Trade Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Iain Stewart and Faisal Rashid

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 23rd January 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Iain Stewart]

Q Do you have any concerns about the practicalities of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs operating the system, as envisaged by the Bill?

Professor Winters: I am not sure that I can comment on the practicalities. They certainly want a large amount of information. My general rule would be that that needs to be information that firms collect anyway in the normal course of their business, and that it should be a simple matter to transfer it to HMRC.

[Faisal Rashid]

Q Professor Winters, given what you discuss in the UKTPO paper with the example of South Korea, do you think it is fair to say that what the Government are presenting as bilateral discussions are actually trilateral discussions?

Professor Winters: Yes. I gave the example of rules of origin and tariff-rate quotas. Those very clearly have to be negotiated with the EU, because the EU is intimately involved in them, and they have to be negotiated with the partner. We cannot just arrive in Korea and say, “Here it is. We don’t want to talk about it.” They very clearly have trilateral dimensions, which I guess need to be sequenced and taken seriously.

Remember that there is a further wrinkle: these are going to be new trade agreements and we are going to have to notify them to the WTO. Although the WTO procedure for reviewing regional trading arrangements does not require us to ask permission, the WTO secretariat will make a good deal of information available to members, and other members may wish to clarify things to discuss and even, ultimately, to dispute. It is actually somewhat broader than trilateral, but you cannot avoid a tripartite discussion on quite a lot of aspects.

--- Later in debate ---

[Iain Stewart]

Q I would like to put to the panel the same question I asked the previous panel about part 3 of the Bill, which relates to trade information and the collection of exporter information by HMRC in particular. Are you content with the content of the Bill in this part? Is there anything missing or do you foresee any practical difficulties in HMRC collating this information?

Anastassia Beliakova: Not at first glance. However, the wider picture around trade data is that trade data is imperfect. It is particularly lacking when it comes to services, of course, and when it comes to intra-EU trading data. That is where we currently have significant gaps. If, in the future, there can be a more robust collection of data and stronger assessments of UK-third country trade, that would be helpful.

Stephen Jones: I have nothing to add.

Edward Bowles: Obviously, the collection of data is largely in respect of goods that cross borders. It is very difficult to do that for services, so I would have thought that a way of more robustly measuring cross-border flows of services would be quite an important thing to look at, so that you can get a better grip on revenue as much as anything else. Largely, it is more on the goods side than it is on the services side.

[Faisal Rashid]

Q My question is to Mr Bowles: one of your chief economists for the African region noted that African countries such as Kenya were extremely concerned about having to renegotiate trade agreements with the EU and the UK. However, she concluded—her name is Razia Khan—that this process has taken many years already. Can you tell us what your views are on how long these deals will take and what difficulties will be encountered in the negotiations, from your point of view?

Edward Bowles: The great thing about having economists is that they are independent of those of us who do jobs outside of research. Razia is an expert in her own right and would be the best placed person to speak to those issues.

In fact, they are not really trade agreements; they are economic partnership agreements that the EU has with most African, sub-Saharan and, indeed, subcontinent markets. It is certainly true that they have undergone a high degree of revision under the current Commission’s administration. I am not aware, frankly, of any overwhelming dissatisfaction. I attended a recent meeting only two months ago between quite a lot of these markets and Cecilia Malmström, so things do seem to be moving in a good direction. The question is what the UK’s approach would be to that and how much it might be minded to depart, if at all, from the approach. The starting point must be simply to mirror the current arrangements, as was said on Second Reading and in the Government’s response to the consultation on the Trade Bill.