Parliamentary Scrutiny of Leaving the EU

Jeremy Lefroy Excerpts

Wednesday 12th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

It is a great honour to follow the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), who, as usual, made an extremely impressive speech. I agree with every word he said.

Two opportunities, which have already been mentioned, will come out of this process. The first opportunity is about the tone with which we conduct it. Most of the speeches today have very much had a constructive tone. I agree with the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) that we should adopt the same constructive tone in talking about Scotland, because that is a much better approach than the one that some of us have used in the past. My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) said that we have to create excellent relationships with our European Union partners and to build on the relationships we have already, and that is absolutely vital.

The second opportunity, in a world where there is a great threat to the global economy, was mentioned to me when I was in Washington for meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund last week. The meetings last week were the most downbeat that I have attended for a long time—not just about Brexit, but about the downturn in the Chinese economy and many other factors. We have the opportunity to make this process a chance to stress the importance of interacting with the world in praise, as it were, of globalisation—I do not like that word—or internationalisation by working to encourage trade and reduce barriers. This is such an opportunity. We could shirk it and retreat, or we could use it to show that we want to be positive and to reach out.

I want to make a couple of comments about content. I know that this debate is about scrutiny, but content is equally important because we do not have much time—next March is less than six months away. In addition to agreeing with the right hon. Member for East Ham and other hon. Members about having the fullest possible access and, if possible, being part of the single market, I will mention two points from my long experience of selling into the EU from outside it over more than two decades.

First, this is not just about tariff barriers, because non-tariff barriers are sometimes worse than tariff barriers. We could have tariff-free access and then find that all our cars have to be exported through a small port that does not have the capacity to import them. We must watch out for that.

Secondly, as a number of Members have mentioned and the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) raised in the context of Jaguar Land Rover, there is the issue of supply chains. They are absolutely vital for aerospace and for car manufacturing, and we must make sure that they are not impeded by paperwork, tariffs or whatever. That must be absolutely at the forefront of negotiations.

Finally, it is absolutely right that we focus a lot on manufacturing, but services are critical. They are well over 80% of our economy. We have a surplus in exports of services to the European Union. We must absolutely focus on ensuring that we have the best possible environment both for exporting services and for engaging in providing them throughout the European Union and elsewhere.