Lord Rooker
Main Page: Lord Rooker (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Rooker (Lab) [V]
My Lords, I am very happy to make a small contribution to this debate. There has not been enough concentration on the fact that we have to follow the WTO rules. I do not know the details of the vast experience of the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, which is different from mine, but I have to say that when I came up against the Crown Agents in the 1970s, I got the impression that they were basically there to facilitate British sales to Commonwealth countries; it was a form of exploitation, in a way.
My main point is that we do not have the resources to police a substantial increase in trade with the 54 countries of the Commonwealth. Let us take just three examples, all of which are very highly regulated: imports to the UK of children’s toys, electrical goods and food, particularly of animal origin. When we were a member of the EU, it employed hundreds of experts to visit overseas factories and processing plants as well as farms. That was in order to check on safety standards, the products, the chemicals used and the methods of manufacture. We have never had to do this for ourselves since 1973 and—the Lords European Union Committee raised this issue some years ago—we simply do not have the expertise, staff or resources to do this work, and neither do the individual British companies doing the importing. The regulations that we have made post Brexit make it clear that doing this checking is an onerous activity for the importers. We simply do not have the facilities or the staff to do it, and the result is that we are going to be vulnerable to unsafe children’s toys, unsafe electrical goods and unsafe food entering the UK. Criminals will exploit that because they will see a gap in the market.
The EU is not stupid. It will want to ensure that nothing that is unchecked or potentially unsafe, because we have not been doing the checks, will be allowed to be exported by the UK into the EU later on, so there are some serious problems there. This is not to attack or denigrate any Commonwealth countries, but the fact is that the UK does not have the facilities or the resources to cope with such a large, unplanned expansion of trade with the 54 countries.