Lindsay Hoyle
Main Page: Lindsay Hoyle (Speaker - Chorley)Department Debates - View all Lindsay Hoyle's debates with the Cabinet Office
(2 weeks, 6 days ago)
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Alex Burghart
If the right hon. Gentleman looks at the details of the trade deals that we have with other countries, he will see that by and large, those trade deals have been created in order to further commerce and trade between two countries, and agree that there will be areas in which there will be a level playing field between our country and that other country—that is often the basis of a trade deal. The United States is the world’s leading economy and has been for over a century, and can sometimes strike deals or come to arrangements that other countries that are not the world’s largest economy cannot. I am afraid he will have to go and do his own research on American trade deals, but I can explain to him why we have the procurement system we do and why, because of the steps we have taken in this legislation, we will be creating additional opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises in his constituency as well as in mine. That is much for the better, and it is a much better situation than we found ourselves in while we were still in the EU, with a very cumbersome, slow-moving and long-unreformed system of procurement to which we had been shackled for about 40 years.
For the avoidance of doubt, Members will want to be aware that this statutory instrument has been corrected to remove drafting references and a couple of typographical errors that were mistakenly added during the publishing process. I hope that colleagues will join me in supporting these regulations and will approve this SI today.
