Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill [HL]

Lord Frost Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak at the end of such a fascinating, interesting and important debate. I imagine we have all heard things—personal experiences, reflections, arguments—that have made us think harder about our own assumptions in this complex area. I certainly have, but I am afraid nothing has shaken my basic view that this is a bad, poorly written Bill, which, if it ever became law, would have a number of rather damaging consequences.

I have certainly not been persuaded by anything I have heard that there is a genuine problem with violent or coercive conversion therapy in this country. These things are, after all, already illegal. What worries me is that the effect of the Bill would be—as we have heard from many noble Lords—to criminalise a much broader range of actions and interactions. The consequence of that—and maybe this is one of the underlying purposes of the Bill—would be to reinforce a tendency towards control and conformity that is already very evident in our society. That is what worries me. The Bill does it in three particular ways.

First, it begins the process of giving legislative force to the controversial view that simply hearing opinions that you do not agree with can in itself cause harm and should therefore be made illegal. This is a damaging proposition anywhere, but it is particularly harmful in this area, where individuals differ and where, as we have heard, there is far from societal or expert consensus—thus, free debate and discussion is vital if we are going to find the right solutions.

Free society works on the opposite principle to that. It works on the principle that everyone has the right to reach their own judgments and opinions, and equally, that every adult has the right to ignore such judgment and opinions and do what they want within the law. Once we question that principle, as the Bill begins to do, we are changing the nature of society. We are asking the state to be our parent, to protect us from uncomfortable concepts and challenging ideas. The only way the state can do that, effectively, is to define which opinions are acceptable and which are not.

That leads to the second problem: that the Bill is another step towards creating in practice a state ideology of approved and unapproved ideas. After all, without such an ideology, how do you know which opinions can be safely expressed and which cannot? In fact, we have already gone some way down that road. It is not possible to hold certain jobs in the public sector without signing up to—or at least not publicly dissenting from—a set of controversial beliefs about diversity and inclusion. The Bill would take it further into wider society. It would make it illegal for religious leaders with their flock, parents with their children, psychologists or psychiatrists with their patients, to express some of their profound disbeliefs, or even to broach certain ideas. Indeed, in some cases, such people would seemingly be required by the Bill to actively say things they do not believe in order to avoid prosecution.

That is obviously a problem in itself, but it is also a problem because in modern conditions, such a state ideology will inevitably be aggressively secular—not just neutral, as between different belief systems, which is what many of us think of as secular, but rather one that requires conformity to a particular set of propositions. This is the third way the Bill shapes society more broadly. These are not propositions shaped by traditional values, beliefs or an established philosophical code, but propositions defined by opposition to those things, in which there is no room for such beliefs. That is what the Bill represents, and it is why it is another step towards pushing religious beliefs out of mainstream debate. If it is not slowed, before long we will find that religious beliefs may be held in private, may occasionally be referred to in public—like a dark and shameful secret—but may never be actively brought into the public or professional square. When we reach that point, which is perhaps not far off, if you believe God created men and women in male and female bodies, you had better keep it to yourself, because the state may think differently.

To conclude, I am sure some noble Lords will listen to my remarks and think I am simply exaggerating. They may be saying to themselves, “How do you get from a Bill that purports to be about treating everybody decently and fairly to this nightmare vision of state-controlled speech?” In answer to that, it is precisely in these liminal, border areas, these marginal cases, that new directions get set. Of course, every human being needs to be treated decently and fairly, because everybody has intrinsic value. However, the catch comes when we go on to identify that fair and decent treatment as necessitating that no one should ever hear anything challenging to the beliefs they hold, even if they have chosen to hear that. We cannot ensure that in a free society, and trying to do it takes us down a very difficult road. The only thing we can reliably ensure is the right to disagree, to stop listening and to walk away. However, we have that right already. Do not let us start taking it away. Let us reject this Bill.

Gaza: Humanitarian Situation

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I will make one simple suggestion—that everyone should read the excellent article by Stephen Daisley in the Spectator yesterday, in which he wrote:

“Time and again, Israel was urged to make concessions … In each case, the promise from foreign capitals was the same: do this and, if the Palestinians exploit these concessions to attack you, we will back your right to self-defence. Well, Israel made the concessions, the Palestinians exploited them, and, with some honourable exceptions, the international community went wobbly whenever Israel mounted a military operation”.


That is why Israelis feel as they do now.

After 7 October, Israel has an absolute right to act to remove the threat of terrorism from its borders and topple Hamas. In doing so, it goes out of its way to prevent civilian casualties and takes precautions that no other military in the world takes. Can my noble friend the Minister confirm that this country will continue to support Israel in finishing that job?

Industrial Strategy

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my former Downing Street colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Rosenfield, on an excellent maiden speech. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Watson, for securing this debate today.

Perhaps not for the first time, I am a bit out of sync with the thrust of the debate in the Chamber so far. I am a little sceptical of industrial strategy. The case for it is that decision-making by Governments and officials produces a pattern of economic activity of industries that would be better than that which would otherwise develop in the market. Perhaps even less plausibly, it is that the industries that we must support for strategic reasons are also, by total coincidence, those that are better for growth too, even though we still cannot rely on the market to provide them. My simple question to all this is: says who? How do you know? Where does the Government get the information they need to shape the economy through tax, subsidy and—apparently soon—tariffs in the form of CBAMs?

Proponents of industrial strategy say that they know better than the market, but you cannot just say that; it has to be proved. That is literally impossible. The only reliable source of economic information in a market economy is prices, yet the proponents of industrial strategy say that market prices are wrong because the allocation of resources that the prices create is inferior to the one that their industrial policy would create. They cannot then use market prices of the future to justify the claim that their new industrial structure is better than the unknown alternative. You cannot have it both ways.

The second problem with industrial strategy is regulatory capture. We all know about that: it is the tendency for economic decision-making to be captured by Governments, who find it hard to admit failure, or firms that benefit from incumbent positions.

The final problem with industrial strategy is epistemological. Nobody knows the future. No one knows that “the industries of the future” actually are the industries of the future. Of course, if you spend enough money on them, they become the industries of the future—at least, if any competition can be squeezed out—but that does not mean that they were the best use of our resources. It is especially unlikely that they were if the outcomes are shaped by Governments spending other people’s money, rather than firms and entrepreneurs risking their own.

Of course, it is possible to make a case for industrial strategy on different grounds, such as by saying that we need, for example, a windmill industry for climate change reasons or a steel industry for national security reasons, and that although doing that is not the best use of resources and will harm growth, we must do it anyway. It would still fall foul of the inability to know the future, but at least we would be honest in debate.

To conclude, I commend the Government for their at least partial reluctance to go down the money-wasting road of industrial strategy. My policy proposal to the Minister is to end all the subsidies, use a bit of the money to buy for every Minister and official a copy of Hayek’s essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, and then sit back and let the market work.

Elgin Marbles

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I join others in thanking my noble friend Lord Lexden for securing this debate. It is right that we should debate this subject because it cannot be left just to museums. There is obviously room to debate the legal case. I think Lord Elgin’s actions were possibly a little murky; nevertheless, our legal case is good. I also think that is not the point. The point is what we do now, rather than what happened in the past.

Personally, I have never been so convinced by the moral, artistic and cultural arguments for the position we take. The Parthenon marbles are a special situation and we should try to find a special solution. They are one of the supreme expressions of ancient Greek, hence western, art. They were created for a specific building and a specific cultural context. In contrast to much ancient sculpture, we know exactly what that context was and what the work of art was intended to signify. These are not just random museum exhibits and, for as long as they are not seen as a whole, they are less than the sum of their parts.

I was lucky enough to learn Greek in Greece, when the Foreign Office still invested in such things, and I have lived in Cyprus. I have no doubt been influenced by that experience, but it has also enabled me to see the argument from the Greek perspective. For us, the marbles are just one exhibit—albeit a very important one—in our national museums, but for Greece they are part of the national identity and a national cultural cause. As we saw from what was, I am afraid, the slightly dismissive treatment of Prime Minister Mitsotakis the other week, they have the capacity to disrupt a relationship that really ought to be a lot better than it is.

We should try to find a solution, but I also wonder whether a loan is the right way forward. I admit that I am slightly unconvinced by it. It seems like a solution that has been shaped by the existence of the 1963 Act, which rightly prohibits the museum from alienating its collections. I am afraid that is a very necessary protection nowadays against the tendencies of too many museum curators. The problem with a loan is that it keeps the issue and the arguments alive when we should try to settle this for good.

My personal view is that it is a time for a grand gesture, and only the Government can make it. It is to offer to return the marbles as a one-off gift to Greece from this country, but as part of and on condition of a new, wider Anglo-Greek cultural partnership. That partnership could have three elements, but many others. First, a museum partnership, high-quality reproductions of the marbles in London plus an agreement by Greece to loan some of its most famous works of art, temporarily, in return—perhaps beyond London as well. Secondly, a wider cultural partnership, perhaps a bilateral foundation, largely financed by the, I am sure, many wealthy private individuals with an interest in this question, to try to take academic and scholarly collaboration to a new level, and an agreement to relax or eliminate restrictions—because the barriers are much stronger on the Greek side than ours—on language teaching, cultural work, artistic performance by each other’s citizens and so on. Thirdly, and finally, a joint campaign to return to Greece those parts of the marbles that are in other museums globally, for it should not be forgotten that, although the British Museum has most of those that are not in Athens, it does not have them all.

Such a partnership would have to definitively set aside for good the rights and wrongs of the original acquisition. It would also have to be clear that it was not a precedent for restitution demands for any other museum exhibit. But it would show that we actually mean it when we see the marbles as part of our common inheritance, and that we can move beyond the “What we have, we hold” approach we take on so many occasions. Perhaps we could rise to the occasion this time and make a deal.

Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland: Follow-up Report (European Affairs Committee)

Lord Frost Excerpts

Monday 11th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and his sub-committee for this excellent and important report. It rightly highlights many of the uncertainties around the Windsor Framework and the lack of clarity about its operation. I too look forward to digesting the Government’s response when I have time.

I understand why the Prime Minister wanted to put an end to the tensions of recent years over Northern Ireland, but I am sorry to say that I regret the way in which it has been done. The Windsor Framework is said to be proof that good faith and a softer approach can pay dividends with the EU; I am afraid that I disagree. For me, it is proof that you never get a good result in a negotiation if the other side can tell that you just want a deal. As a result, I fear that its benefits have been oversold and the temporary reduction in friction over Northern Ireland has been bought only by conceding many of the points at issue. I will briefly explain why and highlight four problems.

First, I do not honestly think the Government have been totally clear about the nature of this agreement. The name may have changed, but we are still dealing with, essentially, the old protocol. The EU is still the goods and customs regulatory authority in Northern Ireland; its provisions are implemented by EU laws, not ours. In my view, the Stormont brake is a trivial and probably unusable add-on to something that was already in the protocol. The committee said and the noble Lord, Lord Jay, noted:

“There has been no substantive change to the role of the CJEU”.


It is not a new solution. Fundamentally, it is the old one and can be expected to generate the same problems.

Secondly, the workability of the framework’s limited new elements looks increasingly questionable. I wrote in February that the red and green lanes and the more relaxed rules on food standards and so on would probably improve the situation. I am no longer quite so sure. We are seeing operators setting out the practical difficulties with the green lane; on food standards, we seem to have agreed that people in Northern Ireland can consume GB-standard foods only if they are imported—they are not allowed to make them themselves. The Government claimed six months ago that there would be “no sense” of an Irish Sea border. We cannot really say that that is the case at the moment.

The third difficulty, which is crucial, is that the Government’s stance has changed. They have now committed to defending and supporting the framework. This is fundamental. The Johnson Government, of which I was part, always took the view—many criticised us for taking it—that the protocol was unsatisfactory and temporary. We always hoped that, ultimately, divergence by GB would produce the collapse of the protocol arrangements, whether consensually through a vote, a further negotiation or otherwise. We always wanted something better. Now, though, the Government are committed to the view that the Windsor Framework is better and should be defended. The consequence is that, as problems emerge—as they will—the Government must ally themselves with the EU, defend these new arrangements and impose them on a deeply divided Northern Ireland. They must actively support rules that destroy long-standing trade arrangements in this country and impose laws without consent in Northern Ireland. When problems emerge, as they do, for example over horticultural trade in Northern Ireland, they deny that they exist. I am afraid the Government will not find that comfortable. I fear the long-term consequences.

The final difficulty is that the Government’s commitment to the framework will shape their broader policy. That is why I cannot entirely share the view of those on my side of the argument who say, “Yes it’s imperfect, but it’s time to move on”. The framework creates a huge incentive to avoid diverging from the EU in relevant areas, because doing so will make its arrangements less and less workable, more vulnerable to EU interdiction and harder to defend as a success. Perhaps we have already seen the first consequences in the watered-down retained EU law Act.

The Windsor Framework exists. It seems that we will have to live with it for some years yet, but it is a sticking plaster and not a real solution to the underlying problems. If the Government had said something such as, “This deal softens the protocol but it does not remove it; it is the best we can get for now because we did not want to use the NI Protocol Bill and the EU knew it, but that cannot be the end of the story”, that would have been a fair statement of their position and much easier for people on my side of the argument to get behind. As it is, we are supposed to believe that the problems have been solved, but they have not. It leaves us where we started, with the British Government only partly sovereign over their territory. That is still a bitter pill to swallow, and in the long run I do not see how it can stand.

Climate Change

Lord Frost Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as an unpaid trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, an educational charity in this area.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for securing this debate. We have all too little debate on climate change and it is all the more important we have it now, since critics of any aspect of this policy find it increasingly difficult to get a hearing in the media. Here in this House, at least, we cannot be censored—though it seems that we run some risk of losing our bank accounts if we dare to speak up.

It is crucial, as we debate this, that we do so in a measured and rational fashion. I welcome the fact that the Prime Minister’s comments today suggest that that might be beginning to happen in government. We must put aside the current mood of hysteria and try to assess the choices logically.

When people like me argue about the costs of mitigating climate change, we are often told: “There is no choice. Not acting costs even more”. I question that. Of course temperatures are increasing, slowly, and that will have consequences, but there is another choice, and that is what we are debating today—adaptation.

Let us look at the relative costs and benefits of the two routes. Let us look at the macro level first. The Skidmore net-zero review earlier this year asserted that the costs of mitigation would be 1% to 2% of GDP per year—that is £25 billion to £50 billion sterling—though other studies say it will be quite a lot more than that. Moreover, unless everyone else in the world is willing to bear the same costs, our spending that much will have precisely zero effect on the global climate.

In contrast, look at adaptation. It is not easy to find hard figures about the costs of adaptation but, if we look at the 2021 technical report on this, prepared for the Climate Change Committee in 2021, we see that it shows the cost of adaptation as only £8 billion a year by 2050 and £13 billion to £20 billion, non-discounted, as far out as 2080—and by then, I hope, that will be a very small proportion of our GDP. The orders of magnitude of those figures surely suggest that adaptation might actually be a more productive route than mitigation. I therefore agree with the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that more will need to be spent on things such as flood protection and reservoirs.

Let us look at one example at the micro level, also mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs: the calls for Britain to adapt to the health consequences of rising temperatures. We should dig in deeper and ask: what are the consequences of hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters? At the moment, seven times as many people die from cold as from heat in Britain. Rising temperatures are likely to be beneficial. No less than the Government Actuary’s Department wrote in April this year that

“it is the low winter temperatures that have a greater effect on the number of deaths … since the start of the millennium … A decline in deaths from cold temperature periods has more than offset any increase in the number of deaths associated with warmer temperature over the same period”.

I am not sceptical about adaptation; I am sceptical about mitigation. I suggest that the rational thing to do is move away from the current high-cost mitigation efforts, which involve massive investment in unproductive renewables, huge changes in lifestyles and the crushing of economic growth, and pursue mitigation in a different way. We should invest in effective energy production—such as nuclear, gas and other technologies as they emerge. Meanwhile, we should spend the manageable sums that we need to on adaptation so we can adjust to the perfectly manageable consequences of slowly rising temperatures as they emerge.

Parliamentary Democracy in the United Kingdom

Lord Frost Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for giving us an opportunity to speak on this important subject, even if I do not, I am afraid, recognise her bleak and at times rather fantastic and comic picture of what is going on in this country at the moment. I also look forward to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lichfield’s maiden speech.

In the short time I have, I want to take a step back. As a concept, modern parliamentary democracy is linked to the concept of the nation state. They rose together. We saw the growth of democracies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then again after 1990 as peoples found their independence and wanted to give it institutional form. So, although plenty of nation states are not democracies, there are, I think, no democracies that are not also nation states. That is not surprising. The nation state allows for the creation of a common demos, common loyalties and the readiness to settle political differences within an agreed set of rules.

It follows from this that, when the nation state weakens, confidence in democracy weakens. That is just what we saw in this country over the past nearly 50 years during our membership of the EU. Then, we were in practice only a limited democracy. Fewer and fewer issues could be settled in national elections. Policies on trade, agriculture, fisheries, the environment, employment, social issues, migration and citizens’ rights could be changed only by agreement in Brussels, whatever our national electorate said.

It is no wonder that people switched off and stopped believing that voting could change everything. Luckily, we have now escaped that, or at least, 95% of us have escaped that, since the Windsor Framework unfortunately preserves some of these weaknesses—I hope not for too long. Overall, we have brought politics back home. We have revived political life. We can debate and change everything again in this country. Of course, many people clearly are uncomfortable with that, and it sounds like the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, may be one of them. They call it populism when a democracy reflects citizens’ actual views but for me, it is a strength. Our democracy is healing. Politics is coming back to life.

Net-zero Emissions: Behaviour Change

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate, the Government and the Minister for proposing and enabling this debate today. It is an extremely important subject. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, for her committee’s report on this subject, as has been mentioned.

We all agree, I think, that decarbonisation is a very desirable goal, but that aspiration is different from the specific net-zero 2050 policy. That target was essentially invented by the Climate Change Committee in 2019, passed through secondary legislation in this Parliament with limited debate and, since then, has been creating radical change to the economic structure of this country. My own party is just as much to blame for this situation—possibly even more so—as the parties of noble Lords opposite.

To be fair to the Climate Change Committee, it correctly stated in 2019 that there would need to be policy change to deliver this goal. It specifically mentioned decarbonisation of industry, the grid, insulation, renewables, boilers, carbon capture and storage, and so on. Now, however, we find, first, that all these technical measures are extremely expensive to install; secondly, they make energy and normal life very expensive for people; and, thirdly, they are increasing the unreliability of the energy sector, worsened by the destruction of energy supply that is actually reliable and by the addition of too many renewables that destabilise the grid.

We see a situation where the technology does not deliver the goal or aspiration by 2050 and behavioural change is beginning to fill that gap, which I find somewhat troubling. I will make three remarks. First, “behavioural change” is a nice phrase, but let us look at what it actually means: it means making it harder for people to do things that they would otherwise choose to do. One of the Government’s slogans is:

“Make the green choice affordable”.


Another way of putting that is: subsidise substandard and ineffective technologies, chosen politically by government, which people would not choose to use otherwise. Behavioural change, then, reduces human welfare, making people do things that they do not want to do, rather than things they do.

Secondly, if we take the phrase at face value, behavioural change should be voluntary. It means encouraging or nudging, but it often feels as though that is not what is being described. In 2021, the Climate Change Committee said:

“Behaviour change … comes through consumer adoption of low-carbon technologies such as electric cars”.


You do not get any choice about that: from 2030, you have to buy an electric car. That is not nudging but compulsion. The same is true for heat pumps from 2025 and closing roads for cyclists—it is all compulsion.

The same is true of the aspiration to learn from the pandemic set out in the committee’s report, from which I note my noble friend Lord Lilley wisely dissented. Yes, behavioural change was encouraged during the pandemic, but the key aims were achieved by legal compulsion: making it illegal to leave your home and meet people, and fining you if you did so. That is not nudging but simple compulsion, and if people mean legal compulsion, they should say it.

Finally, we are already in a society where far too much is governed by politics, which is too much in every sphere of everyday life. I worry that behavioural change and climate measures are shrinking the private space of individuals. They turn every decision—every time you go to the supermarket or travel—into a political act, which is a bad thing for society. Free societies should have large spaces where there is free choice.

I conclude by urging the Government on this. They have done quite enough encouragement of behavioural change as it is; there is no need for more. The right way to the decarbonisation goal is on the supply side. Provide the energy that people need but do not tell them not to use it. The right way forward is from natural gas to nuclear, with renewables at the margin, and investment in new technology—batteries and hydrogen—so that we have the low-carbon power that a modern industrial society needs. That is the way forward.

Economy: The Growth Plan 2022

Lord Frost Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate and to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, who is a voice of clarity and forthright speaking in this Chamber. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe on her appointment once again to the Front Bench, in the Cabinet Office.

This country faces serious underlying problems, which my noble friend Lord Bridges and others have set out, and in my view this Government are beginning to tackle them. This will create turbulence but there is really no choice.

My noble friend Lord Lilley referred to the achievements of the Thatcher Government in the 1980s. One of her close advisers, John Hoskyns, said:

“It is not enough to settle for policies which cannot save us, on the grounds that they are the only ones which are politically possible or administratively convenient.”


Unfortunately, too many of those who have opposed the Government’s growth plan seem to want to do just that, thinking that the right way forward is just more of the same: more super-zero interest rates, more public spending and more clever policies, and the whole thing run by clever officials and institutions who are very invested in how things are now. The task before us is different. It is to make politically possible what is necessary for the country to begin to recover, and I believe that this is what the Government are setting out in the growth plan. I welcome that. I have spent a lot of the last year, within and outside government, urging the Government to get more serious about low taxes, reform and change. I am very happy that they have begun to do so.

The situation that we face as a country is difficult but it is not as bad as that which many others face. It is not as bad as for those trapped in the eurozone, who have no control over monetary policy or much else of the normal role of a Government. The report a week or so ago from Deutsche Bank researchers attracted a lot of attention in the hysteria of the last couple of weeks, pointing out that our economy might shrink slightly, by 0.5% in 2023. What attracted less attention was it saying that Germany’s economy would shrink by 3% or 4%. We must keep these things in proportion.

We have had a productivity and growth problem since 2008—which I note in passing is the period of the deepest integration of this country in the single market and of the highest inward migration. Re-joining the single market and reversing those trends will not help our growth performance at all; it did not help then and it will not help now.

The right way forward is set out in the growth plan: the gradual normalisation of monetary policy, which is essential if we are to solve the productivity problem. Zero interest rates harm the motor of a free market economy. The only way forward is medium-term fiscal discipline while letting fiscal policy take the strain in the short run, and supply side structural reform.

When the economy does not grow, you get competition for static resources, which is why we have what my right honourable friend the Prime Minister called the anti-growth coalition. The fact that so many people do not like the term shows that it has captured something real about attitudes. These people’s vision of the country seems to be to keep everything as it is. They do not want change. They are happy to see our country as a shabby-genteel aristocratic family, trying to keep up appearances but not ready to go out to work.

This will not be easy. Politicians must explain what needs to be done. However, I take inspiration again from the words of Margaret Thatcher, who said:

“First you win the argument, then you win the election.”


If the Government stick to their guns, I am confident that they will do both those things.

Negotiating Objectives for a Free Trade Agreement with India

Lord Frost Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for securing this debate, as well as for her broader work in chairing this important committee and producing this report. I assure her that she will be hearing more from me in this capacity and that no valedictory is due—for the time being, anyway.

I go back some way in my interest and involvement in trade issues with India. Ten years or so ago, when I was the UK’s representative on the EU’s Trade Policy Committee—also known the Article 133 committee—I spent a lot of my time promoting the UK’s interests in what we hoped at that time would be a free trade agreement between the European Union and India. Even then, it was clear to me that the task was an almost impossible one. Coupled with the Indians’ reluctance to make major concessions, the fact that the EU Commission had to promote so many interests, both offensive and defensive, and approached the task in such a mercantilist way—as trade negotiators tend to do—made it always seem unlikely that the right balance would ever be found. Indeed, so it proved when the EU suspended the talks in 2013.

Luckily, we in the UK have been given another opportunity to reach an agreement with India thanks to the fact that we no longer have a trade policy in which we are a minority share participant. We are now in a position to prioritise our own objectives, determine our own trade-offs and, let us not forget, conduct a negotiation in which UK officials are actually in the room and negotiating directly rather than having to rely on accounts from a third party.

Moreover, as the committee’s report makes clear, the time is propitious, with India, I hope, taking a more positive attitude to trade agreements and with the strategic case for an agreement with India ever more important. Indeed, this more positive environment is why the EU too resumed negotiations in June, although I suspect it will find the task of balancing its different interests as difficult as ever.

We now have a new Prime Minister, one who was formerly Secretary of State for International Trade and one who I know to be an economic liberal and believer in the merits of openness and competition. I express the hope to my noble friend the Minister that this attitude will feed through to a new government approach to this negotiation.

The committee’s report endorses the observation of the current Secretary of State for International Trade—at least I think she still is—my right honourable friend Anne-Marie Trevelyan that the Government will sign a deal by Diwali only if it is “good for UK businesses”. Of course, what is good for existing UK businesses is not necessarily the same as what is good for the UK economy overall. This is particularly true when looking at trade liberalisation. We cannot determine whether an agreement is beneficial to us purely by looking at one test: whether it reduces barriers, tariff and non-tariff, for our exports. That is a very important test, but not the only test.

The important judgment to make is whether, taking one thing with another, the agreement is beneficial to our country overall. That requires a broader assessment. It requires looking at the benefits of increased competition to our economy through more openness to Indian exports, notably but not only in agriculture, even if that might make life tougher for some existing businesses. It requires looking at the broader national economic and security interest we have in rebalancing our trade policy away from the current arrangements, which, in effect, are a giant preference scheme for the European Union. And it requires looking at the strategic case for a trade agreement with India, in the context of our broader aspiration to join the CPTPP, which is in many ways complementary, and our aspiration for a broader strategic and defence political involvement in the Indo-Pacific.

That is why, with the greatest respect, I disagree with the committee’s judgment that there is only questionable value in setting deadlines for the conclusion of negotiations. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, alluded to this. I know, perhaps better than anyone, how much a deadline focuses minds on both sides, but I draw different conclusions. Without a deadline, we will always be prey to the wishes of our domestic lobbies; there will always be the wish to take a bit longer and to push negotiations that one step further. Like the tortoise in Zeno’s paradox, the perfect moment for concluding talks will always seem a little way in the future. This approach risks us never getting any agreement at all.

It may be that, given events, the Diwali deadline is a bit too soon, although I note that, strictly speaking, it was a deadline

“to conclude the majority of talks”,

not to have a completed agreement. Be that as it may, we should set a credible deadline soon, seek to reach the best agreement we can and reach a judgment on whether it is in our interests overall. If that agreement looks more like an interim than a comprehensive agreement, and it can be harvested so further talks continue, we should be very open to that.

I will briefly make two other points—one on which I agree with the committee and one on which I do not. On the first, I agree that it is time we had a broader UK trade strategy—one that sits within and is consistent with the revised and updated integrated review, which I hope we will see shortly. That strategy should also include some proposals and ideas for the greater involvement of Parliament in signing off agreements, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, noted. I hope that the new Secretary of State for International Trade will take this forward.

My second point is on the committee’s comment that the devolved Administrations have concerns regarding the sharing of information pertaining to areas of reserved competence in the negotiations. The noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, the previous Trade Minister, is quoted as justifying the current arrangements on the grounds of confidentiality. That is all well and good, but there is a clue in the words “reserved competence”. Information need not be shared with the devolved Administrations in areas of reserved competence because, to put it bluntly, it is not their business. Where competence is reserved, it is for the DAs to implement decisions taken by the national Government in the negotiations. I urge the Government and the Minister to be more robust in policing these boundaries; we have seen a tendency for the boundaries to move, and in only one direction.

I conclude by once again thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and the committee and by expressing my best wishes and support for their further work in this important area.