Trade (Australia and New Zealand) Bill (Third sitting)

Lloyd Russell-Moyle Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th October 2022 Public Bill Committees

[Gareth Thomas]

To be fair to the Minister, he sort of touched on the issue in very loose terms. Perhaps my hon. Friend may be reassured that amendment 5, which we are inching towards, would require much more consultation down the line. Perhaps that is a way to try to improve things for SMEs across the UK.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Is not the big problem—my hon. Friend rightly pointed this out earlier, but the Minister did not really reflect on it—that we are giving away negotiating elements for future deals? Opening this up to all GPA countries means that no GPA country will need to put it on the table. We have opened up our markets for them, and they have not opened up their markets—fantastic. We have cut off the nose to spite the face of all our small and medium-sized businesses, but other countries have not acted similarly. If we do this repeatedly with all areas of trade, in the end we will have unilaterally opened up all our borders but received no benefits for our small businesses. That is the basis of the Conservative negotiating strategy, and it is a disaster, is it not?

[Gareth Thomas]

I appreciate that Conservative Members will be focusing on other mistakes that the Prime Minister has made, but my hon. Friend is absolutely right. One wonders whether, in the rush to get a deal with Australia, Ministers essentially decided just to give up their negotiating leverage on these issues and hoped to push it through quietly without too much attention. None the less, we have aired these issues. We will reflect on what the Minister says, and we may well come back to this matter on Report. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

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[The Chair]

After that big bang, I am very tempted to call the ghost of Christmas past, but instead I call the very living and very present, Lloyd Russell Moyle.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I will take that in the good manner that it was meant. Thank you, Mr Pritchard.

I speak to amendments 5, 7, 20 and 22 for three main reasons: first, because we heard evidence of great concern from businesses and other organisations about the consultation that this Government will do when bringing forward regulations and the trade deals themselves. The Government have established the Trade and Agriculture Commission, but it is able to produce reports only after the trade deal is signed, defeating one of the main points of its existence—it produces a long report but we go and ratify the trade deal anyway, after the horse has bolted. That is same with the International Trade Committee.

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[Bill Esterson]

My hon. Friend makes good points about the way that France and European Union scrutinise trade agreements. In the context of agriculture, the other really good example is the United States. Recently, the United States trade unions had access to negotiating texts during the negotiation period and were able to insist on improvements to employment rights in the recent United States-Mexico-Canada agreement, which, crucially, protects workers in Mexico who face draconian approaches and attacks on trade unionists. Does my hon. Friend agree that we should have a similar process in this country? In the absence of that process, the amendments are a desperately needed back-up.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I totally agree. The US is a much better example than us of scrutiny and engagement. It engages its elected representatives early on. We see a Democrat Government there—one of our sister parties—putting trade unions and small businesses front and centre in their ongoing prosperity, rather than trying to run roughshod and have corrupt practices, which the previous party of Government in the US was all in favour of.

There is a better way of doing this. The amendments are not the ideal. I am, desperately unfortunately, missing my Select Committee inquiry this morning on international trade agreements and how we how we process them. I am sure I will read the transcript of the evidence hearing with fascination this evening. The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s inquiry makes it clear that the current ways that we produce trade deals and scrutinise their implementation—what these amendments are about—are inadequate. They are inadequate because they were created in an age when most of it was farmed off to the European Union and we had strong scrutiny processes of secondary legislation that came via the European Union—Committees that looked at that and debates in Parliament.

All that was swept aside—I will not get into the rights and wrongs of leaving the European Union. We have then just relied on a CRaG process and no other proper form of ongoing scrutiny process, which we would have accepted under the European Union, or which every other country has now developed, because trade deals are dynamic.

Gone are the days when trade deals were fixed in one piece of writing; they are ongoing, living, breathing documents. That is quite right, because trade deals really are multilateral deals on numerous issues: on not just direct trade but intellectual property and procurement, as we are discussing today. They affect the domestic implementation of issues, affecting how councils and public bodies are able to go about their day-to-day business, and the ability to consult.

[Gareth Thomas]

I apologise to my hon. Friend for missing his opening remarks. However, as he was reflecting on the weaknesses of the CRaG process, does he not think that perhaps part of the reason why Government Members genuflected towards the CRaG process so much, despite all its weaknesses, is that it was initiated by a Labour Secretary of State, Arthur Ponsonby, albeit 100 years ago? Perhaps that is what gives them some comfort. However, I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend that it is time to uprate and modernise it.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I do not think that even the most foresighted Labour politician would expect the rules that they designed 100 years ago to still be in operation today. Even if I managed to get one amendment through in my career here, I would not expect it to last 100 years.

The CRaG process, I am afraid, is not fit for purpose in the modern world. Although I do not want to prejudge what my other Committee will say, I suspect that is the conclusion that all sides are coming to—that it needs to be updated. These amendments allow a sticking plaster so that secondary legislation and regulations that are made must go through that process. That is what we heard businesses wanted.

The amendments would also ensure that all regions and nations of our country are properly consulted. The other part of my constitutional affairs hat is that we visit the devolved Administrations every year and speak to them about how they feel their relationships with the Union are going. I can tell Conservative Members that they think it is going very badly. That is not just the SNP in Scotland but Labour in Wales and the Democratic Unionist party in Northern Ireland. They think that the way this Government consult and work with them is arrogant and dismissive. That is what every single one of them said, and what Conservative colleagues in the devolved Administrations said to us too.

[Sir James Duddridge]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his constructive criticism. In the 25 meetings between the chief negotiator and the devolved Administrations, what, specifically, did the DAs raise on procurement issues that they were unhappy with?

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Well, I can go and look at my notes and see if they said that procurement was a particular problem. Their concern was that they were presented with a faits accomplis time and time again. They were presented with, “This is the way that you can have it; accept it or leave it.” That was in a wide range of areas, but trade was one of their many concerns.

The amendments are not to say that the Government are not meeting with the devolved Administrations or are not in communication with them, but to say that the Government must consult and work with the devolved Administrations and the English regions before the regulations are laid, in a co-operative, rather than dictatorial, way. It is therefore important that they are agreed to, because they would provide the reassurance that is needed to rebuild the way that regulations are laid that affect the whole UK. We have seen how, when legislative consent motions have not been provided, they are still run roughshod over.

[Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)]

The Minister has just informed the Committee that the chief negotiator met the DAs 25 times in the run-up to this trade Bill being put down. Will the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown inform the House, if he knows the answer to this, how many times the chief negotiators from the EU consulted the devolved authorities in the UK and, indeed, the UK Government and Members of this House when trade deals were being negotiated, given that he seems such a fan of the way the EU conducts itself in trade negotiations?

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[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I am sure that my Committee’s report will include a fantastic comparison and I will ensure personally that the hon. Member for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine gets a copy of it when it is out. I can tell him, though, that when we were in the European Union, the devolved Administrations met the different sections of the European Union weekly, because the devolved Administrations had representatives in Brussels who would meet weekly on trade issues, and they would meet daily with the European Union officials. Anyway, we will move that to one side.

[Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)]

It may help to underline the hon. Gentleman’s point to quote Ivan McKee, the Scottish Government’s Trade Minister, who said:

“Once again we were not consulted by the UK Government before the introduction of proposed legislation that as currently drafted, bypasses the Scottish Parliament and undermines Scotland’s powers. That is…disappointing, but sadly no longer surprising.”

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

I think that is the case here.

These amendments, particularly amendments 2, 20 and 22, which relate to the devolved Administrations, provide a failsafe for the devolved Administrations and English regions to know that they will be consulted. They provide a failsafe for the businesses, including small businesses, that we heard in evidence to know that they will be consulted beforehand. Of course, with all consultation, the Government can still go away and say, “We have listened to you. We have heard you. We have put forward our suggestions. You don’t agree with them, but we are still going to push forward, because we think that is necessary.” That is democracy; of course that has to be allowed, but what we cannot have is people being bumped into things at the last moment or presented with things as faits accomplis, and that is the situation at the moment.

I rose to support the amendments. I think that they are vital; more importantly, they are vital in preserving our Union. I know that some colleagues have a different view, and it is people’s own right whether they want to leave or not—it is not my choice—but I would like to see the Union preserved. I think that those on the Government Benches would like to see the Union preserved as well. I am afraid that if we do not start treating the devolved regions and nations of this great country with more respect and more humility, people will be out the door and it probably will be understandable.

[Gareth Thomas]

I rise to support amendments 5, 7, 20 and 22, which were tabled in my name and which my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli spoke to. In so doing, I want to indicate, as I hope my interventions on the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts indicated, my strong sympathy with her two amendments as well. I hope that amendments 5 and 22, in that they are more wide-reaching because they cover Northern Ireland, Wales and the English regions as well as Scotland, might be sufficient to encourage her support for them.

Amendment 5, as we have indicated, seeks to lock in the opportunity for more consultation with the whole UK about particular regulations that might emerge around the procurement chapters. As I said in my opening remarks, the Australia free trade agreement is more than 2,500 pages long, and it is quite easy for the bits on procurement to be largely missed. The opportunity to lock in a bit of consultation at this point—before implementing regs have to be made—would help to ensure that there is specific focus on the procurement chapters in both deals.