Trade Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Martin Vickers and Alan Brown

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 23rd January 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Martin Vickers]

Q Of a watered-down version.

Dr Hestermeyer: There might be political pressures but I am not a politician; I am just a lawyer, so on a legal position. Obviously, that is the past; that is not the future.

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

Q Jude, earlier on, you mentioned tariff-rate quotas and the fact that the whole negotiating process is potentially back up for grabs between the UK, EU countries and the third countries. Going forward, as part of these negotiations, as a politician I would want to know which third parties are advising the Government and what the correct asks are. What impact assessment has been made of getting the desired result and any other trade-off that might be associated with that? How will we make sure that the correct people—the politicians, I would suggest—have approved or ratified the deal? What needs to be done or what amendments need to be made to the Bill to allow such a transparent process and that level of scrutiny?

Jude Kirton-Darling: In my experience of the European Parliament’s level of scrutiny, what we have at European level legally is quite limited. Inside the treaty we have a right to accept or veto trade deals at the end of the negotiations. That is included in the Bill, but the second element which we have which is not included in the Bill, which we use much more effectively, is that we have the right to be kept informed throughout the negotiations. That is a legal obligation inside the European treaties. That effectively then gives Members of the European Parliament a hook on which is placed the whole of parliamentary scrutiny at a European level.

You could amend the Trade Bill to include a hook in the same way, which would then allow you to develop some kind of working statute which could evolve over time. These processes evolve over time—improve, I hope, over time—with more transparency as trust is built between institutions. However, you need that legal hook at the beginning. Within the European Parliament, as a result of the hook, we have monitoring groups on every single negotiation that the EU is undertaking and established trade agreements. We have monitoring groups which meet behind closed doors on a regular basis with the chief negotiators, in which MEPs can scrutinise and ask any question. We have access to the majority of documents. During the negotiations you will have heard about the TTIP reading room. We had access to all the EU side of the negotiation documents. Crucially, in that reading room, we also had the read-outs from the European negotiating team of the process of each round of negotiations. To put it into context, you had the legal text of the EU negotiating position and, through the read-out, you could see where the room for manoeuvre was with the US side of the negotiations. Those documents give you the capacity then really to question.