G8 Summit

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I wish to add my regret that, sadly, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bath and Wells is about to retire. Over the past week, I have been thinking about the first Bishop of Bath and Wells whom I was aware of, who stood on the right of the Queen, I think it was, as she was crowned. In some ways I regret—though in others I am glad—that the current right reverend Prelate has not been able to assert that privilege during his time as a Bishop. We shall miss him, but the Bishops keep the House of Lords young, as they say.

Before moving to other topics in this debate, I want to answer the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, on the coalition Government’s attitude to international and European co-operation. I say this as a Liberal Democrat, but what I have heard from the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary in recent weeks has been outstandingly clear: our national interests rest in international co-operation and in remaining a full and committed member of the European Union. I have heard no such clear statement from any member of the shadow Cabinet.

If we are to have responsible opposition, we also need a clear indication from the Labour Party of its commitment to staying in the European Union and its position on a referendum. We need clear cross-party support in the national interest. I see that the noble Lord is unhappy with my criticism, but I look forward to hearing a clear statement from the Labour Party on those issues. I am happy with the coalition position on European reform and with the way in which we are moving forward with the balance of competences exercise and I reject the idea that we are being blown about by the right-wing press and UKIP.

This has been a good debate in terms of the G8’s broad agenda, particularly about going to Fermanagh. To hear the noble Lord, Lord Trimble, refer to Fermanagh as “tranquil” is an indication of just how far Northern Ireland has moved. Enniskillen was anything but tranquil 20 years ago. Fermanagh and Tyrone were bandit country during the Irish emergency. It is therefore tremendous that the Prime Minister was determined to bring the G8 to Northern Ireland this year to showcase Northern Ireland to the international media, to foreign Governments and as a place to invest.

I note to myself that it is now time for Yorkshire to start lobbying for the G8 summit to be held there when it comes around in eight years’ time, for not dissimilar reasons. Meanwhile, the Tour de France will have to do for next year. I am already discovering that it is impossible to get a hotel anywhere on the route of the Tour de France for next year, so Yorkshire is already beginning to do quite well in that regard.

Let me turn to the substance of what the G8 leaders will discuss when they meet next week and address the question of whether the G8 is the right body to meet. The noble Lords, Lord Bates and Lord Howell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, raised questions about whether we should now be going with some other body. It is of course always easier to carry on with what you have than to carry on with something new. However, I would stress that in many ways this is the best group we have because it is the only group we have to focus attention on strategic global issues, whether they are economic, political, developmental or environmental.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bates, remarked, the G8 had its origins as the G4 in 1975, when three major European Governments were trying to bring a then rather distracted American Government back to discussing how we managed the global economy. It was then expanded to become the G7 with Italy, Canada and Japan—and with the EU playing a role, because the EU as a collective body has competence in matters of trade, which has always been very important for the G7 and G8. Russia was added in the mid-1990s when, as a post-communist country, it was becoming a much more open society and moving towards a rather more open market economy. This is a group, after all, which is committed to free institutions, open markets and open societies. That is one reason why, as I was saying at the Dispatch Box yesterday, we have some concerns about the direction in which Russia is going. These eight countries are responsible for 50% of global output and 66% of global trade, so in many ways they are still the reliable top table at which one has to discuss many of these matters, in a rather messy response to the need for some form of global governance among major sovereign states.

There is of course the G20 now, the larger grouping which includes the Chinese, the Indians, the Indonesians, the Brazilians and others. The G20 will be meeting in St Petersburg in September, under Russian chairmanship, and many of the issues to be discussed among the G8 will be pursued further there. We all have to recognise that in different ways China, India, Indonesia and Brazil are still reluctant to take on and share the full responsibilities of global leadership and that much of the agenda for global co-operation and future global regulation thus remains to be negotiated between European countries, the European Union and the United States, then to be accepted by others.

The G8 has of course grown more institutionalised. It has grown larger and its agenda has grown amazingly wide. The numbers of officials attending have mushroomed and our Prime Minister is attempting to bring back direct conversation, intimacy, informality and a focus on getting things done. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, queried the outcome and the follow-through. One of the British initiatives this time is to have an accountability report to look back at former G8 pledges and see what has been done. We have produced a report with checks on what we think has been achieved, or moderately half-achieved, and what has been left undone. It is not that bad a record, actually. Of course, as in all negotiations between Governments, there are some things on which you simply cannot manage to make progress, but we have made a lot of progress, particularly on global development.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

Will this report be in the Library?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I do not know whether it is yet in the Library. It was published two days ago. I will do my best, looking hopefully at the Box, to put it in the Library as soon as we can. I must say that I have been briefed by a number of officials who are working incredibly hard for the G8 exercise. I am very grateful that one of them has been able to spare a bit of time out of her 14-hour day to come here and assist me in this and I wish to add my compliment on her remarkably clear handwriting.

The G8 is an informal directing group and the discussions within the G8 then feed out to others. On the final lunch the secretaries-general of the IMF and the OECD will be there and the tax transparency agenda will be carried on quite largely through the OECD. The land ownership agenda, which was mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, will be carried out partly through the Food and Agriculture Organisation. Discussions are part of a very intricate network in which we work as we can with others. There are a number of associated conferences now. We have had a Foreign Ministers’ G8 with very active engagement from the Russians on issues such as Syria and elsewhere. We do not always agree but we are actively discussing these issues. There is also the Science and Innovation conference mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. The Nutrition for Growth compact has been signed by 24 Governments from the developed and developing worlds, 22 business groups, four science organisations and a number of major international non-governmental organisations.

Sessions at the G8 will cover the global economy, including trade, and the very important bilateral negotiations which have been taking place between the EU and Japan and which will be taking place between the EU and the United States. There will be a session on international political issues and foreign policy, a session on countering international and cross-border terrorism, a session particularly devoted to tax and transparency, and a final lunch at which the delegates will be joined not only by the secretaries-general I have mentioned but also by a number of other senior figures from Africa and South America.

The Prime Minister has focused on the three Ts—trade, tax and transparency. I have already spoken about trade. We very much hope that we will be able to get back to a global trade agenda with the World Trade Organisation. However, some of the leading members of G20 have not been particularly co-operative on a global trade agenda which is why we are having to pursue regional trade negotiations. If we are able to achieve a trade agreement between the United States and the European Union to follow those with Japan, Korea and Canada, we will have made a major contribution to global economic growth. This is about the rules which shape global trade and the fairness and openness which characterise them.

We have also discussed tax. Britain has a particular responsibility here because of the number of overseas territories and Crown dependencies which have become offshore financial centres. The Prime Minister has been in contact with all of our overseas territories and Crown dependencies. They have now all agreed on a number of measures. Bermuda is still discussing the question of a multilateral convention on mutual assistance on tax matters but we hope to resolve that issue with Bermuda before we have sorted out the complete agenda for the G8.

I was asked about the fourth money-laundering directive. This is an EU measure and proposals are currently being negotiated by member states and the European Parliament. They would require that companies obtain information on their beneficial ownership, hold this information and make the information available to competent authorities. The European agenda, the global agenda and the G8 agenda overlap and complement each other. In all of this one has to recognise that tax sovereignty and global markets do not go easily together. That is why we have to pursue these international negotiations on tax transparency in order to regain a degree of our tax sovereignty. The Government have been relatively successful over the past three years at regaining tax from multinational companies. I am told that HMRC has collected more than £23 billion in extra tax since 2010 through challenging large businesses’ tax arrangements and tackling transfer pricing issues, and we continue to hope that we will raise a good deal more through tax transparency.

As noble Lords know, transparency is about not only tax but beneficial ownership. The noble Earl, Lord Listowel, asked particularly about transparency over land tenure. The problem with land tenure in developing countries is that often records do not exist, so in terms of technical assistance, as part of bilateral or multilateral aid programmes, helping these countries to establish clear records of land tenure is a necessary part of what we do to establish who owns what, where foreign companies are buying in and how far we protect local farmers on their own. There is very careful work on greater transparency with less developed countries, starting with proper land records.

On 22 May the Prime Minister announced that Her Majesty’s Government intend to sign up to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which was set up to tackle corruption, to improve the way in which the revenues from oil, gas and minerals are managed and to ensure that people across the world share in the economic benefits of natural resources in their country. A lack of transparency there, as with land transactions, is very much part of the obstacles that we have to overcome in ensuring that free trade and open markets benefit everyone, including the poor and weak countries, which are often open to these sorts of extractive industries in particular.

The lunch on Tuesday will focus particularly on Africa, looking at the millennium development goals and, as we have already mentioned, talking about the larger issue of nutrition. I am disappointed that we are not paying more attention to population on this occasion. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, is disappointed that we are not spending more time on climate change, although there will be preparations for a major conference in 2015 under different tutelage—the UN Committee on Climate Change—which will be a main focus.

With regard to our political discussions, I was asked particularly about Syria. At Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, the Prime Minister said:

“We should use the G8 to try to bring pressure on all sides to bring about what we all want … which is a peace conference, a peace process, and the move towards a transitional Government in Syria”.—[Official Report, Commons, 12/6/13; col. 331.]

This has been a worthwhile debate. I was nervous that the agenda of the G8 was so wide that I would be unable to cope with many of the questions that would come in. I sat here trying to imagine the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, talking to his Soviet colleagues during the Cold War about eastern and western approaches to weather forecasting and whether there was a Marxist approach to it as well as a capitalist one.

We have looked back to the previous UK-sponsored G8 in 2005. Gleneagles was a great success and helped to push the G8 on to the development agenda to a much greater extent than before. It is still managing to push that forward. This Government, as the Nutrition for Growth compact shows, are still attempting to use the combined efforts of the developed democracies, non-governmental organisations and international organisations as such to promote a more open global market and a more equitable global society.

We look forward to a successful G8 summit next week. This is of course only one in a long series of heavy intergovernmental negotiations, but Her Majesty’s Government are using this opportunity to press forward what I hope all noble Lords will agree is a very worthwhile and constructive global agenda.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton]

Will the Minister respond on the issue of water? This is the United Nations International Year of Water Co-operation and the water issue has not really had the emphasis it should have had, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord McColl.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, has sponsored one or two conferences on water in the Middle East in the past year with the support of the Foreign Office. We are all well aware of the many complexities of water. Those of us following the argument between Ethiopia and Egypt over the dam on the Blue Nile will know that water wars are not necessarily too far away. There are a great many complications and the Government understand that not only clean water but also cross-border water supplies are very important matters for us to deal with. It is not neglected simply because it is not a major item on this year’s G8 agenda.