Trade Bill

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Monday 7th December 2020 Lords Chamber

Finally, many of the proposed amendments do not offer a practical advantage for discernible UK interests, like the railway interests to which I refer, and I wonder whether this Bill is the place to include them all. This is a continuity Bill first introduced in 2017, and we need to get it on to the statute book.

[Baroness Kramer (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I join the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, in utter frustration. The Luxembourg Rail Protocol was adopted at a diplomatic conference in 2007 and is due to come into force in 2021 because enough countries will have ratified it by then to create that effect. It creates a worldwide legal framework to support private-sector investment in railways and rolling stock, as the noble Baroness said, by establishing a new international registry for security interests, making it far more difficult for valuable rail equipment to be lost or stolen. These concerns have limited private investment in railway schemes across the globe, especially in the developing world.

Of course investment in rail matters, because it supports economic development and the battle against climate change. As others have suggested, the UK is a beneficiary both as a buyer of rolling stock—bringing down the price is therefore an advantage—and as a manufacturer, which will be able to market itself more effectively across the globe.

The UK is a signatory to the protocol, but it just cannot seem to get around to ratifying it. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, has introduced these amendments to try to achieve that ratification. I am very keen that ratification should happen, but I am concerned that the noble Lord is being forced by the Government to choose a route that adds even more unaccountable powers to the Government’s rapidly increasing range of widening and unchecked powers in this Bill and in others. I will be interested to hear the Minister address this issue because I hope that he will explain that I am wrong, that this could be construed as a narrow power simply to allow us to get the Luxembourg Rail Protocol done. I would like to be wrong, but I fear that I am not. We have already been through one shambles—the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, did not use this phrase, but I will—with the Private International Law Bill, which was supposed to enable ratification of this protocol but turned out to be inadequate.

Let me address the narrow purpose of the Trade Bill. The Long Title of the Bill makes it perfectly legitimate to include language that would enable the Luxembourg Rail Protocol to be ratified. Everyone who has spoken on this subject so far has been a Minister at some point or other. Many of us have seen Bills with a slightly broader purpose dealing with an urgent gap in legislation, so it is not unusual and it does not undermine the character of the Trade Bill at large.

So I really would urge the Government to come back at Third Reading with a clause that allows them to ratify a protocol that they, the Opposition, the industry and those who seek to buy rolling stock across the world want to see ratified. This is an outstanding opportunity; I very much hope that the Government seize it.