Steel Safeguards

Mark Tami Excerpts

Wednesday 29th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

I thank my hon. Friend for his honesty. I am not known for being shy of discussing anything, and I am always happy to do so. I was required to be on the phone this morning to discuss urgent WTO matters, and I very much hope to be able to attend the International Trade Committee next week to discuss the Australia trade deal.

I note that my hon. Friend and other members of the Committee have raised some issues between the Committee and some of my team. We continue to work to resolve those issues and to provide information, at every opportunity, in as timely a manner as possible within the confines of market sensitivity.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

I welcome this announcement but, as the Secretary of State says, it just buys her some time. What will the Government do to help the industry invest for the future, particularly at it moves to hydrogen, and to help it with the crippling energy prices it faces today and has faced for many years?

[Anne-Marie Trevelyan]

As the right hon. Gentleman says, the safeguards will be in place until June 2024, and we will obviously need to act in concert with our international partners and our domestic steel sector to find longer-term solutions. The energy security strategy that the Government announced a few weeks ago includes an extension and an increase of the compensation for energy-intensive industries, including steel, to help with the current incredibly high electricity prices.

The right hon. Gentleman is right that, as part of the 10-point plan set out by the Prime Minister back in 2020 and the work the Government have continued to do to be at the forefront of solving some of the net zero challenges, of which steel is at the heart of so many, the Government will continue to work with the industry to find long-term solutions both through technological change and through developing clean steel. Hydrogen and other potential energy solutions are currently part of that mix.

Protecting Britain’s Steel Industry

Mark Tami Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

In recent years, the UK steel industry has lurched from one crisis to another, with a Government who have used every excuse in the book not to step in. For years, we were told that European rules and regulation prevented us from supporting our domestic industry and procuring UK steel. Despite the fact that that was not true—we saw our European partners use their steel in infrastructure projects time and again—in the UK, we had project after project using imported steel, despite alternatives being available.

UK steel makes up only about 10% of UK public sector demand. That is pathetic, but it will not change unless the Government work with UK steel well in advance of major procurements to maximise UK input. Too often, it is an afterthought, or left to the companies delivering the projects, with Government turning a blind eye. The Government are right that the industry needs to modernise and invest in new technologies to meet the challenges of the future, but that is not simply going to happen by some sort of magic. It is no good just saying to an industry that relies on coal and high-energy usage that it needs to change and decarbonise overnight. This industry pays 86% more for its electricity than in Germany and 62% more than in France, and that imbalance is set to get worse rather than better. It is no good saying that hydrogen is the solution to every problem going when we do not have a single facility in the UK, unlike in other countries. The industry will need help and support to meet these challenges and not just warm words and no action, which is what we have seen up until now.

As with energy prices, where the Government refuse to help and just say that it is an issue for Ofgem rather than for them, we now face the major challenge of the TRA judgment making it open season to dump products on the UK. We have seen the results of that dumping for many years. How is our domestic industry expected to survive, let alone compete, in these circumstances? Again we hear from the Minister tonight, “There’s nothing we can do.” Well, that is not good enough. We need to legislate now if we are going to make sure that we can maintain these safeguards and save our industry. Time is not with us and failure to act would be disastrous. Shotton steelworks celebrates 125 years of production this year. Let us hope and trust that there are many more years to come.

Global Britain

Mark Tami Excerpts

Monday 11th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I welcome the chance to wind up this first debate of 2021 for the official Opposition. We have heard powerful speeches from the shadow Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), and from my hon. Friends the Members for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), for Newport West (Ruth Jones), for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy), for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson), for Bradford East (Imran Hussain), for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi), for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq), for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) and for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe). Also notable were the speeches from the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and the hon. Member for Leicester East (Claudia Webbe). It was difficult to disagree with the right hon. Members for Maidenhead (Mrs May) and for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) that cutting our aid and abolishing the Department for International Development is hardly going to build confidence in the global Britain brand.

The International Trade Secretary’s speech was, sadly, not quite so encouraging. She and the rest of the Cabinet spent 2020 putting up barriers to trade. She unsuccessfully chased Donald Trump for a trade deal—indeed, it was striking that not once in her speech did she mention President-elect Biden. Vital markets in Asia and important allies in Africa were neglected or treated poorly last year. The one advantage that Ministers in the Department for International Trade start the year with is that expectations of them are not high.

The deal with the European Union that the Prime Minister negotiated, while better than no deal, is proving already to be very thin gruel. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton noted, 80% of our economic output depends on services. We might reasonably have expected Ministers to fight harder to maintain our access to EU services markets, but there is nothing on, for example, mutual recognition of professional qualifications, and the Prime Minister’s claim that his deal means certainty for financial services—one of the industries where Britain leads the world in jobs and skills—will surprise many who work in that industry.

Never has any party embraced with such enthusiasm a trade deal that is set to generate unprecedented levels of red tape and form filling—new red tape for farmers, new plant and animal health checks, new red tape for manufacturers, new rules of origin checks, and new safety and security checks. Businesses will have to get used to an estimated 400 million new forms. Not surprisingly, one of the fastest growing areas of employment in global Britain is in handling all the new red tape.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend recall the Prime Minister saying that, if businesses were presented with new forms, they should just rip them up, apparently?

[Gareth Thomas]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point, but, sadly, we are seeing lots of new jobs being created in this very area: customs clearance agents, import customs agents, international customs agents, import customs brokerage agents and customs clearance clerks—all these new jobs being created because Ministers appear to want dynamic export-oriented British firms to fill in more forms.

Since the Government’s new trade agreement with the EU came into effect, we have also seen rising numbers of export consignments from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and the EU turned away because they do not have the right customs documentation, we have seen EU businesses stop selling their products to the UK by mail because of new VAT rules, and we have seen thousands of companies grappling with the new rules of origin to determine whether their exports to the EU now face tariffs. So businesses—never mind the House—might have expected to hear a little more from the Secretary of State on what she was going to do about those problems.

As the shadow Secretary of State made clear, on rollover agreements, the truth is that the process has been a bit of a mess. Only 31 of the 63 countries listed on the Department for International Trade’s website have fully ratified agreements with the UK. Twenty-one have provisional agreements pending ratification, eight have bridging mechanisms pending the signing of deals, and in three cases deals have been signed but are not yet in effect. Clearly, not all of it is the Government’s fault, but leaving it so late to secure these agreements has caused completely unnecessary headaches and costs for many businesses trading with those countries. Prime Minister Trudeau’s suggestion that Britain did not have the “bandwidth” for a deal with his country hinted at a rather different reality from the one that the Secretary of State and her cheerleaders have implied today.

Indeed, the total inadequacy of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act process as a means to guarantee proper parliamentary scrutiny of new trade deals signed by the Government has been exposed. Look at the eight continuity agreements that took effect on 1 January before they had been formally ratified: not a single one with a word of debate in Parliament. Continuity agreements with Canada and Mexico have not yet taken effect because ratification is taken more seriously in those countries than it is here, and one more agreement, with Cameroon, came into effect on 1 January without even being laid before Parliament. Think about that—it became law before any of us even saw it. If ever a process merited amendments from the other place being accepted to improve scrutiny of trade agreements, it is surely the events of the past month.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West pointed out, the House has received no formal explanation as to why 11 continuity agreements could not be concluded in time. So it certainly would be helpful if the Minister of State took a bit of time in his winding-up speech to go through the reasons why deals could not be done with, for example, Algeria, Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia. The Government’s dismal treatment of Ghana—a key Commonwealth ally—is particularly surprising. We know that UK negotiators turned up for meetings late and badly briefed and then left early with nothing resolved. What hung over all those negotiations was the threat of very heavy tariffs on cocoa, tuna and bananas if a deal could not be completed in time. That, sadly, is what has happened—twice already now, including today. I hope that a deal with Ghana can be completed soon and, when the Secretary of State finally signs that long overdue and much needed deal, it should come with a much needed apology.

It is also striking that, in the year when the UK will be hosting the world’s climate change summit, not one of the trade agreements that the Secretary of State signed last year saw any progress on the environment and climate change. Also, as other hon. Friends have mentioned, many of the deals that the Secretary of State signed did not include even the most basic provisions on human rights. It was good to hear the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) briefly require the Secretary of State to mention India. The Secretary of State has been astonishingly quiet on trade with the Indian subcontinent. India’s market is set to be the world’s fifth largest within five years, and given that Britain is bottom of the G7 for growth in our trade with India, a little more effort to open those markets would, I say gently, be timely.

Trade deals involve give as well as take, so it would be good to hear a little more openness from the Minister of State tonight and ultimately from the Secretary of State about what we will have to give in the trade deals she wants to sign this year. Australia and New Zealand, for example, are both great allies, but with a considerable interest in our agricultural markets. Japan, too, is a great ally, but we must remember that the Japan trade deal signed with great fanfare appears, according to the Government’s own analysis, set to benefit Japanese exporters five times as much as British exporters.

When it comes to future negotiations, the Secretary of State has once again spoken in this debate as if the UK’s membership of the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership—the CPTPP—should be seen as a no-brainer and a done deal. Membership of the CPTPP may indeed be a very welcome and positive step for our country to take, but I think the Government owe it to the House—we certainly owe it to our constituents—at least to ask some basic questions about that membership and what it will really mean. Will it, for example, mean signing up to secretive investor-state dispute settlement processes, with all the risks that that poses for our ability to protect public services, consumers and the environment from corporate profiteers? Will it mean having to accept the CPTPP’s “list it or lose it” approach to private competition in the public sector? Will it mean being obliged to accept palm oil from Malaysia and other producers, regardless of the public pressure in this country for a ban? Will we really be able to renegotiate the provisions of the CPTPP in our own interests before we sign up to it, or will we just have to accept the provisions that are already there? Of course, that might ultimately be the right thing to do. The benefits may well outweigh the costs, but the Government have not yet made that case. They have not yet answered the most basic questions. It is not just the other members of the CPTPP that they need to convince, but Parliament and the British public as well.

After almost 50 years, we have left a trade alliance with our closest geographical and economic partners—a decision that was not taken lightly. It certainly was not taken without debate, so before the Government plunge us into another trade grouping, perhaps a little more discussion might be worthwhile: maybe an impact assessment, and certainly serious and meaningful consultation.