Baroness Smith of Newnham
Main Page: Baroness Smith of Newnham (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Brexit: World Trade Organization
Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts(6 years, 7 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Baroness Sugg
An agreed deal with the European Union is a mutually beneficial choice and we are confident that we can achieve that. But as the Prime Minister said, while we think that that is by far and away the highest probability, we have a duty to plan for the alternative, and that is exactly what we are doing, in detail.
Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)
My Lords, the leave campaign suggested before the referendum that being on WTO terms would be easy and straightforward —or that is how I understood its case. Do Her Majesty’s Government have in place sufficient trade negotiators able to deal with both the European Union and the WTO? If not, what are they doing to rectify that?
Baroness Sugg
Absolutely: within the WTO we have committed additional resources to our UK mission to strengthen our ability to carry out work there and we are currently expanding within the Department for International Trade. We have gone up to nearly 3,500 members of staff and employed Crawford Falconer, who is an internationally recognised trade expert. We are fairly confident that we have enough capacity to make all these deals.