Protecting Britain’s Steel Industry

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Jonathan Edwards

Monday 21st June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House believes the British steel industry, and the livelihoods and communities it supports, should not be undermined by unfair competition from overseas; regrets that the Trade Remedies Authority has not accounted for the interconnectedness of the British steel industry, nor the impact of safeguard tariffs being maintained in the US and EU, when recommending the abolition of nine of the 19 existing safeguards on steel products; accordingly requires the Government to take urgent action by legislating to allow Ministers to reject the Trade Remedies Authority’s recommendation and temporarily extend the current safeguards; and orders that, at the sitting on Monday 28 June, Standing Order No. 14(1) shall not apply, and that precedence at that sitting shall be given instead to any Business of the House motion in the name of the Leader of the Opposition which may be moved at the commencement of public business that day to make provision for urgent legislative action to protect the vital interests of the British steel industry.

The motion before us disagrees with the recommendations of the Trade Remedies Authority to revoke half the current safeguards protecting our nation’s steel industry against potential floods of cheap imports. It requires the Government to bring forward emergency legislation, allowing them to reject those recommendations and extend all the current safeguards before they expire on 30 June. Finally, it makes provision for the Leader of the Opposition to enable the emergency legislation to be considered next Monday if the Government fail to do so themselves.

It is a pleasure to open this debate. It is a testament to the urgency and importance of the issues before us that so many Members have registered to speak. For that reason, I will not be taking many interventions. I believe that there are 24 Labour Back Benchers alone who want to contribute.

We all recognise that the livelihoods and futures of steel communities across our country will be directly affected by the decisions taken in Westminster this week, but it is the motion before us tonight that creates the possibility that those decisions will be the right ones. That is a heavy responsibility on our shoulders and it is therefore incumbent on us all to treat this debate with the seriousness that it deserves. That is why it is a source of regret that the one person whose decisions will matter above all in Westminster this week—the Secretary of State for International Trade—has chosen not to be here this evening.

After all, it is the Secretary of State’s Trade Remedies Authority—appointed, empowered and inspired by her—that has made the misguided recommendations that have led to this crisis. It is her powers in relation to those recommendations and her freedom to take other issues into account which are the subject of the motion before us today. Most fundamentally of all, it is her general approach to trade policy and her specific attitude towards the future of the steel industry in Britain that is crucial in determining the final decision that is taken on the retention of these safeguards.

If it were me standing in the Secretary of State’s position, I would want to be here this evening to listen to what the representatives of Britain’s steel communities have to say, particularly as some of those representatives are sitting on her own Back Benches. In her absence, I am going to use my opening remarks to look through each of the three issues I mentioned in turn—first, the role of the Trade Remedies Authority; secondly, the powers of the Secretary of State; and, thirdly, the decisions she now has to take—and try to develop a consensus in this House not just in support of this vital motion, but on how the Secretary of State should approach the crucial days ahead.

Let me start with the role of the Trade Remedies Authority and the reason for its flawed recommendations. There is nothing worse, in life or politics, than people being wise after the event, but in respect of the Trade Remedies Authority it is very much a case of predictions coming to pass. Four years ago, my hon. Friends the Members for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) and for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) warned the Government consistently during the first attempted passage of the Trade Bill that their vision for the new TRA was misguided. Exactly 13 months ago, when the Trade Bill returned for a second time, I stood at this Dispatch Box and followed their previous lead, describing the TRA as

“a vital body with a vital task”

but one that was not representative of the business and workers that it was being set up to defend. “No wonder”, I said 13 months ago,

“there are such concerns and suspicions that the Government’s true agenda for the TRA is not to defend Britain against underpriced imports, but somehow to balance the damage they do to domestic producers against the perceived benefits for domestic consumers.”

I said back then:

“That is not the job of the trade remedies authority.”—[Official Report, 20 May 2020; Vol. 676, c. 616.]

I stand by that statement, even more today now that we have seen this new body in action. If we were in any doubt about the misguided sense of mission that is driving the TRA, we had all the confirmation that we needed last week from the new chair and the new chief executive, who were personally selected by the Secretary of State from the senior ranks of the Department for International Trade. In their joint interview with the Financial Times, they explained that, under their leadership, the TRA would always seek to set the lowest safeguards possible, deliberately lower than any EU equivalent, and that this approach would be quite distinct from countries

“which impose swingeing tariffs to protect particular industries.”

They boasted that the TRA had already scrapped more than 50 of the safeguard tariffs carried over from the European Union, and that they intended to consider only around four cases per year where new safeguards might be required, which is a quarter of the amount being pursued each year by Brussels. They concluded that the TRA was

“suited to a buccaneering global Britain”

that would favour free trade over the protection of domestic industries. If anyone were wondering how the TRA can possibly have come to the conclusions that it has when it comes to maintaining Britain’s steel safeguards, the answer is that the men in charge are simply doing what they were appointed to do by the Secretary of State.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (Ind)]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for taking my intervention and for the point that she is making; I agree fully with what she is saying. Does she agree that it is the complete opposite of taking back control that the Secretary of State cannot even amend the recommendations of this authority and that, basically, it is faceless bureaucrats who are determining Government policy?

[Emily Thornberry]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right, and I will be developing that point in a few minutes.

UK-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Jonathan Edwards

Wednesday 25th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I have to say that trade deals generally are better when we consult properly and extensively and put trust in Parliament, which unfortunately the Conservative party does not seem to have at this time.

[Jonathan Edwards]

Also missing from the Secretary of State’s comments were the Government’s own figures, which indicate that Japanese imports to the UK will benefit at a level four times greater than that for UK exports to Japan. Does that not indicate that it is actually a very good deal for Japan?

[Emily Thornberry]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman; I am coming to that.

When it comes to the exaggeration of benefits and the misrepresentation of the Japanese trade deal, one crucial issue is left unresolved, and it is a vital precedent to get right. By my count, I have now asked the Secretary of State a very simple question three times on the Floor of the House, twice in letters and once in a written parliamentary question and—she knows what is coming— I ask it again now: in pounds and pence, what is the forecast increase in UK exports and growth resulting from the UK-Japan deal compared with the EU-Japan deal that it replaces?

I fail to see why the Secretary of State gets so indignant about this question; after all, she is the one who has repeatedly claimed over the past 75 days that the deal she has negotiated with Japan goes “beyond and above” the EU-Japan deal, goes “further and faster” than the EU-Japan deal and delivers “additional economic benefits” compared with the EU-Japan deal. Indeed, when I pressed her last week simply to confirm that the forecast for exports and growth was higher under her deal than under the EU-Japan deal, the Secretary of State told the House, “Yes, it is higher”, so why has she continually refused to quantify that difference? Why will she not provide the figures, in pounds and pence, to back her claims?

All is not lost, though: we might be able to make some progress on this point today. I went back to the Department’s original impact assessment, published in May 2018, of the effects of the EU-Japan deal. It is a detailed 51-page document, signed and authorised on the front cover by the Minister for Trade Policy, the right hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands). I have to say that I do not think it is the right hon. Gentleman’s best piece of work—the assumptions and baselines are pretty sketchy, and my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) was pretty scathing about it during the debate in 2018—but, nevertheless, it is what we have to go on; we do not have anything else.

On page 2, after the Minister’s signature, it says in black and white:

“The analysis assumes that the UK continues to trade…after EU exit…with Japan on an equivalent preferential basis to the EPA.”

In other words, this is what we have been asking for and what the Secretary of State has repeatedly refused to provide—an analysis by her Department, authorised by her closest ministerial colleague, of what would happen if we had just stuck to the terms of the EU-Japan deal.

I remind colleagues—I wonder whether my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas) wants to write this down, because it might be worth coming back to—that in the final assessment produced last month by the Department of the long-term impact of the UK-Japan deal, the forecast increase in UK exports to Japan was £2.6 billion, and the forecast increase in UK GDP was £1.5 billion. Let us compare those figures with the Department’s assessment of the long-term impact of the EU-Japan deal. Under that assessment, the forecast increase in UK exports to Japan was not £2.6 billion but £4.3 billion, and the forecast increase in UK GDP was not £1.5 billion but £2.6 billion. I do not know about you, Madam Deputy Speaker, but that does not sound like further and faster, above and beyond, additional or higher to me. It sounds like smaller, slower, lower and lamer.

I have no doubt that the Secretary of State will tell me that the 2018 forecasts were inaccurate, the methodology was flawed and the Minister for Trade Policy was having a bad hair day, although he did put his name on it. All those things may be true, but here is the problem: unless and until she can produce an assessment of how the UK-Japan deal compares with the EU-Japan deal in terms of the forecast for UK exports and growth, that is all we have to go on. The two assessments produced by her Department in 2018 and 2020 show that her historic, groundbreaking, British-shaped deal has left our country worse off than if we had simply rolled over the provisions in the EU-Japan agreement. My suggestion to the Secretary of State is that, until she can provide her own assessment of the difference between the two deals, she should stop making exaggerated claims about the “additional economic benefits” of her deal, because quite frankly, she does not have the figures to back them up.

That is why this issue really matters, and that is why it is important that we get this precedent right before the Secretary of State goes off to negotiate any more trade deals on our country’s behalf. It does not matter whether it is an issue as small as soy sauce imports from Japan or as big as car exports to Europe. We gain nothing in international credibility if we overstate what our trade deals have achieved. Indeed, we risk misleading the British people and undermining their confidence in the importance of trade if we claim benefits from the agreements we negotiate that are simply not borne out by the facts.

I welcome the trade agreement with Japan—all of us on the Opposition Benches do—but the Secretary of State has done herself no favours and done our country no service in the way in which she has presented this agreement and oversold its benefits. I hope she will learn the right lessons from this when it comes to negotiating our new trade deals with the US, Australia, New Zealand, the rest of CPTPP and the Mercosur countries in the coming years. More importantly, I hope that a renewed focus on substance over presentation and the chastening loss of our trade deals with Algeria, Bosnia and Serbia will encourage her to get her head down over the next five weeks and do the hard, unglamorous work of sorting out the other 11 continuity agreements worth £55 billion in trade with Mexico, Singapore, Ghana and others before the clock runs out and before any more of the free trade agreements we already have are carelessly and needlessly thrown away.