UK-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement

Greg Hands Excerpts

Wednesday 25th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

I, too, sit on the International Trade Committee and our report outlined the positives in this deal. There were also many things we just could not quantify, because the Government have not given us the figures, or they do not want to do that analysis, so we just do not know how things will pan out in the future. This is the first run at this.

My first point is about the role of parliamentary scrutiny. This is very much the first run and we need to deepen and strengthen parliamentary scrutiny. We have the weakest parliamentary scrutiny of the major bodies that we now want to negotiate with. Japan and the Japanese Parliament will have longer debates, binding votes and a guaranteed vote to accept sections, the European Union will of course be able to have discussions through the negotiations and will vote section by section, and the US will be able to vote section by section on the deal and will be involved in setting up the framework of the negotiations.

[The Minister for Trade Policy (Greg Hands)]

indicated dissent.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

The Minister shakes his head; I am happy to send him a constitutional 101 of all those countries, because the fact is that we have one of the least developed parliamentary scrutiny systems. Of course we do, because we have not done it for 40 years and other countries have developed since then, but we do need to develop, and it is no good the Minister shaking his head on these points.

The other thing I would say is that, although I welcome the Department giving the International Trade Committee a two-week head start on these documents, I have here in my hand just one volume of the documents, and three of the annexes never arrived in time and were only given to my office a few days before they were publicly released. It is all well and good, and I understand these are working documents, but that cannot be a continued pattern for how these things work; we need to be involved earlier, and we need to be involved throughout.

On the content of the deal, let’s be honest: many of the clauses we have heard celebrated today are non-binding or worse, or are being exaggerated. The workers’ rights sections are of course all totally non-binding; the climate change sections are non-binding and weak; the women and trade section—a new section—is all totally non-binding in the agreement. There is no section on consumer standards, and Which? says to me that it has not been involved much at all in these discussions. It believes there need to be whole sections on consumer standards, and the agreement fails to do that.

Also, in many areas there are standstill clauses that embed the current system we have in Britain and do not allow change. For example, there is a standstill clause on the Post Office; that means if a future Government wanted to change their mind on the disastrous privatisation by this Government of the Post Office that put money into their crony friends who bought the shares which then zoomed up—[Interruption.] It is true, and we would not be able to reverse that without renegotiating this deal. That is an inhibition of sovereignty, and that is a problem.

This deal is also reliant on the EU deal. If we do not get an EU deal, there are some clauses in this deal that will not be enacted fully; there is also a danger that the deal might be a green light for offshoring many jobs out of Britain, as there will be an EU-Japan deal and a UK-Japan deal. But if there is no UK-EU deal, businesses will place themselves in Japan because they will access both markets from there. If we do not get that EU deal, this deal could be an offshoring charter.

The TRQs are a scraps-on-the-table deal, under which the EU of course gets first dibs and if there are crumbs left—we hope there will be crumbs left, for a few more years anyway, until we sign the CPTPP—then we can get those crumbs. We cannot get the crumbs beforehand of course; and in terms of developing innovation, businesses cannot rely on them because they do not know what amount of crumbs will be left over. We have heard that Government analysis of the EU-Japan deal conducted when it was signed shows that the deal will have a worse economic outcome rather than a better one: there will be £1.7 billion less in exports with this deal than under the EU deal, and £1.6 billion less in GDP with this deal compared with how much the EU-Japan deal was benefiting us. Those are the Government’s figures, not my figures.

There are also some very dangerous elements on data protection, including voluntary agreements rather than binding agreements, not least in areas such as data protection and the NHS. That should greatly worry many people.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Trade Policy (Greg Hands)]

This has been an excellent debate, with speeches from 13 Government Back Benchers and six Opposition Members. It is an historic moment, as the Secretary of State outlined. The UK-Japan comprehensive economic partnership agreement is an historic milestone in embracing the opportunities of the UK’s future as an independent trading nation. It shows that economic powerhouses such as Japan—the world’s third largest economy—want ambitious deals with the UK and that it is possible to strike deals that go further and faster than the EU. It not only secures the benefits of the existing EU agreements, which many—and particularly the Opposition—said was impossible, but goes further in a number of key areas such as digital and data, financial services, the protection of geographical indicators and rules of origin. It was negotiated in record time, almost entirely virtually.

[Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Greg Hands]

I give way to hon. Friend, who was not able to get into the debate.

[Richard Graham]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend. Does he agree that this important free trade agreement is the first of several key UK-Asia goals over the next year, including accession to the trans-Pacific partnership, dialogue partner status with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, several bilateral market access initiatives and partnership of the climate change summit in Glasgow? Altogether, this will bring alive the determined strategy of global Britain.

[Greg Hands]

My hon. Friend is quite right. He is our trade envoy to the ASEAN region and to a couple of countries there. I was addressing our DIT internal teams in the Asia-Pacific region just this week on the incredible opportunities that this country has there.

The deal was negotiated almost entirely virtually. It deepens the economic partnership between two like-minded island democracies. It reflects our shared values and our shared belief in the fundamental principles of free and fair trade and the importance of playing by the rules. That point was made on both sides of the House, including by the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar) and my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt). This British-shaped deal strengthens ties between the world’s third largest and fifth largest economies and will help to drive economic growth in the long run. The Government are committed to levelling up the UK, delivering opportunity and unleashing the potential of every part of our United Kingdom.

We heard in this debate from two former Trade Ministers: my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox), with his excellent and deep understanding of world trade, and my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier) on the importance of the International Trade Committee in scrutinising this agreement. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), who again showed that we have proved the naysayers wrong, and from my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire (Craig Williams) about thriving Wales-Japan trade, particularly in the area of lamb.

My right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey, a former Foreign Secretary, described this as a personal triumph for the Trade Secretary; I entirely agree. I can attest at first hand to how much personal effort she has put into getting the team to move forward, including in the early hours of the day. That has been incredibly helpful. My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), who chairs the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, welcomed the fact that the Trade and Agriculture Commission was to be put on a statutory basis. He also pointed out that Japan is the world’s largest importer of agrifood.

[Neil Parish]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Greg Hands]

I am afraid I have too many hon. Members to respond to.

My hon. Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Damian Collins) has a keen interest, of course, in all matters relating to data. I can tell him that I shall be meeting the Information Commissioner’s Office in the next few weeks. I say to the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) that he was correct when he made the point that the UK-Japan deal would not change the current position in relation to onward transfer of UK personal data from Japan.

My hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) made some very important points. He made an important point on services—that it is very important that there is mutual recognition of professional qualifications in deals as we go forward. In recent weeks I have met the architects, the Law Society, the Bar Council and so on.

My hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) said that Japan’s role as chair of the CPTPP this year was really important for our agenda in 2021. My hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie) said that the deal opened up new opportunities for farmers in her constituency. My hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Imran Ahmad Khan) praised the DIT’s outreach to MPs. That has been a priority of the Secretary of State, me and the entire team.

Then we had the entire Conservative team from Stoke, lined up geographically in order, South, Central and North—the sort of line-up that Alan Hudson would have been proud of in the 1970s, in his Stoke City pomp—making the point again and again how important trade is going to be for the future of that great city. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Jo Gideon) of her business and personal connections with Japan, and her commitment to quality. It has been a great effort. I know how supportive the whole Stoke team has been of the DIT’s efforts.

The hon. Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith) said that the SNP is “pro-trade.” He may not know, but the SNP of course abstained on the original EU-Canada deal. But he is almost unique. There are only two Members in this House who have actually voted against the original EU-Canada deal, and he is one of them, from his time as an MEP. So with all of his praise for that original deal, he is one of only two Members in this Parliament who has actually voted against it. He has fallen into the trap that the SNP fell into last week of praising EU agreements that they actually voted against in the first place.

The hon. Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) spoke about the importance of COP 26 and climate, and slightly ridiculed the idea of our joining the CPTPP. He claimed that Britain owned the Pitcairn Islands. Well, it is not the Pitcairn Islands but the 11 members of the CPTPP that have welcomed the UK’s interest in applying to join—countries such as Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and so on.

The right hon. Member for Warley raised an important point about the unity of liberal democracy, which I have mentioned.

I assure the hon. Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi) that no harm will be done to the NHS or NHS data by this agreement, but it does help tech firms and data firms setting up operations in Japan that they do not have to follow local data localisation rules. That is incredibly important for our tech sector.

The hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) spoke about parliamentary scrutiny. He said that Which? had not been involved. I was the guest speaker at Which?’s national trade conversation just last week. He does serve on the Select Committee, but he is not always fully up-to-date with his information.

I have already answered the point that the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland raised about data transfer.

The hon. Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas) summed up for the official Opposition. He is like the SNP: he never actually supported any of these trade deals in the first place. He did not support EU-Japan. He voted against EU-Canada. He voted against EU- Singapore. So for him to come along today and say that the new UK rolled-over version is somehow inferior to the trade deal that he might have supported in the past—well, a quick check of Hansard revealed that he never supported any of those deals; in fact he actively opposed most of them.

It has often been said that an independent UK would not be able to strike major trade deals, or that at the very least such deals would be bad and take years to conclude. But even in the midst of this terrible pandemic we have proven the naysayers wrong, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes also nobly said. We have secured provisions as good as the EU’s on all our objectives and gone beyond them in some key areas, securing vital priorities for the UK.

This deal benefits all parts of our country while protecting our red lines on areas such as the NHS and food standards. It is a sign and a signal that we are back as an independent trading nation, as a major force of global trade, and as a country that stands up for free enterprise and liberal values across the world. Using our newfound independence as an optimistic, outward-looking trading nation, once again we are embracing the golden opportunities ahead for global trade, visibly shown in this UK-Japan comprehensive economic partnership agreement.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the UK-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement.