India and Southeast Asia: Free Trade Agreements

Baroness Verma Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Anelay for this debate, which is incredibly timely and important. I have been involved with business-to-business with India for over three decades. I was a non-executive of the Leicester Asian Business Association as my first dip into business-to-business.

A fast-moving geopolitical movement is going on around us, so it is critical that we secure deals with India, the country with the largest population on the planet: 1.4 billion people. Both countries are well-respected convenors for many other nations, as we have seen—India in its own region, in the south-east Asia region, and the UK with its convening powers across Europe, as recently seen by Prime Minister Starmer, and with our allies such as America and others. At this critical moment, we know that by securing this FTA we will start to leave some of the extra dependency that we have had on a very few countries and engage with a much wider region. Therefore, we really need to encourage this deal to be done as quickly as possible.

I want to address the strengths of why the UK is best placed to be with India on this deal. First, as the noble Lord, Lord Sahota, said, the relationship goes back many years. It is now also a relationship that is coming together because we have a diaspora here that is incredibly important to both India and the UK. I do not think the diaspora of nearly 2 million people that we have in this country is fully utilised for its soft power strength. I urge the Government to look at how they can further engage with the diaspora links to get some of those nuances, which sometimes become stalling blocks, to unlock.

I am president and founder of the India APPG. It has been one of the most popular APPGs in Parliament, because India recognises the importance of our parliamentarians as we recognise the importance of engaging with India. There are so many areas where I think we can strengthen our relationship outside the FTA. Some of those are the defence sector, tech, research, developments in space, higher education and, of course, sustainable green technologies.

We have so many envoys in other countries; it is beyond my understanding why we do not have dedicated envoys for a country as big as India from the UK. I know that Ministers have a big job, and our high commissioner and deputy high commissioners are brilliant, but they are tasked with a lot to do in a large country. Trade envoys are therefore critical. I am sure my noble friend Lord Vaizey will say that it is the soft power that you take with the trade envoy role that helps to continue cementing this partnership—this relationship. I said it over and over again when my party was in government; I do not know why it did not happen. I now ask this Government to see whether they can take a leap and a jump and please encourage trade envoys there. We are a country at the front line of convening; let us utilise our strengths.