EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Baroness Warsi Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I draw the House’s attention to my interests in the register and I too start by congratulating my noble friend Lord Wharton of Yarm on his maiden speech. As someone who also entered the House at the grand age of 36, I say to him, “Pace yourself, it’s a long road ahead.”

I welcome the deal because it is better than no deal and because it provides some stability for business—and I welcome the agreement on tariffs, which has eased some of the anxiety faced by business. But in my two minutes I want to draw my noble friend’s attention to the real-life implications of these changes for businesses.

In preparing for the debate, I attempted to run through the process of obtaining the information and completing the new documentation required to export to an EU state. It is far from straightforward. Having read through numerous documents, visited numerous websites, been advised to join more webinars and watched hours of YouTube videos, I was directed and encouraged to contact an external organisation that could assist me with the necessary paperwork, for a fee, on a transaction-by-transaction basis.

I personally went through the system and process that businesses are doing as we debate. What concerns me is that there is no single portal or place to get vital information. It is naive and out of touch of us to assume that small business owners have the time to dedicate hours to video watching, hoping that the next one will be relevant and have the answers. It is worrying that we assume, in these pandemic-hit, difficult times, that they have the headroom to absorb additional costs in simply trying to carry on the trade they were doing last year. Additionally, training on these changes and additional staff time will have to be organised and budgeted for.

In preparation for the debate I spoke to a number of manufacturing businesses that have also been going through this process. They anticipate a morning’s worth of paperwork and preparation per export transaction. The optimist in me would like to think that these are simply teething problems, but the realist in me fears that it is not and that it will—certainly in the short term—make British business less competitive.

I have two short questions. First, do the Government feel that businesses coming out of a pandemic have the time or capacity to absorb additional costs of production and provision? Secondly, would it be prudent for the Government to provide financial support to enable businesses to implement these changes?