CPTPP

Claire Coutinho Excerpts

Wednesday 21st April 2021 Westminster Hall

[Claire Coutinho (East Surrey) (Con)]

Thank you for calling me, Mr Chairman. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) for bringing this important and exciting debate. The UK has always recognised the need to get ahead of the economic curve and the accession to the CPTPP will do that on two fronts. It will be part of the ambitious push towards free trade, which I will talk about later, but also delivers on our explicit foreign policy objective of tilting towards the Indo-Pacific. The Indo-Pacific is an area that I am passionate about, and I have been delighted to serve on the Policy Exchange on this issue. It is the fastest growing region in the world, and a core amount of our maritime interests are there. It is important to our national security in defending the rules-based order and our democratic principles.

Acceding to the CPTPP will be core to free trade for multiple reasons. First, in terms of scale, it accounts for 13% of GDP. If the US joins, which is entirely possible under the Biden Administration, it will account for over a third. I come back to the point about geography, which I do not completely buy, even for physical goods, as we have seen the rise of China and how that worked with exporting to the West, but also because the future of free trade will encompass digital trade. I commend the work of the Secretary of State in this area and the amazing progress she has made in securing seven out of 11 bilateral free trade agreements with the cohorts of the CPTPP. It is important to note that it is not just the Indo-Pacific—we have countries such as Canada, Mexico, and possibly the US joining. Alongside the delivery of our tilt to the Indo-Pacific, when fully implemented, the CPTPP will eliminate 98% of tariffs. Also, one of the best things is that it will bring about a standard set of rules of origin, meaning we could integrate our supply chain with the CPTPP. One of the beneficial ways that works is that 70% of our supply chain can be accumulated in any CPTPP country to account for the preferential tariffs received.

I come back to digital free trade, something that I have written about. The UK is a services superpower—the only country that exports more services is the US. The digital economy accounts for £150 billion of the UK economy. It is growing six times faster than the rest of the economy. It is important that the UK is at the front of pushing for ambitious digital provisions. That is at the centre of the CPTPP, which makes provisions for services, intellectual property and digital trade. It was not at the forefront of EU trade, so it will be really beneficial to the UK, particularly considering the shape of our economy—80% of our economy is based in services which employ 30 million people across the nation.

The UK is making great strides in this. I think the agreement with Japan accounts for the most ambitious digital provisions in the world, particularly on data localisation that means that expensive data centres abroad are not necessary, and we can use the brilliant ones here. We all know that data will be the fuel of the future. It will fuel our incredibly rich sectors, such as artificial intelligence and FinTech, which the UK excels at, and is why the CPTPP, given its shape, its geography and its importance in our foreign policy and strategic objectives, is exactly the right thing to pursue. I commend the Government in doing so.