Trade Talks with India, Greenland and Israel

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the opening of trade talks with the governments of India, Greenland, and Israel, what steps they intend to take to support parliamentary scrutiny of the negotiating objectives.

[The Minister of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Department for International Trade (Lord Grimstone of Boscobel) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government welcome parliamentary scrutiny of our negotiation objectives. The India objectives were recently published, and we will publish our negotiating objectives for our updated Israel agreement in due course. The Government are negotiating to swiftly restore the terms of our trading relationship with Greenland. If the IAC should publish a report on these objectives, of course the Government will consider it with interest and facilitate a debate on the objectives, subject to parliamentary time.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, in addition to that, I should say that the Minister very nicely, at 10 pm last night, sent me an extremely helpful letter which said that, as the International Agreements Committee had been asking, there would be an exchange of correspondence between the Government and our committee about how we deal with scrutiny. We have been asking for that since September, so I welcome the letter sent last night. In light of that, it would be a bit churlish, perhaps, to say that it was a shame that the New Zealand agreement was published before it had been shared with our committee, so let us put that to one side. For the moment, I thank the Minister for managing to engineer this big move forward and just ask him to confirm that when that exchange of letters has been agreed, it will be published in the normal manner.

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to be congratulated by the noble Baroness; I have a high respect for her and for the committee she chairs. I apologise that there was a little bit of confusion in the timing of the New Zealand publication. It was a bureaucratic error because so much was going on, and I apologise to the noble Baroness and the House for that short delay.