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

Debate between Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Mark Garnier

Report stage
Tuesday 19th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

It is a pleasure to follow the maiden speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Damien Egan). What a great way of upstaging his sister a week after her wedding—after a by-election is forced, he goes on to win it. But I suspect that it was a happy moment for all the family, and it is a delight to have him here.

I have tabled two new clauses. I have sat on the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and, in its previous iteration, the International Trade Committee, when we scrutinised the Bill almost, I felt, to death. The problem with scrutiny without any teeth is that words produced in Parliament all the time are lost in the ether. The reality is that, unless there is debate in the main Chamber, there is not the right body of weight behind those words and those concerns.

It is clear to me that we need to change constitutional make-up of how we do trade deals. I support everything that PACAC has said, of course, but personally I would go further. I think we do need legislative changes to CRaG, despite the fact that we could make some changes through trust—that would be a good start. The reality is that, since we left the European Union—I know we are not meant to go on about that—this House has had less scrutiny over trade deals than we did before. It used to be that consent was required, which would go via the European Scrutiny Committee. That consent was required to be sent to the European Union before a trade deal could be signed off.

We know that in other places around Europe, legislators did hold back inappropriate trade deals. The EU-Canada free trade deal, for example, was held back by the Wallonian Parliament because it failed to address things such as workers’ rights, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) mentioned. The deal was renegotiated and the Europeans got a better deal. We could have done that at any step of the way when we were in Europe, but now we are out of the EU, we are less able to do so and less able to hold our negotiating person to account. Our negotiating person at that point was the European Commission. Our negotiating people now are our Ministers and civil servants, but we are less able to hold them to account. We cannot set their negotiating mandate or stop a trade deal, as we were able to do before. Yes, we can delay it, and yes, this Minister is fantastic in coming to be held to account through questioning, but the hard stop that means that people listen to you rather than just having a nice debating club with you has now been lost. We need to reflect that changing world.

[Mark Garnier]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He and I have discussed this at great length in two Committees that we have both sat on. I am hugely sympathetic to every point that he is making, but there is one counter-argument that has not yet been put forward. The position of our negotiators in striking these deals in the first place could be slightly weakened by the fact that they would then have to check back with the legislature on whether or not it will ratify. Were we to take the final decision away from our negotiators, they would not be able to negotiate such a strong deal. I put that forward not necessarily as a definitive answer, but as a counter-argument.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right. Some people claim that that would happen, but others claim that it would strengthen our position. When the EU says, “This is our backstop,” we know that it is not bluffing because the backstop has been set by the EU Parliament. Now, negotiators can say, “Well, we know that that is not really the backstop, because you can go away and cajole your Back Benchers to vote this through anyway,” whereas in other systems, they can say, “I’m sorry, but the Senate will not approve this because the committee is holding my feet to the fire.”

However, there are other ways of doing it. As other Members have mentioned, we could allow the matter to have Privy Council status and meet in camera, to allow involvement in negotiations. In multilateral processes, other Governments embed parliamentarians in their negotiating teams. The Norwegians, for example, embed parliamentarians in their WTO negotiating teams in the day-to-day back and forth. Of course, in Norway, the WTO is dealt with by a different department from bilateral treaties, so there is a slightly different way of negotiating different kinds of deals. We can determine what kind of deal it is from the level of negotiation and whether Parliament is involved. If Norway were dealing with the CPTPP, parliamentarians would be embedded in that process, but if it were dealing with the Japan deal, they would not.

There are granularities of parliamentary overview and scrutiny, but almost all systems have developed them over the past 50 years as trade deals have basically become international lawmaking processes rather than dealing just with trade—they deal with all aspects of our life. However, we effectively paused our processes when we joined the European Union, and we have now reverted to where we were before joining. Although I accept that our process are now in the CRaG law, they have not evolved properly.

Let me address my new clause 2. Around 90% of the world’s oil palm trees are grown in just a few islands in Malaysia and Indonesia. Currently, less than 20% of that palm oil has received certification for sustainable palm oil forestry. The CPTPP will remove tariffs from palm oil. Of course, the aim of removing tariffs is to increase trade, so it seems implausible to say that we do not think it will increase the amount of palm oil in the UK that comes from unsustainable forests. The same could be true of tropical woods. Two of the 11 forests that supply our tropical woods and are identified as in danger are in the CPTPP region, but they have no additional protection.

Trade (Australia and New Zealand) Bill

Debate between Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Mark Garnier

2nd reading
Tuesday 6th September 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mark Garnier]

Yes, I agree. It is incredibly important that we have a basis on which we can improve and that is absolutely the case. We would not be able to improve on these deals if we did not have them in the first place.

The Japan deal was a relatively easy one to scrutinise, because it was basically about looking at whether we had secured better terms than the European Union, based on the fact that we all started at the same time with that deal. It was a cut-and-paste deal with added lines, but the important point is that it was a modification of a roll-over deal.

These two deals are massively important, because there are two fundamental things that we need to consider. First, what are the UK Government’s negotiating objectives? We have never really understood what they are. A number of documents have laid out bits and pieces here and there, but there has never been a cohesive document to tell us what we are negotiating against or how we are doing relative to the outcome that we want.

The second important point is that this is the very first time that we are looking at the process of ratifying a trade deal, and it falls short of what we really need. I welcome this debate, which is an incredibly important one, but it is not the debate that we should be having. This is a debate about enabling certain legislation to ensure that the trade deal goes ahead. The Opposition have already said that they will support the Bill, but in the unlikely event that the Bill did not pass, that would leave us in breach of our international obligations under the trade deal. The trade deal has happened, so we would now be in trouble if we did not pass the Bill. It is incredibly important that we understand that this is an enabling Bill; it is not about how we scrutinise the deal itself.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

The hon. Gentleman highlights the point that we have passed CRaG before passing the enabling legislation, which is quite an unusual thing to do; normally in this country we pass enabling legislation and then ratify treaties. Does he think that perhaps the Government should have done things in a different order to ensure that the right scrutiny would happen and that there would be no risk, not even a minuscule one, of our breaching international agreements?