Oral Answers to Questions

Tom Brake Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Sandy Martin (Ipswich) (Lab)]

7. What plans he has to negotiate for the retention of market access for EU service providers as part of the future partnership between the UK and the EU.

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

17. What steps he is taking to ensure that negotiations on the UK’s exit from the EU support the UK’s service industry.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (Mr Robin Walker)]

The White Paper sets out a comprehensive vision for our partnership with the EU. For services, our ambitious and credible proposals include guaranteeing that suppliers and investors can operate across a broad number of sectors, enabling firms to establish cross-border services, ensuring that professionals continue to get their qualifications recognised, and establishing a new economic and regulatory partnership for financial services.

[Mr Walker]

The White Paper sets out a number of proposals for the services sector on how we can maintain those benefits, but we have also been growing our services trade with the rest of the world. The hon. Gentleman mentioned a 40% growth in trade with the EU, but there has been a 70% growth in UK services exports to countries outside the EU over the past decade. Our UK services industry is world leading and will continue to be as we go through this process.

[Tom Brake]

In preparing for negotiations, a responsible Government would establish the impact on the services sector of both the Chequers agreement and no deal, so will the Minister confirm how the profitability, job creation potential and ability to export to the EU of the services sector would be affected if either the Chequers proposals or no deal were reached with the European Union?

[Mr Walker]

The right hon. Gentleman will know that the UK has a world-leading services sector. As we have just discussed, it is exporting both to the EU and the rest of the world very successfully. Sadly, the single market in services was never completed. I think that our services sector will remain hugely profitable and a huge success story for the UK throughout this process.