UK-India Free Trade Agreement
Debate between Chris Bryant and Andrew Griffith(3 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Andrew Griffith
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I do not want to simply agree with him for the sake of it: it is not easy for Chancellors of whatever flavour to balance the books, but where we have wonderful industries such as all our drinks and spirits industries, including, if I may say so, our English wine industry, the Government must do everything they can to promote them—
Andrew Griffith
And Welsh, and from other parts of this wonderful kingdom.
This Government, as the previous Government, have by and large got the importance of the wonderful Scottish whisky industry, but it is important to do anything that can be done to help. Of course, the way that one reduces taxes over time is by making tough decisions on Government spending, which would be one of the key things the Conservatives would do in order to be able to lower those taxes.
The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell), who is no longer in his place, made an important point about the protection of ceramics and related industries, such as our brick and energy-intensive chemicals industries, which are all important. A trade deal, however wonderful it may or may not be, will do nothing to help the ruinously high energy costs faced by the ceramics, brick and chemicals industries, along with so many others. This debate is not about that issue and it is not the responsibility of the Minister, but it is nevertheless an important factor; if we are going to lower barriers and frictions so that we can boost trade, increase the prosperity of our citizens and grow our economy, that absolutely must involve the full stack, including energy and what one does about employment law and regulation.
Andrew Griffith
The document produced by the Select Committee lays out the impact for defence, modest as I believe it is. I will leave it to those on the Government Front Bench to answer my right hon. Friend’s important question about security—
Chris Bryant
I wonder if I could talk through the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith) to the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis): our export control system for any exports from the UK into any other country in the world bears in mind diversion from one country to another. That is a very important part of what we look at. The FTA does not affect that process at all.
Andrew Griffith
I hope that my right hon. Friend is reassured to a degree by the Minister’s response. I will move on now—you will be pleased to know, Madam Deputy Speaker, that my speech is not as comprehensive as the work of the Select Committee.
I would be grateful if the Government could clarify a few points about the position on food and agricultural products. There are protections for sugar, chicken, eggs and pork, and that has been welcomed by producers. However, there are concerns from the British dairy industry about opening the market, which describes the deal as a one-way street: dairy is excluded from UK exports to India, yet tariffs on Indian dairy coming into the UK are removed.
Chris Bryant
I will try to keep up as we are going along, if that is okay. On dairy, I understand the point the hon. Gentleman is making; it has been made to me before and was also made in Committee. However, I am not aware of any Indian cheese company that has been able to export into the UK, as it would still need a licence. We were very keen to secure arrangements so that we were not abandoning any of our food standards, which obviously have to be met before any export can come here.
Andrew Griffith
I will try to leave the Minister with a short list of questions, rather than going through each and every one as we go.
Notwithstanding what the Minister has just said—perhaps we can revert to this later—there are also concerns about the Government’s hypocrisy in respect of pesticides and animal welfare, particularly with regard to crustaceans. I do not know whether the Minister has quite the same degree of expertise in crustacean welfare and in particular prawn eyestalk ablation, which sounds more trivial here than it would to the prawn whose eyestalks are being ablated. Those concerns are particularly relevant because despite the Government publishing and vaunting their virtue in terms of animal welfare, these poor blinded prawns seem to be victims under this deal. [Interruption.] I would be happy to give way to the Minister on prawn eyestalk ablation, which is an important point; perhaps, on winding up, he could make a more general point on trade deals and how the Government will protect our animal welfare and food safety standards.
Andrew Griffith
My hon. Friend puts the point in a better and more informed way than me. It is important, and it is for the Government to set out very clearly how they propose to maintain or create a level playing field on these matters so that producers operating here to British standards are not disadvantaged, while we all get the benefits of trade and prosperity that I spoke of.
Chris Bryant
We are all joking about it, but this is a serious matter. The centre of the point is that whatever the tariffs may do, companies can only sell products in the UK that meet our food standards—precisely the point made by the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds). In order to ensure that is true, companies have to have a licence to sell in the UK. In addition, all Indian aquaculture products are currently subject to intensified controls with 50% consignment checks at the border. This is one of the many areas where we need to ensure that we protect our producers in this country, who are abiding by very high standards. I could apply that to all the different agriculture and foods that we are talking about, as well as to aquaculture.
Andrew Griffith
I thank the Minister for that intervention; I drew some comfort from it, but we will have to see the detail of the exact crustacean protections we end up with.
Finally, there is one glaring area that—even beyond the missing benefits to our important services industry—was a point of difference in the negotiations that we conducted and a reason why, when we were in government, we did not consummate that deal and why the negotiations remained outstanding. The Leader of the Opposition has been very clear about this: when she was leading the negotiations, she refused to sign this deal because of the double contributions convention. The Minister will know precisely what I mean by that.
We still have not seen the detail of that convention, and every Member of the House should be concerned. This is a very limited part of the process of scrutiny of trade deals—the rights of Parliament are perhaps not fully discharged just by the CRaG process. However, we have not even seen what the Minister referred to earlier as the HMRC agreement on this. What it means in substance—I will choose my words very precisely—is that Indian workers who come here to work will not pay a penny in British national insurance contributions, and neither will their employers.
The Government decided that they would open this deal—this two-tier tax system for India—at precisely the same time as hiking their jobs tax on every single British worker. I am happy to be rebutted or corrected, but by my calculations, under this agreement it could be up to £10,000 a year cheaper to hire a software developer on an average British salary from India than to hire someone from Britain for the same role, as employers will not be liable for those national insurance contributions. These are big numbers, and this will mean a big disadvantage to hiring an identical British worker at a time when there are 9 million people of working age not in work and when unemployment is rising—in fact, it has risen every month under this Government.
Andrew Griffith
I am glad to hear agreement across the House on the desire not to have a two-tier system. We all understand the need to pay our taxes to support our public services, but it will not feel right if two people are sitting cheek by jowl, side by side in the same place of employment—a factory or other work environment—but are contributing at a very different rate to the Exchequer for the public services that we all support.
Andrew Griffith
Let me finish my point, and then there will be plenty of opportunity for interventions. I will not anticipate the Minister’s point, but there are other agreements such as this in place—I want to be full and clear about that.
There are social security agreements where contributions are both paid in and taken out. We have them with the European Union, for example. They are a long-standing feature, and they were under previous Governments. Again, to be very clear and open, we also have a limited number of agreements like this with some selected other countries, including the high-skilled economies of Japan, South Korea and Chile and, to some degree, Canada. But we do not have an agreement like this of any sort with a mostly English-speaking nation of 1.5 billion people, all of whom would potentially be better off availing themselves of this arbitrage—this two-tier system—under this deal.
Astonishingly, this part of the deal was left out of UK Government communications, so not only do we have two-tier substance in terms of the economics of the deal; we also have two-tier communications. The Indian Government boasted about this element as a significant and attractive feature of the deal, but there was not a single mention of it in the UK Government communications. That, in and of itself, should send alarm bells ringing about this two-tier tax deal.
Chris Bryant
I was not going to make the point that the hon. Member went on to make—that his Government signed up to lots of similar arrangements—but I was going to respond to the intervention from the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed). It is important that we make it clear that under the double contributions convention, a detached Indian worker and their employer in the UK would need to pay into the Indian provident fund. On top of that, they will need to pay £3,105 in NHS surcharges, and up to £769 in visa fees. On top of that, the employer would pay an immigration skills charge of £3,000, and £525 to issue a certificate of sponsorship, so I do not think that the numbers add up in the way that the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley was suggesting.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Chris Bryant and Andrew Griffith(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)
Five Lib Dem Lords a-leaping. That is all it took for the Liberal Democrat party to throw every British business under the bus and expose them to the unimaginable liability of infinite tribunal payouts. It is hard to think of a more anti-growth, anti-job measure. On Monday, the Liberal Democrat spokesman was against, on Wednesday they were for and goodness knows where they will be tomorrow. Does the Minister agree that British business would have an entirely fair case to dismiss the lot of them?
Chris Bryant
The hon. Member seems to have lost the plot, frankly. Let me just point something out to him: what was average growth under the Tories? It was 1.5%. What is it under Labour? It is 2.2%. Which is higher? It is higher under Labour than the Tories. Average employment in the UK under the Tories was 73.8%. What is it under Labour? 75%. Which is higher? It is higher under Labour. Average inflation under the Tories was 3.2%. Under Labour, it is 1.8%—better off under us. I will just say on rights that we do not create a healthy and wealthy society if we ignore the rights of workers.
Andrew Griffith
Lyndon B Johnson said the first rule of politics is to learn how to count. The Government lost the vote in the House of Lords last night on the unemployment Bill because 144 of their own peers did not want anything to do with that Bill. One Labour peer has already resigned to join the exodus to Dubai. Tony Blair would never have brought forward this Bill because he understood the importance of growth. Will the Minister now accept the sensible compromise passed in the other place last night and today give British employers and workers the certainty they need for business to grow?
Chris Bryant
I can count; the hon. Member cannot. Let me remind him: growth under the Tories was 1.5%, and growth under Labour is 2.2%. Which is higher? It is higher under Labour, isn’t it? Why did we lose the vote last night? Because of 25 Tory hereditary peers. Why on earth would that be? Why do we think they might not be willing to support Labour? Look, it is absolutely clear that it is business that builds economic growth, but we cannot create a wealthy nation if we do not tackle poverty, and we cannot tackle poverty unless we grow the economy—just like a prosperous business cannot be built on the backs of the workers, and that is what we will never do.
Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)
Labour’s steel strategy was originally promised in spring 2025, but yesterday we learned from a written ministerial statement, snuck out without Ministers coming to the House, that the strategy will now not be published in 2025 at all—it is more likely to be spring 2026. We have no steel strategy after 18 months, there is no sight of the US tariff agreement on steel that the Prime Minister claimed to have on 8 May, and no deal with the Chinese owners of British Steel. Will the Minister give the sector the Christmas present that it wants and publish the steel strategy?
Chris Bryant
It is a bit of a cheek, isn’t it, the Conservatives coming and talking about a steel strategy when they had absolutely no strategy and did not even choose to go and visit some of the steelworks that we are talking about. There will be a steel strategy. The Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Chris McDonald) has been having discussions with trade unions and industry, both downstream and the producers, and we will be producing a comprehensive steel strategy very soon. I am happy to deal with the tariff issues if there is a little time later.
Digital Pound
Debate between Chris Bryant and Andrew Griffith(3 years ago)
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Andrew Griffith
My right hon. Friend makes an important point. To govern is to choose and we ask our regulators to make choices to prioritise. It is one reason why we are looking at reform of long-standing areas, such as the 40-year-old Consumer Credit Act 1974, to see if we can modernise it and make it more fit for purpose, deliver better customer outcomes, and potentially free up the regulatory environment so they can make choices to focus on the new and emerging threats and opportunities that this domain represents.
Sir Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
Further to the question from the Chair of the Treasury Committee, the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin), can the Minister be a bit clearer? Will this be an interest-paying currency, yes or no?