Trade Bill

Lord McNicol of West Kilbride Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 8th October 2020 Grand Committee

This has been a long and rigorous debate, and I hope it has been helpful in clarifying the Government’s position. As I said at the beginning, I believe that if one analyses the Government’s position there is less difference between the Government and Parliament than some noble Lords have said. I hope that I have sufficiently addressed your Lordships’ concerns and therefore urge the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, to withdraw his amendment.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)]

My Lords, I have received three requests to speak after the Minister, from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester. I will take them in order.

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[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)]

We now come to the group beginning with Amendment 39. I remind noble Lords that anyone wishing to speak after the Minister should email the clerk during the debate.

Amendment 39

Moved by

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We can already see some of the reductions, for example, in TradeMark East Africa, an organisation which facilitates higher standards and less bureaucracy, reducing border time processing and trade—all of the areas which the Minister is passionate about, seeing trade agreements as unable to deliver by themselves unless businesses and enterprises can take advantage of them. Our commitment to the least developed around the world should be a priority for our agreements, which is why the amendments in this group are important and I am grateful for the cross-party support for them. I hope the Minister will look on them favourably when he responds, and I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)]

We are trying to contact the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, but we have not been able to reach him and are checking to see whether that is due to technical failure. I therefore call the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan.

[Baroness Sheehan (LD) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed, whose grasp of the particular issues that developing countries face is well grounded through his leading role in the All-Party Group on Trade Out of Poverty, which he mentioned at the start, and which complements his demonstrated knowledge of trade matters in general. I thought I would be following the noble Lord, Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale, so I will leave out a bit of my speech.

Amendment 39, to which I have added my name, seeks to ensure that trade agreements take full heed of the UN SDGs, or sustainable development goals, which the UK in no small measure helped to craft, along with an impact assessment report back to Parliament on progress towards meeting those SDGs. Embedding the SDGs in our trading ethos, which Amendment 39 seeks to do, will go beyond mere words and take ownership of a much-lauded initiative that we were instrumental in delivering, defining our determination to establish Britain as a force for good in the world, which is after all the stated aim of Dominic Raab, the Secretary of State of the newly created FCDO. I am concerned to hear about the cutting of the ODA specifically to implement trade agreements with developing countries. That is very disappointing, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on that.

If we were to embed the SDGs into the new trade agreements, we would be keeping in step with the WTO, which has embraced the ambition of the SDGs and recognises its own central role in delivering them. The WTO’s publication Mainstreaming Trade to Attain the Sustainable Development Goals shows its commitment to delivering and implementing pro-growth and pro-development trade reforms, and which are crucial to prosperity for us here in the UK as well as for the rest of the world. Without a fair trading scheme, we will not realise the ambitions to protect our planet as we make good social injustices, and that is the purpose behind Amendment 97 in the name of my noble friend Lord Purvis of Tweed, with the welcome support of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.

Least developed countries and low and middle-income countries have a few privileges when it comes to trade with more developed countries without which they would never get off the starting block in the cut-throat world of international trade. I urge the Minister to do all he can to expedite the rollover agreements with developing countries we have through the EU which to date have not been the subject of continuity agreements. The sooner that happens, the better. I think my noble friend Lord Purvis pointed to the east African states and Kenya where that has yet to take place.

The existing concessions for market access for developing countries, such as Everything But Arms and preference schemes, must continue and they need to be guaranteed as we carve out new deals post Brexit. I say that advisedly. The Minister repeatedly insists that this Bill has a limited remit to apply only to continuity agreements, but that is not what is written in the Bill. The Long Title starts:

“A BILL TO Make provision about the implementation of international trade agreements”.


There is no mention of continuity agreements. It is therefore little wonder that so many amendments have been tabled to secure in the Bill safeguards for existing standards that our citizens hold dear in so many spheres of their lives. Britain’s reputation for thorough, open and regular scrutiny, something that the noble Baroness, Lady Fairhead, remarked upon repeatedly, is in no small measure the backbone of our good standing on the international stage and should not be given up.

Amendment 97 would impose a duty on the Government of the day to lay a report before Parliament on a regular basis assessing the economic and developmental impact of each free trade deal between Britain and least developed and lower middle income countries. This is a powerful requirement, the mere knowledge of which will act as a positive incentive to the Government of the day to keep in place existing measures to deliver the “gold standard”, as the Fairtrade Foundation puts it, in the trade for development policy. That is what we are looking for: a gold standard in trade for development policy. It will go a long way toward securing—I again quote the Fairtrade Foundation,

“an overarching trade strategy that works in support of the SDGs, business and human rights and climate change commitments.”

I shall end my contribution with a few words on fossil fuel subsidies and their abundant use in our trading relationships with developing countries. If you believe, as I do, that unless we stop climate change, we will destroy life as we know it on our plant, we must stop burning fossil fuels. It makes little sense to me that we, through UK Export Finance, continue to subsidise investment in new fossil fuel infrastructure in developing countries as if existing infrastructure will not take us over the two degrees of warming that spells disaster. The argument is often put forward that not to help former colonies to harness energy from oil or gas somehow harks back to colonial times when Britain dictated economics abroad. That is pure bunkum. It is far more reminiscent of the colonial era to lock former colonies into soon-to-be defunct stranded assets and pocket the profits at the same time as we in the west equip ourselves with modern, clean and cheaper energy infrastructure. My plea to the Government is that they stop subsiding fossil fuel infrastructure here and abroad and transfer those subsidies to clean renewables, such as solar, wind and hydro, which present plenty of opportunities to do business in developing countries.

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Motion agreed.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)]

That concludes the work of the Committee this afternoon. The Committee stands adjourned. I remind Members to sanitise their desks and chairs before leaving the Room.

Committee adjourned at 7.28 pm.