Trade (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) Bill [Lords]

Debate between Liam Byrne and Anthony Mangnall

Report stage
Tuesday 19th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). I will speak in support of new clause 1, which he tabled, as well as the new clauses tabled in the names of my right hon. and hon. Friends.

I welcome this debate and the new clauses and amendments that have been tabled, but I lament the fact that we have not been permitted a full debate on the treaty—something the right hon. Gentleman argued for very eloquently. We needed a debate today not merely on the three chapters of the CPTPP covered by the Bill, but on the full 30 chapters of the treaty, with all the associated annexes and bits of analysis and argument.

I do not want to detain the House for very long, because the Business and Trade Committee went to the length of writing and publishing a report earlier this year. However, I want to underline the point about the lack of scrutiny. Of course, it was the Government themselves, in the Grimstone rule, who said that no new free trade agreements would be ratified by His Majesty’s Government without a full debate on whether we should agree to them. When I asked the Secretary of State on 23 January whether she would agree to a debate under the terms of the CRaG process, she said she would be “happy to support” such a debate. Her officials then wrote to the Clerks on the Select Committee to say that such a debate had been requested, only to be told by the Leader of the House that no time was available. The Leader of the House confirmed that in writing to me last week in a letter in which she said:

“it has not been possible to find time for a debate in Government time.”

The House of Lords is having a debate on the treaty today on the recommendation of the International Agreements Committee, so why can’t we? Are we second-class representatives in this House? Are we unqualified to have a debate on all 30 chapters of the treaty? Are we not qualified to speak, on behalf of the people we came into public life to represent, about how the treaty will affect their future? I think we are. I think we should have a debate on the full treaty.

And I cannot believe that we are out of time. Members will have seen the report in the Financial Times last week, which said that the working day in this Chamber

“has been shorter on average this parliamentary session than in any other in the past quarter century”.

Are we seriously saying that we have not been able to find time for a debate, which it is the Government’s policy to support, on one of the only free trade agreements that His Majesty’s Government have been able to bring forward since we left the European Union?

On Twitter, the Minister—I am a keen follower of the Minister on Twitter, he will be pleased to hear—said last week that there have been four parliamentary debates on the treaty, but I wonder if he is sure about that. When I asked the Clerks on the Select Committee to check that, they were left scratching their heads a little bit. They could not find all four that the Minister referred to. We have to accept that there is no shortage of controversy in the Bill, not least because the Secretary of State herself resiled from the figures that describe the benefits of the treaty to the country.

[Anthony Mangnall]

I thank the Chair of the Select Committee for giving way. It is a pleasure to serve on the Committee with him. I thought I might just throw a bone in the form of cross-party support on this point. Having a debate is not just about pointing out controversies; it is about having the opportunity to justify and debate things about which our constituents care. These trade deals make a difference not only to the businesses, but to the services and agriculture sectors in our respective constituencies. That is why it is damaging not to have a debate: it fails to allow us the opportunity to persuade people that trade deals can be a force for good.

[Liam Byrne]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and I commend his contribution both to the Committee and to the report that we published on the CPTPP earlier this year.

There are a number of important new clauses and amendments not only about the future expansion plans of the CPTPP and what our policy on those might look like, but also, in the names of my right hon. and hon. Friends, about investor-state dispute settlement. This is important because in all the fanfare, arguments and passionate bits of literature and speeches offered by the Government about the virtues of the treaty, it was always positioned as a gateway to the fastest-growing economy on Earth that will represent a significant fraction of economic growth in the future. Of course, what was often missing from those eloquent descriptions was a recognition that the countries in the CPTPP represent only about a fifth, at best, of the Indo-Pacific region.

We are surely right to worry that there could well be a Government drive to expand the orbit of the treaty to a much wider group of nations. If the Government really want to take aim at the biggest economies on Earth, they may well encourage China to join. However, when I asked the Secretary of State whether it was her policy to agree to or block China’s accession, she said that that was not something we could discuss on the Floor of the House or in the Select Committee. That is why safeguards are needed. We might even be so bold as to merely ask for a little bit of clarity on the Government’s future strategy. That is why the amendments on the future pathway of the treaty are so important and why I hope we will have a vote on some aspect of that today, even if it is not on the new clause tabled by the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green.

I will talk briefly about new clause 3, which relates to ISDS. It is important, because His Majesty’s Government have agreed side letters with a number of countries to take us out of the ISDS process. That is not an exemption or safeguard that we saw when it came to agreeing to the treaty, yet the treaty includes countries such as Canada—I think we are just about on fraternal terms with Canada at the moment; we may have failed to agree an FTA with it, but quite why is a matter of some dispute between the Canadian Government and the Secretary of State. Canada is home to some of the biggest pension fund investors on the planet and we know that those funds are especially litigious. Although the Minister was right, when he answered these questions in earlier conversations, to say we have never lost an ISDS case, the reality is that many fear there will be a chilling effect on the regulations we bring forward because of a fear of the peril of ISDS procedures.