Trade Bill (Second sitting)

Tom Pursglove Excerpts

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 23rd January 2018 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Q Do others have a view on that?

Dr Hestermeyer: There are certainly examples of standards being used only for protectionist purposes, but it is far more common for standards that one side sets to be perceived as protectionist by the other. Let us take hormone beef. There is real concern on the part of a lot of European consumers that hormone beef is not healthy. There is no direct scientific evidence to show that that is true, but the concern is nevertheless there. So the standard reflects the democratic choice of the populace—whether we think it is adequate or not. That is important to see. With any standard set, some sides will say, “This is protectionism,” and it is also rhetoric to attack the standard.

Jude Kirton-Darling: I guess the last point missing from that is that if we look at where trade agreements and trade policy have been controversial in recent years, it is when the perception is that standards held very dearly by the public for exactly those reasons are perceived to be negotiated away behind closed doors, with only a certain number of vested interests having access to the process. That is one more reason why having an open process, with parliamentary scrutiny and engagement, gives credibility to any final agreement, which at the end of the day has to have public support, after the negotiations. You build in societal acceptance through the process by engaging Parliament in an active way.

Dr Fowler: I would very much endorse that. If it is the case that some degree of secrecy or privacy is an advantage in one respect, there is probably a trade-off in terms of not being able to have that societal buy-in that might be wanted at the end of the process. There is a trade-off and losses if it is all done in private.

[Tom Pursglove (Corby) (Con)]

Q Quite a bit has been said, not just in this sitting but in the sitting earlier today, on the issue of checks and balances, and scrutiny. Would the witnesses accept that all of these agreements initially, when they were brought into being in the first place, went through an impact assessment process and that, on ratification, they were scrutinised thoroughly by the scrutiny Committees in both Houses? Also, the 2010 CRAG process—under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010—allows Parliament to pray against a treaty and indefinitely deny ratification, including bringing it to a debate. Do the witnesses recognise that and think it is sufficient?

Dr Bartels: I will kick off. Yes, I would agree with that, but I would also say that what is important about the Bill is that it gives the Government the power to change those agreements. They are, legally, new agreements, and that is recognised specifically in the Bill and in the explanatory memorandum, where no bones are made about saying that new obligations might be undertaken, so it would not be the same agreement that is subject to scrutiny. What is important here is to work out whether there are any limits on the Government’s ability to undertake new agreements—or new obligations in what are named as existing agreements—and implement those obligations, and if they do that, whether that is then sufficiently being scrutinised by Parliament.

Dr Hestermeyer: I would like to go back to my first answer and take as an example the Turkey agreement. I do not think that we would want the kind of customs union that Turkey has, but currently the Henry VIII power would allow implementation of any agreement that we then make with Turkey, even if in the end it looked completely different. That is the first problem with this scrutiny process.

The second problem, as Lorand identified at the beginning, is that some agreements have been signed but not ratified, so the scrutiny part of ratification has not yet happened. They have not been fully scrutinised.

The third element is that I do not think that the Ponsonby rule, as qualified, is sufficient because, first, it allows only delay and not a straight up-or-down vote; and secondly, it requires scheduling of an actual debate and vote. With Government control of parliamentary timetables, there is no guarantee that it cannot be indefinitely delayed. Even theoretically, therefore, that is not possible.

Jude Kirton-Darling: I fully agree with previous speakers.

[The Chair]

In which case, you may just nod.

Dr Fowler: I would agree with that. In terms of existing scrutiny through the European scrutiny system, one point is that it is imperfect. As we know, the European Scrutiny Committee here spends a lot of time trying to get time on the Floor of the House and trying to ensure that it sees documents in time and to arrange things so that it can have a meaningful say. Then there is the problem of the agreements that will not have been fully through the European scrutiny process before they come back again. Then there are the CRAGA problems—it seems that no one quite knows how the CRAGA provisions would work. That may be because no one in either House has ever tried to do anything under them, but it seems to me that part of this process ought to be that agreements are going to come before Parliament that it might want to do something about, and merely as a minimalist position—