy ratification” of the agreement, says that it wants to work with the Government

“to ensure firms get the best possible access”

to what it defines as a “thriving market”, but this will depend on the department reaching out to stakeholders and providing the advice, guidance and, indeed, the access that they need.

When we looked at the agreement two years ago, the UK Fashion and Textile Association said that it had not seen much export development take place, while the NFU wanted the Government to put more energy and resources into export promotion and marketing. It would therefore be helpful to hear about the Government’s plans for working with relevant industries and professional associations to make the most of the enhanced business mobility possibilities that have already been touched on.

Indeed, to give just one example, I have had a query from a sector possibly impacted by the Bill, which I will outline here. My concern is less with this particular issue and more that it has not been ironed out by the department talking to the relevant industries. The question relates to Clause 4, which amends the rolled-over EU regulations to enable the Secretary of State to cancel trademarks and geographical indications retrospectively.

The question is: might this new power cause some conflicts with the EU should the Secretary of State remove trademarks that apply in the UK and the EU simply to satisfy a demand from a CPTPP member? Does the Bill really need to make this provision for the CPTPP to apply in UK law, given that GIs are determined on a bilateral basis between CPTPP member countries? Perhaps the noble Lord can clarify this matter and—more importantly—confirm that relevant stakeholders impacted either have been or will now be consulted before we ratify and the procedures come into place.

I turn to broader political issues. There is one early discussion, already touched on, that will involve the Government now that we are members—that is, of course, about the future expansion of the CPTPP. We are the first country to join since it was established by its 11 inaugural members, and we are the first European member—which sort of stretches the definition of “Pacific”. On the agenda for the partnership now is the application for China to join. Needless to say, we will be particularly interested in the Foreign Secretary’s view on this. As my noble friend Lord Collins and the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, have emphasised, this strategic issue is of central concern to the UK and, indeed, to other countries. We look forward to hearing the Government’s views on that in due course.

Most commentators see the importance of the CPTPP as being part of the Indo-Pacific tilt—a diplomatic and security matter as much as a straight economic one—so the Minister’s views on where we sit in that sphere will be of continuing interest to this House. It is particularly good that we have the Foreign Secretary, from the FCDO, sitting alongside the Minister from the Department for Business and Trade. It stresses again the need referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, for the strategic framework. Trade is part of foreign policy and, indeed, defence policy. Therefore, seeing how this all fits together is an important challenge for the Government.

The new Foreign Secretary has already been warned that there is a lot on his plate; we add this to it. For the moment, this Bill, a small but important part of our accession, is to be welcomed. I wish it well.

Trade (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) Bill [HL]

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 14th December 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendments 25 and 30 and then touch even more briefly on Amendments 13 and 14.

Amendment 30, which will shortly be spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, calls for a parliamentary debate on a CPTPP impact assessment. This is really important, because the influence of this House is not in the big decisions we take but over the Government—although it is too late when they have already signed a treaty—and the House of Commons. Although we do not normally tell the House of Commons what to do—I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, chose his words very carefully—in this circumstance it is really important.

In addition to the impact assessment, the International Agreements Committee, which the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and I sit on, will also write a report on the treaty. We can get that to influence the real decision-makers down the Corridor only if this amendment is agreed and we ensure that a debate happens there. The request for an impact assessment is a nice little segue into a debate on our report as well. By concentrating on the wider impact assessment, it also allows a wider range of issues to be considered, such as prices. Nobody ever talks about the impact of these agreements on prices. We hope that and other issues will be very good for consumers but we need to see that, so a debate will be important.

Amendment 25, which my noble friend Lord McNicol will speak to, requests an impact assessment on labour and ILO standards. This is key. We want this and any other FTA not just to maintain but, we hope, to bolster ILO standards—not just through paper adherence but enforcement. I think we all agree that trade is good for jobs, consumers, our exports and the economy, but that must not be at any price. It cannot undermine any ILO standards. Indeed, I hope it will enable us and others to be rather more observant of them.

Very briefly on Amendments 13 and 14, I strongly concur with the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, about the importance of increasing investment. As I will make a wider point, I declare that I am a leaseholder and am on the board of the ABI, but I bring to the Committee an issue of core importance to prospective overseas investors that I have read about in the financial and specialist press rather than know about through any personal connection. In a completely different part of government, there is an attempt, with leasehold reform, to make retrospective legislation to reduce ground rents to peppercorn rents. That is very attractive for lots of people, but there is a real clash with the desire to increase overseas investment via the CPTPP, because many overseas investors—to say nothing of our domestic pension schemes—are concerned about non-compensated loss of property rights or contracts if their ground rents are suddenly taken away from them retrospectively.

That retrospective nature could undermine the Government’s welcome attempts to get more international investment into the country, because the attractions are not just over trade agreements such as this but over all the other things that we know we are known and valued for: stability, certainty and the rule of law. That needs to go hand in hand if the objectives of this deal are to be taken into account.

That was a little off-piste, but I could not resist it. My real point is that we need to know far more at a more granular level and after the event about what this agreement has produced. That needs to be debated in this House and elsewhere so that the influence of, in particular, my colleagues and the specialists we have heard from, who put so much into this, can be heard at the other end of the building.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, who was an extremely effective chairman of the International Agreements Committee. I have only two points.

First, in response to overwhelming demand across the Committee, I have agreed to repeat the extraordinarily boring technical point I made in our first day in Committee about deadlines. The majority of the amendments in this group set deadlines that hang on the passing of the Act. I respectfully suggest that what matters for reports is the date on which our accession takes effect. That might be in the course of next year—I hope it will be—but that is not certain. Some of these amendments would call for reports almost certainly before we have actually acceded. Accession takes place when the last ratification is received by the depositary power, so the right peg to hang it on is not the passing of the Act, which permits us to ratify, nor our ratification, but the 12th ratification, which allows us in. I know that these are mostly probing amendments, but I suggest to their drafters that it might be a good idea to use the peg of our actual accession rather than the passage of the Bill. I exempt some of the amendments in this group; this is only for the ones that hang on performance and how it is working out, because it would be well for us to be in before we require the Government to report on how being in is working out.

Secondly, I am a little concerned about Amendment 32— the accession amendment in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Purvis of Tweed and Lord Foster of Bath. It would require the Secretary of State to produce

“an impact assessment of the impact on the United Kingdom of the accession of countries that have submitted a request … to accede to the CPTPP within the last five years”.

That would include us; it would be jolly useful to have an impact assessment for us, but I do not think that is the purpose of the amendment. The deadline is

“within three months of the passing of this Act”,

which is the wrong deadline, for the reason I gave.

However, my point is more substantive than that. Apart from us, there are six countries whose applications to join the CPTPP have been received in the last five years: Ecuador, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Ukraine, China and Taiwan. The rules of the game, of course, are that consensus is required before a negotiation starts with any applicant country and consensus is required before a negotiation is closed, completed, and then the ratification process starts. It is also the case—not so much in our case but in previous cases—that there have been a lot of side letters and deals done in the margins of the main accession negotiation.

It is misleading to call for an impact assessment of what would be the impact of the outcome of any of these six negotiations. One cannot do that now. A very good moment for dialogue with the Government would be when CPTPP was considering whether to open negotiations. It seems that three months after the passing of the Act, one simply does not know. I add, on a personal basis, that I do not think that six negotiations will start in the foreseeable future. The applications of three of these countries pose serious political problems. In one case, there will be an enormous change to the nature of the CPTPP if the accession took place—a change that I think would be undesirable and, I believe, a majority of members think would be undesirable. There are, however, two other cases where considerable political problems arise.

Setting early deadlines and calling for the Government to go public with their analysis, which would in fact present the Government’s negotiating position, would be unwise. I do not think that we should ask our Government to go on the record in advance about a hypothetical negotiation which, in my view, in three of the six cases is unlikely to start in the foreseeable future. The Government would not be wise to act on that requirement, so I hope that they will resist that requirement—or, rather, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, will have second thoughts about Amendment 32.