UK-EU Summit: Policy Priorities

Richard Foord Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne]

My hon. Friend is right to point that out. The good news for the Minister is that he now has the scrutiny framework in front of him that the Committee will use to judge the progress that he makes over the course of this Parliament. There is a moment that is still to come for this Parliament, however. At some point—we are not quite sure when—scrubbed treaties will need to be laid in this House. This House will then enjoy the grand total of 21 days during the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 process in which to scrutinise them. That is not very long. The Committee has therefore decided this week that we will open inquiries on the EU, India and United States deals. We will seek to hold hearings on each of those trade deals before the summer so that the House can be as well informed as possible when the CRaG process begins, and we can zero in on the issues that are at stake for our constituents.

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

I am grateful to the Chair of the Business and Trade Committee for this thorough set of proposals, and especially for the call for a greater role for Parliament. The Committee red, amber and green-rated its 20 proposals and marked as green the UK-EU security pact. Yet the Prime Minister’s spokesman admitted:

“This is a first step towards UK participation in Europe’s defence investment progression”

and went on to say that it merely

“opens the door towards joint procurement.”

Will the Committee Chair acknowledge how much more there is to do before this amounts to a shared defence industrial base?

[Liam Byrne]

The hon. Member is absolutely right. He knows, because of the extraordinary record of service that he brings to this House, that there is an immense amount of work that we still need to do to conquer the inefficiencies and fragmentation of the European defence industrial base. We cannot spend the money that we propose to spend on defence wisely unless we change the way that we procure military equipment. On the one hand, that will provide greater certainty and long-term contracts to defence suppliers and, on the other, it will help ensure that we are building an innovative ecosystem of funding to help smaller, innovative, nimble and agile suppliers of weaponry to come forward in the way that they can to ensure that the lessons that we have learned on the battlefields of Ukraine inform our military strategy in future.

If there is one lesson that we have learned, it is that any warfighting capability depends on the strength of our defence industrial base. Quite obviously, today’s defence industrial base in Europe is not in the right place, and together with our partners we have to work hard on that. I hope that the strategic defence review will set out some practical steps for how we will do that together with our allies in Europe.