Trade Bill

Lord Fox Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 30th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Purvis of Tweed]

I believe we do. Not only are we resourced in Parliament, but we are resourced in this House. Our committees do a remarkable job in scrutinising both European legislation and secondary legislation. As we approach the Bill, many noble Lords stand ready to scrutinise proactively and constructively some of the proposals. But we cannot do that if our role is only at the last stage. Indeed, the Government would be much more effective in securing final agreements on such arrangements if Parliament were involved at the early stages. If that principle had been applied to the process of negotiating our withdrawal, we might now be in a different position.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, before he had to hurry off, spoke of transparency as if it were a threat to negotiation. Speaking to another amendment earlier, the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, who has more contemporary experience than the noble Lord, spoke of her regrets about the TTIP negotiation, and the fact that the NHS brouhaha that blew up around it scuppered, or terminally injured, that negotiation. Transparency is not a prerequisite just because it is a good thing; in the modern world it is needed to get consent for such things to happen. In the world we live in today, such negotiations can be stopped—and if we think the TTIP negotiation was an example of that, we have not seen anything until we have seen a US treaty being negotiated. Transparency is not just a good thing; it is an enabler, which allows us to have such treaties.

[Viscount Younger of Leckie (Con)]

My Lords, forgive me for stretching the definition of repetition, but before I address the amendments in detail I would like to underline the fact that the Bill concerns continuity for our existing EU free trade agreements as we leave the European Union. I mention that without wishing to revisit the emphasis that we placed on the word “continuity” on Monday last week. Scrutiny of new free trade agreements is not part of the Bill, nor is scrutiny of our future relationship with the EU.