Trade Bill

Baroness Hooper Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 30th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I will intervene on the Bill, which is not my normal territory, although I have 20 years’ experience of working on equalities issues in your Lordships’ House. I will speak in support of Amendment 32, in the name of my noble friend Lord Stevenson, which requires the Government to lay before Parliament a qualitative and quantitative assessment, after five years, of the impact of new international trade agreements on human rights standards and people with protected characteristics under domestic equality law, among other things. It also provides transparency on the impact of such agreements on fundamental rights. As far as I can tell, the UK Government are a party to all the bodies mentioned in this amendment, so this should not be an issue and there should be no question about it. I should like some assurance from the Minister that, over the next five years, we will comply with all these international treaties on human rights and equalities.

I agree with noble Lords who said that compliance with equalities has to be judged by an independent body—I certainly know that. It should not be judged by the Government themselves. I thank the Equality and Human Rights Commission for its briefing on this subject. Its concern is that we,

“retain the UK’s equality and human rights legal framework as we leave the EU”,

and we ensure that,

“the UK remains a global leader on equality and human rights”,

after we leave the European Union. That is consistent with the UK being an open and fair place to live and do business. Certainly, if the Government do not accept the length of this amendment, I hope that they will accept the spirit of it, and that that will be expressed at the next stage of the Bill.

[Baroness Hooper (Con)]

My Lords, I also have sympathy with the concept of impact assessments. After all, they will apply equally to rollover agreements and future trade agreements, so it is perfectly appropriate to raise this issue and discuss it at this stage of the Bill. I also agree that it is important to have an independent body and not the Government themselves as a monitoring body, and that there should be arrangements to cover all parts of the United Kingdom equally and fairly. I am persuaded by the argument for simplicity in all this; therefore, I support my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe’s amendment in particular. There is a danger in making lists, because they can become out of date.

[Lord Lilley]

My Lords, the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, and others of the same gist are remarkable. In my 35 years in Parliament, I do not recall Parliament ever having subjected any trade agreement negotiated by the European Union to the level of scrutiny which it is proposed that future trade agreements negotiated by ourselves should be subjected. This is remarkable evidence that the Opposition are converted to the merits of having an independent trade policy because it will mean that we can influence it and work it to our own advantage. Of course, that would not be the case if we had a customs union-type arrangement similar to Turkey. Turkey does not participate at all in the negotiation of European free trade agreements with others, but is simply a pawn in those agreements. We would be too, if we were in a customs arrangement with Europe but not part of Europe—in other words, if the policy of the noble Lord’s party were to become effective, as I am sure he would agree—and those sorts of assessments would become irrelevant.

More substantively, in the past when I was involved in negotiating the Uruguay round, for example, one thing that disturbed me was the difficulty of becoming accountable to the House—then the House of Commons—for what I was doing. It is quite difficult for Ministers to be accountable for something that they are negotiating, because they can always come back and say, “We got the best possible deal. If it hadn’t been for my brilliant negotiation, it would be even worse”. It is very hard for the House to respond to that. That left me feeling uneasy. If we can find a way to ensure that negotiations are properly reported, assessed and held accountable to the House, that is a good thing. One of the bad consequences of them not being accountable is that officials did not take the job of being accountable to Parliament at all seriously. They felt they were accountable to the international organisations with which they were negotiating. One needs to be worried about that and it is why it is important that we have accountability. If Parliament holds Ministers accountable, officials will be responsive to Ministers and to what the House wants—not to what international organisations and their peers in other organisations want.

That is not a party-political point. When I made that point in the Commons, my Labour opposite number came up and said it was exactly the sort of thing she experienced, not in trade matters but in other matters. Where she was not responsible to the House, officials did not take that responsibility seriously. The noble Lord and his colleagues are on to something important with their approach, which I prefer to the simplicity of the approach of my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe. When we have our independent trade policy, it will be important to find ways to hold Ministers to account.