Oral Answers to Questions

Stephen Morgan Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

What discussions she has had with UK trade partners on maintaining environmental protection standards in future free trade agreements.

[Stephen Morgan (Portsmouth South) (Lab)]

What discussions she has had with UK trade partners on maintaining environmental protection standards in future free trade agreements.

[The Minister for Trade Policy (Greg Hands)]

The Government are committed to meeting their ambitious environmental objectives. We are exploring all options in the design of future trade and investment agreements, including environmental provisions within those, to ensure that we uphold the UK’s high environmental standards.

[Greg Hands]

The hon. Lady raises a good question. The UK is absolutely committed to our international climate change agenda; that is one of our key objectives. We have not included that because the US is withdrawing from the Paris accord, which we regret. She mentioned the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. That agreement does include 30 pages of environmental commitments, including, for example, on sustainability, forestry, air quality, marine plastics, multilateral agreements and so on. There is plenty of potential for us to go further on the environment with our US trade agreement.

[Stephen Morgan]

There is no point in the UK achieving our own zero-carbon targets if the trade deals we reach with other countries are pushing them ever further away from achieving theirs. Can the Secretary of State ensure that all future FTAs agreed by the UK reinforce the legal primacy of emission targets established in the Paris climate change agreement?

[Greg Hands]

It is worth pointing out that nothing in any trade agreement would prevent the UK from reaching its targets under the Paris agreement and to go net zero by 2050—we are the first Government to commit to doing that, and no trade agreement will prevent us from doing that. We remain on the front foot in our advocacy, making sure that the international response remains extremely strong, including through multilateral agreements and the UK contribution to the global climate fund.