UK-Australia Free Trade Agreement

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Wednesday 5th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

This agreement has a very detailed SPS chapter, and I would be very happy to sit down with the hon. Gentleman and ask the officials to talk him through it in more detail and reassure him accordingly.

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

I know that the Secretary of State cares a lot about services trade and the positive impact that that can have not just for Britain but across the world, and I welcome what she said in her statement about what is in this particular trade agreement. Will she set out in detail how she thinks this trade agreement is a step forward for services, particularly business and professional services, and commit to working with me and others outside the House over the next few weeks and months to strengthen our services offer in trade deals, not just this one per se but other deals that we are seeking to do in the coming months and years?

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

Absolutely. Our services sectors are second only in the world. They are a fantastic part of our export market, and we want to make sure that we showcase them in all the trade deals we do and find the best tools and opportunities to share them across the world. This particular deal, as I set out in my statement, has a number of important mobility features to help provide certainty and longer continuity for those who want to move into these sectors. There is also a huge amount of opportunity through the £10 billion of Government procurement that is now available to UK businesses. This will continue to be a central part of every free trade deal that we look to arrange, and I am very happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss it in more detail.

European Union (Withdrawal) Act

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

I rise in support of the Prime Minister’s withdrawal agreement, and I do so because I believe in compromise. That word is not very popular in our current politics. As the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy) said, everybody believes that they are right all the time and refuses to see where we can find common ground. In a 52:48 nation, the Prime Minister needed to find common ground and a balanced compromise, and this deal reflects that.

For those who voted remain, like me, this deal gives a two-year transition period, an unprecedented partnership on security, agreement on citizens’ rights and the pathway to a deep trading relationship. For those who voted leave, this deal means that we are leaving the European Union, the common agricultural policy and the common fisheries policy and ending free movement. If we want high alignment with the European Union, we can choose that, and if we want low alignment, we can choose that too. Many Government and Opposition Members who do not want us to be part of the European Union would have bitten David Cameron’s arm off if he had offered them this deal a few years before the referendum. We should all consider that.

In the time remaining, I would like to examine what happens if we end up with no deal. We have heard from many Members about how devastating that would be. I urge anybody who thinks that no deal is not necessarily a good idea but will not be that bad and is manageable to speak to manufacturing businesses, retail businesses, agricultural bodies such as the National Farmers Union and the Country Land and Business Association, and the many senior civil servants who have worked on these issues in Government and know the parlous state of things.

We must also examine what “WTO rules” really means. The tariffs and quotas would need to be negotiated individually, country by country, and we should not expect every single country to accept those unilaterally. There would be a negotiation, and that would take time. All the countries are watching this debate. They would see the difficulty we are in and may seek to take advantage of that. It would not be straightforward. Some people say, “We’ll just have zero tariffs on everything to make things easier.” We could do that, but if we did, we would need to have zero tariffs for every single country, because to do the contrary would be against WTO rules. What would that do to manufacturing in various parts of the economy and to agriculture, which would be suffering from the consumer shock of a no-deal Brexit? There are other areas not covered by WTO rules. I am sure that we could work those out over time, but they would need to be negotiated with the European Union, and how easy would the negotiation be if we had walked away from the withdrawal agreement and refused to pay the money and fulfil our agreed obligations?

Some suggest that this agreement puts us in a poor negotiating position, and I think it is fair to say that it will be a difficult negotiating position. We are one country against 27. That will be difficult. It will also be difficult to get the 27 to agree, because they will have divergent interests, but that was always going to be the case, whether it is a WTO exit or a negotiated exit such as this. In my last seconds, I would like to urge the Government to speak to Members across the House if this deal does not succeed and consider—

[Mr Speaker]

Order.

Exiting the European Union and Global Trade

Bim Afolami Excerpts

Thursday 6th July 2017 Commons Chamber

[Tom Brake]

I am sure that there will be some excellent cross-fertilisation going on there. Of course I congratulate Robbie Gibb on his new role.

As the Minister will know, the Liberal Democrats favour staying in the single market and the customs union, and we are disappointed that the Government made no attempt to secure that while talking to the other EU countries about freedom of movement. We need to hear the Minister’s assessment of the cost of leaving the single market and the customs union. What would be the cost of reaching no deal? What would be the cost of a bad deal or a good deal? The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union has said that he cannot tell us what these costs are because we do not know what the deal is, yet we hear successive Ministers saying that leaving the European Union is going to be absolutely brilliant and a bonanza for British business. They can tell us that, yet they cannot say what the cost of leaving the European Union with either no deal or a bad deal would be. Will the Minister tell us what those costs would be, or is there a cover-up going on?

We also need to hear how many deals the Minister expects to be struck when we leave the European Union. How many does he expect to be secured in the first, second, third and fifth years after our departure? We have heard from other Members what the average time is for securing a trade deal. I would also like some feedback from the Minister on the countries with which the European Union has already struck a deal or is about to finalise one. Canada and South Korea are examples, and I understand that Japan is now close to securing such a deal. I would like to know how long those countries think it would take to secure a new deal with the UK at some point in the future. Given that informal discussions have started, I also think we are entitled to know what countries such as China, India and Brazil have been saying to the British Government about their expectations of how many more Chinese, Indian and Brazilian citizens will be able to come to the UK on the back of any trade deals. People will be interested to know those facts.

The Minister has heard from many contributors this afternoon about the importance of freedom of movement. He will have been lobbied by a series of companies and organisations across the board about their concerns over the impact of restricting freedom of movement. He will have heard from companies that innovate, and from companies similar to the one in my constituency that is worried that it cannot gain access to engineers from the UK, because we simply do not have enough of them, and that the number of engineers from the European Union, on whom it relies, is already decreasing because those people are seeking opportunities elsewhere. Such companies know that it will cost them more to secure engineers from outside the European Union because they will have to pay visa costs. That is already happening with the recruitment of nurses. My local hospital is no longer recruiting nurses from the European Union because they do not want to come here, partly because of the fall in the value of the pound. Instead, it is securing nurses from India and the Philippines. However, it is now having to pay roughly £1,000 per visa for each of those nurses—a cost that it did not have to meet for nurses from the EU.

We also need to hear what the Government are trying to embed in these trade deals. We have heard the Secretary of State for International Trade talk about the shared values he has with President Duterte of the Philippines. I do not have that many shared values with someone who is on record as saying that he has gone around his country using extrajudicial killings to dispose of drug dealers, but maybe the Secretary of State does share values with him. We need to hear from the Minister how he is going to embed issues such as human rights and environmental rules into the trade deals. We need to be sure that they will be decent deals and that they will not simply be secured at any cost.

Earlier today I asked the Leader of the House to confirm whether the Government will release the report on the funding of extremists in the United Kingdom. I am worried that the report may not be published simply because it might jeopardise the trade deals we have secured with Saudi Arabia.

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

rose—

[Christian Matheson]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

I start by declaring an interest. Before entering the House, I worked as a corporate lawyer in the City for Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and for Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and as a senior executive at HSBC.

I will specifically address financial services post Brexit. I echo my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) on how much of an asset financial services are to our country. I will not repeat the statistics he outlined, but they are all accurate and true.

It is worth considering why our financial services sector is such a world leader, which is not just because it has been around for a long time but because the in-depth, unique infrastructure surrounding financial services—whether it be the lawyers, accountants, consultants or the like—makes Britain such a good place for this industry. Those advantages are not going to change.

It is true that business never likes uncertainty, and there is undoubtedly uncertainty in certain areas of our regulatory and legal frameworks surrounding financial services. If the House will indulge me, I will address two of those areas. First, as Members will fully appreciate, a key area that has been highlighted is this country’s desire to continue benefiting from the single passport for financial services that operates within member states of the European Union, whereby a firm that obtains authorisation to carry out a particular activity in one state can carry out such activity in other member states without further authorisation or regulation. It would be good to hear from the Minister and the Secretary of State whether we intend to try to maintain that position.

Another area of real uncertainty is the principle of equivalence. At the immediate point of exit, EU law will form part of UK law and, therefore, as a matter of fact will be equivalent. However, it should not be controversial for the United Kingdom to keep the bulk of EU financial regulation then in force as, frankly, much of it was either largely driven or written by the United Kingdom or derives from international accords of one kind or another. That is another area where certainty for business would be appreciated. In particular, the clearing of euros in the City of London is attracting a lot of concern.

Having said that, we need to ensure that our reasonable concerns about this uncertainty do not lead us in the long term, post Brexit, to try to keep everything the same as now. Why should that be? It would mean accepting wholesale a European regulatory framework that we would no longer have a role in shaping, and which would consequently allow the European Union—if, perish the thought, it wished to cause us difficulty—to stifle the activity of our financial services sector.

I do not have time to go into what I think the vision for financial services should be post Brexit. [Interruption.] That is a shame for everybody. We need a transition in order to get there, but our financial services sector has a bright future after Brexit. I look forward to the Minister’s response.