Brexit: No-deal Tariff Schedules

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

Ah, “shortly”; that wonderful word.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Answer. Tariffs are, of course, the simplest and most direct of the tools of trade policy. They are taxes on imports. Higher tariffs shelter domestic industries; lower tariffs increase competition and benefit consumers, so Governments should be interested in them. We are interested in the announcements that are about to be made.

Having apparently lost interest in the Trade Bill—maybe it just got lost—we should perhaps not be surprised by the way the Government have been treating tariffs. The interim announcement in March was done without consultation and with very limited debate. We have yet to see an impact assessment or even an Explanatory Memorandum. Can the Minister confirm that these important documents will be published for the next round?

There are rumours about changes that will be made to the original list, which was heavily criticised from all sectors in industry. Can the Minister say more about that? He said that he would not comment on it, but can he give us a timeline rather than just “soon”? We know that the rumour is that the statutory instrument dealing with this is to laid on 21 October, although it will be a made affirmative SI, which I understand to mean that this House will not have a chance to comment on it. Can the Minister confirm that?

Do the Government intend to have our final WTO schedules formally ratified by the WTO this time, or is this just another temporary announcement? On a related issue that bears on the same point, have we reached an agreement yet on our tariff rate quotas? We know that significant challenges by other countries have already been logged that may require substantial compensatory offers. Where are we on that? What assessment have the Government made of likely new tariffs on our exports which will be introduced by our new trading partners? Does this not just mean that UK companies will face competition from a flood of cheap imports that undercut them, putting thousands of UK jobs at risk? What remedies do the Government have in mind to counteract that?

[Lord Callanan]

I thank the noble Lord for his comments. He will understand my difficulty as I cannot comment on a specific date for the announcement, but it will be made shortly.

On his question about SIs, there will be one made affirmative SI and 10 made negative SIs to implement the tariff schedules. We will introduce them as soon as possible following the tariff announcement, which, as he will know, is market sensitive. We expect to liberalise roughly 87% of tariff lines and that tariffs will be applied to roughly 13%. We do not expect to have significant changes from the previously announced regime from March. As always in these things, there is the difficulty of getting a balance between the interests of consumers and the interests of producers.