EU Membership Referendum: Impact on the UK
Debate between Rosie Wrighting and Catherine West(3 weeks, 4 days ago)
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Rosie Wrighting
I worked in buying in a retail head office at the time of Brexit. It was an extremely uncertain time. I remember having to stay up quite literally all night to figure out how we were going to move stock from the EU into the UK to protect sales ahead of Black Friday. Does my hon. Friend agree that the UK-EU reset is a real opportunity to offer certainty to businesses that the Conservative party let down at that time?
Catherine West
My hon. Friend knows of what she speaks in the area of trade in the EU and manufacturing in the UK.
The new UK-EU partnership includes an agreement to work towards making agrifood trade easier, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) mentioned. Ultimately, the sanitary and phytosanitary deal will add £9 billion to the UK economy in the long term, but we need to get on with it. We are 18 months into this Parliament. We need to put our foot on the accelerator to fight against food poverty, bring down food prices and help manufacturers.
Let me emphasise that there is so much more we can do to support our creative sector. We need specific commitments on touring to allow artists to travel visa-free and to carry their instruments, equipment and props without prohibitive admin and bureaucracy. A special cultural exemption from the UK-EU trade and co-operation agreement would go a long way towards that and I know that is at the heart of the discussions for the Cabinet Office.