Trade and Agriculture Commission: Role in International Trade Deals

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Bardell. I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), on securing this debate. I have lost count of the number of times we have debated these issues over the last few years.

In my view, it is very clear that the Trade and Agriculture Commission, in both its iterations, was brought into being only to give the Government a get-out clause—to buy off potential rebels on the Agriculture Bill and the Trade Bill who shared my concerns and those of many others, including the National Farmers Union, about the Government’s real position on protecting our current environmental and welfare standards in future trade deals.

Despite all the rhetoric that we got from Government Ministers when we questioned them at the EFRA Committee and in the Chamber, it was obvious that something was up, because the Government refused to enshrine these protections in law and came up with excuse after excuse for why they did not need to do so. Minister after Minister said, “Trust me.” We just did not. So they came up with this mechanism—the TAC—and, while some of us remained highly sceptical, others thought that maybe it might just work. We hear today from the Chair of the Select Committee, as I am sure we will hear from other speakers, that patience is wearing thin.

I want to focus on what it says in the national food strategy—I have the great big document here with me— which was commissioned two years ago by the Government. The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton has mentioned the overlap between some of its recommendations. In part one of the strategy, which was published a year ago, last July, one of the recommendations was that the Government should

“commission an independent report on all proposed trade agreements, assessing their impact on: economic productivity; food safety and public health; the environment and climate change; society and labour; human rights; and animal welfare. This report would be presented alongside a Government response when any final trade treaty is laid before Parliament.”

The Government adopted that recommendation but did not implement the two other recommendations on trade—on giving preferential tariffs to food products that “meet our core standards” and on giving Parliament

“the time and opportunity to properly scrutinise any new trade deal.”

Part two, which was a larger piece of work, has just been published. Recommendation 10 calls on the Government to:

“Define minimum standards for trade, and a mechanism for protecting them.”

It says the Government should draw up

“a list of minimum standards which it expects imported food to meet in support of the objective of a healthy and sustainable food system”

and that the Government should “defend these standards” in any future trade deals, stating that the Government need to “set out a mechanism” by which they propose to do that.

The strategy sets out compelling arguments on why the Government needs to act and to act now before we start seeing trade deals with Australia, Brazil or the United States, which can produce food much more cheaply than we can, but at a much higher cost.

I have asked the Minister several times about our trading relationship with Brazil, and what we are doing to stamp out links to deforestation in our food supply chain. I do not really expect any better answers today, but I want to ask him what response we will get from the Government—from DEFRA, which has responsibility for the National Food Strategy, but also from the Department for International Trade—to the recommendations that I have just outlined.

Will the Minister respond today on these two points? First, will the Government ask the TAC to draw up a list of core standards covering food safety, animal welfare, use of antibiotics and the prevention of severe environmental impacts, such as deforestation? Will he do that? These are the absolute minimum standards. They are not something that should be negotiated away. That would not remove our negotiators’ freedom to negotiate trade deals, because these things should not be on the table in the first place. Secondly, if he does not accept the suggestion that when striking new trade deals, the UK should offer to lower tariff barriers only on products that comply with those standards, will he explain to us why?

Setting out minimum standards to be defended in any future trade deals and setting out a mechanism to defend them—I really do not think that is too much to ask. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.