Comprehensive Economic Partnership (EUC Report)

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow my colleague on the International Agreements Sub-Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Oates, and our chair, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, who has so well set out the basis of our report that I will not follow him in most of that. I will focus on what I think is really important, which is that this is a continuity-plus agreement. I want to focus on the plus, which I think is more significant than people have perhaps yet realised.

I declare an interest. In addition to being a member of that committee, I am the UK chair of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, which was in online conference with our Japanese colleagues on 11 and 12 September this year, when the agreement was signed. Among our colleagues from Japan were seven members of the Japanese Diet and former Ambassador Tsuruoka, who will be known to a number of Members.

The sense of positive welcome given by our Japanese colleagues to the agreement reflected their view that this was not simply a rollover of the EU agreement—although much of it might look that way—but presaged a significant broadening and deepening of the UK-Japanese trading relationship. I will focus on that. First, on digital trade, I think the EU, because of its lack of a digital single market, continues not to enter the kind of expansive agreements available with other countries. This agreement much more nearly reflects the content of the CPTPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement: things such as free flow of data, net neutrality, consumer protection online, no data localisation and more open government use of anonymised data. All of those are really important for digital trade, and the United Kingdom is a world leader in digital trade. For us to have such agreements is increasingly important.

That is also true on financial services, where the lack of potential agreement in the EU-UK agreement is a matter of continuing regret. Here, with Japan, are some starting points much welcomed by the City on facilitating UK firms licensing in Japan, on regulatory co-operation and reference and deference to each other’s regulatory structures and, generally for service industries, the mobility of staff and their families to work in Japan.

There are improvements on agricultural tariffs and things such as the administrative scheme enabling more geographic indications to be protected in the Japanese market—they are modest, but they can be developed, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, said, in the CPTPP context, as long as we make progress there. I think we can and we will. It is not unimportant that Japan holds the chair of the CPTPP in 2021, and things such as digital trade developments and agricultural market access will be much improved if we are able to accede to the CPTPP. I hope that the Government will take that forward early in the new year.

The plus also includes areas where we want to go further—on financial services, on mutual recognition of qualifications, on the ability of people from this country to go to work in Japan, on the environment and sustainable development and for there to be an investment chapter, given the relative significance of Japanese investment in this country and that in the opposite direction, and in audio-visual and creative industries, where both we and Japan are world leaders and should be encouraging continuing trade. The noble Lord, Lord Foster, may want to say something about that.

Finally, using this agreement is really important, and I commend our colleagues in the embassy in Tokyo, because they recently appointed a digital trade and an agricultural trade attaché. If they, business, including SMEs, and the department use this agreement fully, we can make this a significant increment to our UK-Japan trade.