Comprehensive Economic Partnership (EUC Report)

Lord Goldsmith Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Grand Committee

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[Lord Goldsmith]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Trade Agreement between the United Kingdom and Japan for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership, laid before the House on 23 October (16th Report from the European Union Committee).

[Lord Goldsmith (Lab)]

My Lords, this debate is on the UK-Japan trade agreement, on which the International Agreements Sub-Committee reported last week. I shall provide a summary of its key findings, but the debate is also an opportunity to talk about the process of scrutiny with a test case before us. It is a novel process, and we can draw some initial conclusions about what works well and what does not. I trust that Members will permit those remarks about the bigger picture. I look forward to the debate and to hearing what noble Lords will say; I look forward in particular to the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Darroch of Kew, about which more will be said later.

The report is the culmination of months of talking to stakeholders and discussing negotiations in confidence with the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, who is in his place today and has been generous with his time—I thank him for that on behalf of the committee—and senior officials, including the chief economist and the chief negotiator. We also spoke to and corresponded with the Secretary of State before the summer.

The International Agreements Sub-Committee has sought to work in a complementary fashion with the Commons International Trade Committee, whose report on CEPA largely concurred with ours. The report principally contrasts CEPA with the JEEPA—the Japanese-European agreement that existed and still does—looking to understand impacts of any deviations and what stakeholders wanted the Government to achieve. Parliamentary scrutiny is a second route for their concerns and ambitions to be heard, and we tried to do justice to that evidence base in our report.

Where appropriate, we have considered the Government’s published objectives, but they are, to be frank, generic, and the Government have not cross-referenced CEPA with those published aims to set out whether all of them in their view have been effectively met. Parliament is not involved at the moment with that objective-setting process. We can say after the fact whether we think that they got the objectives wrong and what other objectives might have been sought, but our role here is severely limited. That is a matter which the House may wish to think further about.

We have also evaluated the Government’s final claims about what CEPA achieves and what it does not. Our principal conclusion in this regard is that the Government have oversold several provisions in a way that risks undermining what is ultimately a respectable continuity-plus agreement.

Looking at our specific key findings and starting with the successes, we note that CEPA goes beyond JEEPA in some of its digital and data provisions, which is welcome. This will benefit UK and Japanese businesses across sectors, in particular those in service industries. Those provisions have found favour with many of our witnesses, such as the City of London Corporation and the Motion Picture Association. However, some others, such as the consumer organisation Which?, and the Open Rights Group, have asked whether CEPA’s provisions might indicate a change of thinking from the Government about how to ensure the protection of personal data. Overall, we did not view CEPA as creating a potential personal data protection loophole, but we would be interested to hear from the Minister whether the UK envisages diverging from the EU on data protection.

Another key area of provisions relates to agri-food products. Those provisions are split through several chapters in our report, but I shall summarise them here together. First, overall, CEPA is useful to UK producers. Tariff reductions and their staging are maintained, allowing UK exporters to continue to be competitive with EU exporters. I do not really want to mention the supposedly cheaper soy sauce—the little incident on Twitter—but Members may recognise that as an allusion to an unfortunate and wrong statement that the deal would make soy sauce cheaper. Our report covers some areas such as trade in malt and tariff-rate quotas because the Government made quite a big deal of them, although they are relatively small in trade terms. Regarding the malt trade, the Maltsters’ Association of Great Britain told us that this agreement

“offers the same benefits as the existing system”—

access to the Japanese market tariff free through Japan’s autonomous tariff-rate quotas—yet the Government have advertised CEPA as delivering “more generous market access”. The Minister might like to comment on that.

Tariff-rate quotas, or TRQs as I will call them, were one of Japan’s key concessions to the EU to avoid greater liberalisation of tariff lines. Japan liberalised 97% to the EU’s 99%. In this UK deal, 94% of Japanese tariff lines are liberalised, to 99% of ours, but CEPA maintains access to only 10 of JEEPA’s 25 tariff-rate quotas, and then only after EU exporters have used them as much as they wish. That creates some uncertainty for UK producers and Japanese importers, who may now need even to provide bankers’ guarantees when importing UK products lest additional duty eventually needs to be paid. That does not make UK goods attractive, and access for the UK via the headroom left by the EU may disappear in only a few years. The Government say that joining the CPTPP will fix this, but that seems a contingent basis for dismissing the difficulties that exporters will face.

Finally, on a matter on which other noble Lords may touch later, there are new provisions for geographical indicators. The Government advertised CEPA as though they had won these protections, but in fact there is still an application process to be completed during which there may be objections from any of the 11 CPTPP countries or other producers.

Turning beyond agricultural and food products, CEPA has significant effects on trade in other goods. We thought particularly and had evidence particularly about automated manufacturing, as that is an area of key inward investment in the UK. Let me be clear: CEPA’s provisions are necessary and therefore welcome, but they are not sufficient. CEPA enables UK and Japanese manufacturers to use EU products and count these as their own for the purposes of cumulation. However, what the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders and the North East England Chamber of Commerce told us was most vital was cumulation for products exported to the EU. CEPA cannot deliver this on its own; only the UK-EU deal can, and it seems increasingly from press reports that it is unlikely to do so. I hope that other noble Lords may cover this topic.

The noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, regrettably cannot be with us for debate today, but I know that he would have wanted to highlight the sustainable development provisions of CEPA—the noble Lord, Lord Oates, may touch on some of these issues later. CEPA retains JEEPA’s sustainable development chapter but does not go any further. We were concerned at the lack of focus on environmental goods in CEPA overall. Cornwall Council highlighted in evidence to us the absence of any mention of green technology and the North East England Chamber of Commerce wanted more attention paid to low-carbon goods and services, including renewable energy, which are an important part of its regional economy.

As for the Government’s impact assessment, that itself notes uncertainty about whether CEPA can increase investment fall and the export potential of low-carbon goods and services. Again, I hope that the Minister will say something more about these issues in his speech.

I will illustrate how these issues are all interrelated. The North East England Chamber of Commerce highlighted that the accumulation of Japanese content in UK automotive manufacturing products being exported to the EU was “crucial”, in particular for electric vehicles, as the EU is not well developed in electric vehicle production and many parts come from Japan.

I will say a word about the Government’s explanatory documents. The brief summary of our findings that I have just given indicates the importance of looking closely at variations from the existing Japanese-EU agreement, JEEPA. However, the Government’s impact assessment does not allow us or the public to answer the question of whether the UK-negotiated deal serves UK businesses and consumers better than the existing one. The impact assessment compares CEPA only with no deal with Japan—that is, with WTO terms.

The committee does not want to use this report to relitigate Brexit, of course; that was not the purpose or intent behind that conclusion. However, we think the question is important and that the information to answer it should have been provided. We note that the Government’s own impact assessment of JEEPA estimated a GDP increase of £2.1 billion to £3 billion. That is much more than CEPA’s estimated £1.5 billion boost. We understand that the methodology and context of those two assessments differed, but we believe that the Government should have addressed this issue head on.

Our conclusion is thus forward-looking. For Parliament to best scrutinise the Government’s exercise of their new powers, which will be increasingly important for the country as we develop more new trade deals, we must have the data necessary to judge whether the Government have done a good job.

The Grand Committee previously debated our report, Treaty Scrutiny: Working Practices, and allied reports, when there was significant support for an enhanced mechanism for parliamentary scrutiny of treaties, including trade deals. That has also been evidenced in debates on the Trade Bill, and is likely to feature on Report when it comes about. Our inquiry on CEPA and those on the ongoing talks with the US, New Zealand and Australia—all of which are under way—have all yielded evidence from stakeholders about parliamentary scrutiny processes and their importance. This is not simply Members enjoying an opportunity to talk about themselves, but an important issue that we must get right.

Producing this report has been challenging. It is a testament to the willingness and ability of Members and staff to absorb and consider a vast amount of information quickly that we have been able to produce this report to allow the House to hold a debate within the CRaG scrutiny period. As we said at the working practices discussion, that is a short period. However, success that we were able to produce this report should not lead the House or the Government to think that this has been easy or will be easy in the future. We had notice and we planned accordingly, and because the deal is largely identical to an existing one, it does not raise some of the thornier issues, such as respect for human rights or food standards, that may well arise in other deals and agreements, and still it is very challenging to do CEPA justice.

We said in our working practices report that we reserve the right to recommend changes to CRaG if we conclude that, overall, the required pace is detrimental to the House’s scrutiny function. Nevertheless, I want to recognise that DIT has worked hard to make the process as it is work as well as it can in the circumstances, and the Minister and his staff should be commended for their efforts—I thank them, and particularly him. I look forward to hearing what noble Lords say in this debate. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Goldsmith (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for those remarks and his thorough observations on what noble Lords have said, but I particularly thank noble Lords who have taken part in the debate. When we first thought we would have a debate on this agreement, I was a bit nervous, because I knew that some of the very controversial areas that concern trade—the things that fill newspapers—would not arise on this agreement: it would be some sort of continuity agreement. I was quite wrong to think that this might not be a valuable debate; it has been very valuable. I, for one, will come back to things that many noble Lords have said in this debate when we look at other agreements; they are valuable and important.

I thank noble Lords for what they said about the report. To the extent that there is credit, it goes to my colleagues on the committee, but particularly to our staff. I pay particular tribute to the staff, who worked very hard under very pressing circumstances to get this scrutiny done, led by Dr Dominique Gracia, who is leaving us today, I think. She can rest on the laurels of a successful report and a debate in the House of Lords as, perhaps, her final official act, and I thank her.

Like other noble Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Darroch of Kew, and welcome him. I had the privilege and pleasure of working with him in government, as did many noble Lords, and knew what a tremendous contribution he would make to this House. His clarity of thought, perceptive insight and incisive judgments will be very welcome here—perhaps much more than they were by the outgoing president of another country. I therefore very much look forward to his further contributions.

Time does not permit me to go through the important themes of our debate now, but we will return to them, including the question of scrutiny. I worry that we were able to do this in the time that we had partly because of the co-operation of the noble Lord Grimstone, and his staff, and on the back of an agreement that largely replicated an existing one. How we could have done so on something completely new, with a new text, worries me enormously. We will come back to that, and not just in debates on the Trade Bill.

Meanwhile, we are feeling our way. I think the Government are feeling their way as well, but I heard the Minister say that they have found this scrutiny helpful. That is what we intend: to be helpful to the people, but also to the Government. We think that, as examples in other countries demonstrate, scrutiny can help in negotiations. On that note and with those hopes, I beg to move.

Motion agreed.