Oral Answers to Questions

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Hollinrake]

I know that my colleagues at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport are working hard with our European counterparts to try to ease the difficulties in that area—we recognise it as a problem. Many positive things are happening in current trade with the EU. Indeed, in 2022, the north-west—the hon. Gentleman’s region—exported £33 billion-worth of goods and £24.5 billion-worth of services, which is the area he is referring to. The north-west is the third largest area in the country for services exported to the EU.

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

19. What progress she has made on improving market access to the US.

[The Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Kemi Badenoch)]

As part of the Atlantic declaration, we launched negotiations on a critical minerals agreement with the US, which will secure market access for a strategically important sector of the UK economy. My Department has secured tariff-free imports of UK steel and aluminium into the US, supporting 80,000 jobs in UK supply chains. We have removed the 25-year US ban on UK lamb, opening the market to 300 million US customers, and have signed five trade and economic development memorandums of understanding with individual US states, which imported £4.6 billion-worth of goods from the UK in 2022, most recently last week with Utah.

[Mr Dhesi]

In their 2019 election manifesto, the Conservatives declared to the British people:

“Our goals for British trade are… ambitious. We aim to have 80 per cent of UK trade covered by free trade agreements within the next three years, starting with the USA”.

However, there has been abject failure, with a free trade agreement nowhere in sight, and instead of coming clean on their incompetence, laughingly, Tories are now lining up to blame the Biden Administration for the lack of progress. Will the Secretary of State concede that the Government’s failure to negotiate an FTA with the USA has potentially locked out British businesses from vital new markets created by the US Inflation Reduction Act?

[Kemi Badenoch]

I am afraid that is not the case at all. If the hon. Gentleman looks at the detail of the Atlantic declaration, he will see that we are co-operating very closely with the US. On his point about our 2019 manifesto, we did say that that was what we were going to do, because the Administration at the time were willing. This Administration are not. It has nothing to do with the UK. They are not negotiating any FTAs with any countries. That is what the US trade representative has said to me in many meetings, and they have said that to EU counterparts.

If what the hon. Gentleman suggests is true, he is basically saying that every Government should be bound by their predecessor, in which case, should anything happen, he is saying that he agrees with everything this Government are doing and nothing should change. What we have negotiated with the Atlantic declaration is a success, and he should be praising this Government for achieving something so monumental.