EU Trade Agreements: Replication Debate

Full Debate: Read Full Debate
Department: Department for International Trade

EU Trade Agreements: Replication

Barry Gardiner Excerpts
Wednesday 13th February 2019

(5 years, 1 month ago)

Commons Chamber
Read Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts

Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.

Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.

This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record

Barry Gardiner Portrait Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
- Hansard - -

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade to make a statement on the progress he has made in replicating trade agreements between the United Kingdom and those countries with which the EU has a trade agreement.

Liam Fox Portrait The Secretary of State for International Trade and President of the Board of Trade (Dr Liam Fox)
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

As a member of the EU, the UK currently participates in about 40 free trade agreements with more than 70 countries. In 2018, the trade agreements in force constituted about 11% of our trade. They cover a wide variety of relationships, including free trade agreements, economic partnership agreements with developing nations, association agreements that cover broader economic and political cooperation, and mutual recognition agreements.

The Government’s programme for providing continuity and stability for businesses, consumers and investors in our international agreements is of the utmost importance. We are committed to ensuring that those benefits are maintained, providing for a smooth transition as we leave the EU, but the House will be well aware that the best way to provide that continuity and stability is to ensure that we have a deal with the European Union so the UK remains covered by all those agreements during the implementation period.

We have already signed a number of agreements, including with Switzerland—the largest in terms of our trade flows, representing more than 20% of the value of all our roll-over agreements. We have also signed agreements with Chile and the Faroe Islands, and an economic partnership agreement with eastern and southern Africa. The texts, explanatory memorandums and parliamentary reports for those agreements have already been laid in the Libraries of both Houses.

As we leave the EU, we have no intention of making our developing country partners worse off, as the Opposition would have us do by abandoning EPAs. It is important for the prosperity of their people that we maintain our trading relationships so they have the opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty. We have recently reached agreements with Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and we intend to sign them shortly. Just today, we reached agreement on the UK-Pacific EPA. We have also signed mutual recognition agreements with Australia and New Zealand, and will be closing two with the United States soon. A number of negotiations are at an advanced stage. All international negotiations—indeed, any negotiations—tend to go down to the wire, and I would expect nothing different from these agreements. That is the way that countries do business.

To put the economic value of the agreements in perspective, the countries covered by 20 of the smallest agreements account for less than 0.8% of the UK’s total trade. For the countries with which we may not be able to sign a full agreement by exit day, it is responsible to ensure that we have contingencies in place should we end up, unfortunately, in a no-deal scenario. That is exactly what my Department, alongside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development, is doing. We will shortly be updating businesses and the House about the progress on these agreements, and will continue to inform the House as soon as further agreements are signed, in line with our established parliamentary procedures.

Barry Gardiner Portrait Barry Gardiner
- Hansard - -

Yesterday, the Department’s risk matrix for the so-called roll-over agreements was published in the media. Of the 40 agreements that the Secretary of State famously promised would be ready one second after midnight on exit day, precisely four have been signed. Nine are off track, 19 are significantly off track, four cannot be completed by March 2019 and two are not even being negotiated.

Throughout the passage of the Trade Bill, Members repeatedly said that they were concerned that it would not be possible to replicate the terms of those agreements fully, and that many countries would seek to renegotiate terms in their favour. I therefore ask the Secretary of State to write to me to set out for each country what objections or demands to concluding a new roll-over have been presented, what concessions he has offered in respect of preferential access to UK markets in order to overcome such obstacles, and what assessment he has made of the impact on trade flows with the UK of a failure to conclude a new deal.

Many in the business community feel that the Secretary of State has diverted too many of his Department’s resources to entirely new free trade agreements, and so keen has he been to grandstand with the new that he has ignored the fundamental grinding work of securing what we already have. So I ask the Secretary of State to write to set out: the number of full-time personnel engaged on securing entirely new agreements; the number engaged on securing the roll-overs; and whether he believes his Department has been adequately resourced to handle so many trade negotiations at once.

Recently, the Secretary of State suggested the unilateral liberalisation of tariffs in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Will he explain to the House how he thinks negotiations would go with the remaining roll-over countries once he had given up our key negotiating leverage by reducing all tariffs to zero? Most Members might think that by doing so we were the ones being rolled over. Will he categorically rule out such a proposal? As we speak, goods are being loaded on to vessels that will be arriving in our markets from overseas after 29 March. How does he intend to support business with these transactions, given that nobody knows what tariffs and non-tariff barriers they will face when they arrive at their destination port? Increasingly, the Department for International Trade looks as though it has inadequate resources, focused on the wrong priorities, set by incompetent Ministers.

Liam Fox Portrait Dr Fox
- Hansard - - - Excerpts

As ever, the hon. Gentleman gives us a rich menu of the things on which he is wrong. First, if we want to ensure that all our agreements are rolled over, the best way to do that is by reaching a deal with the European Union so that they will apply one minute after midnight. I voted for that continuity. Did the hon. Gentleman? Did his party? Secondly, he asks about the reasons why countries may not want to continue these things. I have had discussions with a number of Opposition politicians about this. Some countries have said that they did not like some of the human rights elements that were incorporated by the EU and they would like us to drop those in order to roll the agreements over. I am not inclined to do so, because the value we attach to human rights is an important part of who we are as a country. The hon. Gentleman was wrong in that, rather than diverting resources in my Department from roll-over agreements to future free trade agreements, I have done exactly the opposite, reducing the number working on potential future FTAs in order to give maximum resource for this. Finally, he was wrong as I did not advocate unilateral liberalisation of tariffs—that was something mentioned in a newspaper—and the Government will determine what their day one tariffs will be as a collective decision in the event of no deal.