EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Lord Garnier Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Garnier (Con) [V]]

My Lords, there is barely time to declare my interests in the register, not enough properly to welcome my noble friend Lord Wharton—although I warmly do so—and none at all to set out my TCA-related concerns about the Government’s Panglossian approach to the future of the United Kingdom, now very much in peril.

The TCA shows that the United Kingdom and the EU can behave with good will towards each other and agree. That is good, not only on its own but because the TCA exposes a lot of unfinished business, not least on technical barriers to trade. The agreement covers only part of the economic canvas and, to mix my metaphors, it is very much a curate’s egg.

Doing a deal on services is more difficult than doing one on goods, which is perhaps why so much has been left unfinished. Third-country access to the services arena is more complex than access for goods. We could not expect to replicate the same quality of access that both regulated and unregulated services enjoyed in the single market, but we will now see significant new barriers to UK services in the EU. Of course, the Government have for presentational reasons not spoken too much about this, understandably preferring to trumpet the provisions on traded goods, but these barriers need to be recognised and overcome.

Over 40% of our exports to the EU are in services, and 80% of the UK’s economy depends on services. The TCA’s eye-catching commitments to liberalise services are qualified by restrictions in the annexes. Our service suppliers will lose automatic rights to offer services across the EU. They will have to comply with a patchwork of separate host-country rules and may need to establish themselves in the EU to continue operating, and this will create expense and inefficiency. The level of market access will also depend on the way the service is supplied: there are four different “modes” which govern how the rules will apply to service supply. There is no time to explain them, but they will make things more difficult.

Furthermore, the TCA does not provide for mutual recognition of professional qualifications, a notable retreat from the current position. There will be no automatic right for a UK lawyer to advise even on UK or public international law in an EU state. I suggest that my noble friend Lord Frost and the Government as a whole have a lot more work to do, and I wish them well.