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

Lord Goldsmith Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 21st November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith (Lab)]

My Lords, it is always an enormous pleasure to listen to and follow the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. I get the pleasure of doing that quite frequently because he sits on the International Agreements Committee, which I have the honour to chair. I want to say something about that, because it explains why I do not intend to say very much in my remarks today. There are two reasons. One is that, as has been pointed out, this is a technical Bill. It deals with some important but quite limited aspects of the CPTPP, and I do not want, as the chair of the IAC, to allow this debate to appear to be the debate on the whole of the treaty, which, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said in the earlier Question, we want to see on the Floor of the House. It is important that we do; it is important that we have scrutiny. I very much hope that the noble Lord, the new Foreign Secretary, agrees with that.

It is also the reason why, and I say this to the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, I did not contribute very much to the briefing that he very kindly held for Peers recently. It was again for the two reasons I am going to adumbrate that I did not think it was right to get too deeply into the subject. One reason is that it is quite a technical Bill. The second is that the Committee I chair is in the middle of an inquiry, as has been mentioned already. I do not want to pre-empt the outcome of that inquiry, or the views that the members will have about the treaty as a result of that.

I will tell the House where we have got to. We called for evidence between July and September. We have had 27 submissions and three oral evidence sessions already, and we intend to have further. We have had specialists in trade and foreign policy give evidence to us already, and we will hear from diplomatic representatives of at least two countries. I am therefore very keen that we should see the full results of the scrutiny we are doing and place that before the House.

We have had interesting evidence already and I invite noble Lords to look at that which has been given. For example, the Government may be interested to note that one of our witnesses, an expert and experienced witness, said that so poor is the Government’s information about free trade arrangements that some businesses look to other countries’ websites to find the answers to questions, including on how to navigate our own arrangements. They have also pointed out that the data is so difficult sometimes that some of it seems to show that a country is a net importer while other data shows that it is a net exporter.

These need to be dealt with as additional matters, but the fundamental point is that, when we complete our scrutiny, we will, I believe, have very clear views on the treaty. I do not want to pre-empt that today, so I will not say anything further about the detail of the Bill, but I will listen very carefully to what is said; I will study that and the rest of the proceedings on the Bill. I look forward to coming back when we are in a position to do as we intend: to present our report, on the Bill and the treaty, to the House fully.