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

Lord Holmes of Richmond Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 14th December 2023 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Holmes of Richmond]

13: After Clause 5, insert the following new Clause—
“Review: inward investment into the United Kingdom(1) A Minister of the Crown must publish a review of the impact of the implementation of the CPTPP Chapter on investment on inward investment into the United Kingdom.(2) The review under subsection (1) should include a consultation of such persons the Minister of the Crown considers appropriate.(3) The review under subsection (1) must be published within 12 months of the passing of this Act and every 12 months thereafter.”

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this second day of Committee on the CPTPP. In doing so, I declare my financial services interests as adviser to Ecospend Ltd and LEMI Ltd.

I will speak to Amendments 13 and 14 in my name. I also give a nod to the other amendments in this group and look forward to their introduction by noble Lords. In short, the purpose of my amendment is rooted in one simple premise: we need to increase our cross-border trade in financial services with other CPTPP nations. We have an extraordinary opportunity to do so. Chapter 11 of the CPTPP sets out the financial services requirements in the treaty and, as in any treaty, we need to play to our strengths. Financial services are obviously one such strength.

If I could have got it within the scope of the Bill, my amendment would have talked about strategies rather than impact assessments, because that is ultimately what we need here. However, for the purposes of these amendments, we are limited to impact assessments. In many ways, this is a development of many of the discussions we had on the Financial Services and Markets Bill 2023, not least what we achieved in your Lordships’ House in pushing through the international competitiveness secondary objective for the regulator. These amendments fit squarely with that intention and what we can achieve internationally with our financial services firms and ecosystem.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

I will not get drawn into the debate on that, but I think that would be 1,800%, rather than 180%. However, the point is that the noble Lord is right to raise the matter of the estimated expected costs compared with the actual costs today, and the deflationary impact of global trade on some of our developing nation partners and the importance of ensuring that it can be mitigated in some way, regardless of the other trade deals that we are pursuing. I am grateful for his point.

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, this has been an excellent debate. I thank all noble Lords who participated and the Minister for his response. I was pleased that financial services and environmental concerns were grouped together, because that is, in many ways, the fundamental point that is often missed. There is no purpose in talking about financial services and finance without ESG being gold-threaded through it all. I can sum up today’s debate, in many ways, as: what purpose profit if no planet to spend it on? I again thank all noble Lords who took part and, with that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 13 withdrawn.