Oral Answers to Questions
Karl McCartney Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Anne-Marie Trevelyan
As I said, the agreement reached has zero tariffs, which is exactly what the hon. Lady asks for. If there are specific businesses in Streatham that have issues and have not been able to get support from the export support service, she should contact me and my team, because 96% of all those who have used it have said to us that they would recommend it to others, which I take as a sign that the system is working. It is there not only to support those who have trouble but to help with discovering how to access new markets. Exporting is often considered difficult, but if we talk to those who do it, they say that they want to champion others. Our export champions, which are businesses that volunteer to speak to others and encourage them to export, are there to help those who are considering it. I would be happy to put some of her local businesses in touch with them as well.
Karl MᶜCartney (Lincoln) (Con)
Supply chain resilience is very important to EU trade. Will my right hon. Friend advise us on how often she has conversations with our colleagues in the Department for Transport and how helpful they have been?
Anne-Marie Trevelyan
My hon. Friend will be pleased to hear that I have discussions with many colleagues across Whitehall on a regular basis. The supply chain resilience question has obviously exercised all of us, and our businesses, ever since the problems when covid hit and we had to have so many new ways of thinking about our supply chains. We are now having to support our businesses, including those that have had supply chain issues through Russia and Belarus and are struggling to find new supply chains. There is a very strong and continuing thread throughout Whitehall to make sure that we support all our businesses. If anybody knows of any businesses that are struggling, they should contact us directly or through the export support service.
Oral Answers to Questions
Karl McCartney Excerpts(2 years, 9 months ago)
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Greg Hands
The Government have full bandwidth on all these aspects. We are satisfied with the trade and co-operation agreement. It is an agreement that is working well. In terms of adding support to exporters, that is the role of this Department and other Departments. We have helplines in place. We have the Brexit business taskforce. We have the DIT internationalisation fund. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has a £23 million seafood disruption fund. We have recently opened trade hubs in Edinburgh and Darlington, and we will open hubs soon in Cardiff and Belfast. We have a refreshed export strategy coming later this year. The Government are fully engaged on assisting exporters to get their goods and services into the European Union.
Karl MᶜCartney (Lincoln) (Con)
Sir David Amess (Southend West) (Con)
Oral Answers to Questions
Karl McCartney Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Karl MᶜCartney (Lincoln) (Con)
The Minister for Trade Policy (Greg Hands)
A free trade agreement with New Zealand is a priority for the UK Government. Trade negotiators from the UK and New Zealand held the first round of negotiations between 13 and 24 July 2020, and a second round of negotiations is due to begin on 19 October. New Zealand are a global leader when it comes to trade policy and trade agreements, and it is always a pleasure to deal with them.
Karl MᶜCartney [V]
I thank the Minister for his answer. He may be aware that prior to my first election in 2010, I worked closely with our colleague the Prime Minister in his former role as London’s Mayor and various members of the New Zealand Government to secure appropriate recognition for Sir Keith Park, the defender of London. I am pleased therefore to see our strengthened trade links with New Zealand, but does my right hon. Friend agree with me and others that we need to go further to strengthen commercial and political ties between Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK and seize the chances that Brexit presents for the UK?
Greg Hands
I thank my hon. Friend for his words of praise for the previous Mayor of London, who did a much better job than the current incumbent. I recently met the New Zealand high commissioner. The Secretary of State speaks regularly with the New Zealand Trade Minister. I did a webinar with New Zealand businesses recently. We want to have a cutting-edge deal as soon as possible. In terms of the broader relationship with Canada and Australia, I am very sympathetic to what my hon. Friend says, but I think the answer to that lies within the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership, of which Canada, Australia and New Zealand are members.
Royal Yacht Britannia: International Trade
Karl McCartney Excerpts(7 years, 6 months ago)
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Barry Gardiner
If nothing else, the hon. Gentleman and I are agreed on our admiration for Sir Thomas Cochrane. Of course, he was not readmitted to the Royal Navy until 1832 and, in 1806—he later admitted—he bribed the electors of Honiton by paying each 10 guineas so that he could enter this place, so perhaps he was not always a model that we should aspire to follow.
Here we are once again debating the recommissioning of a yacht that was launched some 63 years ago, as if it were the missing part of the Government’s international trade plan. Unfortunately, it is not. What is most troubling is that it seems to be, if not the only part, certainly one of the more credible parts. When it comes to international trade negotiations, the Government are not very able seamen, who have found themselves drifting rudderless into uncharted waters. A decommissioned boat, however, is not the ideal vessel to pilot their way out.
The recent EU referendum has presented significant challenges about what our future trading relations will look like and how we can go about ensuring that Britain and the British people can benefit. British businesses have relied on access to the single market since it came into force in 1993. Before that, they relied on the reduced tariffs of the customs union that preceded it. Few British businesses, and even fewer British business leaders, will recall just what difficulties were encountered when attempting international trade before that.
Furthermore, our participation in the European project and our membership of the customs union and the subsequent single market made the UK an extremely attractive destination for foreign investment. I do not doubt that that was enhanced by our strong international network, our respect for the rule of law and the dominance of English as an international language, but it is equally foolish to identify our success as having stemmed exclusively from our attributes and not from the access that we enjoy to the world’s largest consumer market. Our trading capacity is a manifestation of our attributes combined with our access to and capacity to influence the regulations of that wider market. Chance and good fortune also played their part, because our capacity to engage in and lead international trade is greatly magnified by virtue of our geography, location and time zone.
A combination of those elements has enabled us to play a leading role in international affairs and trade throughout history, and is why we have been able to continue to attract business investment and promote British exports overseas. It takes time to develop markets, and requires thorough analysis. It take confidence on the part of investors and trust on the part of trading partners.
Today, I am wearing the tie of Polska Zegluga Morska, the Polish steamship company. I put it on quite deliberately this morning, not because the royal yacht was built as a steamship, but because in 1989, before the Berlin wall came down, I began my first trade mission to Poland. Over the next five years, I took delegations from Maritime London, and put on conferences and trade missions in Poland, Ukraine and Russia to open up the market for our marine services industry—our lawyers, insurance brokers, protection and indemnity clubs, engineers and marine surveyors. I know what it is to export into new markets, and I inform the House that it is not about a flash yacht. It comes through diligent market research, understanding the regulatory structures and identifying the gaps that a team or product can fill. That is not doom-mongering or “Project Fear”; it is a reasoned assessment of the factors that feed into successful exports.
The Brexit vote threatens our trading capacity because it makes the questions about regulatory structures and market gaps impossible to answer. Businesses have no idea at the moment which markets they will be able to do business in, nor at what cost. They have no idea about the regulatory framework they will face or which non-tariff barriers they will encounter. They do not know whether they will be able to retain foreign staff or fill recruitment gaps from overseas if they need to.
Investors now see the decision to invoke article 50 as soon as possible as prejudicing the very possibility of a stable transition whereby the answers to those questions can be methodically worked through. We cannot know the extent of the investment decisions that are being suspended or cancelled.
Barry Gardiner
Because of the time, I will not.
Certain things are literally incalculable, but that does not make them less certain. Such investment decisions are being made, and they will have a long-tail liability—a liability that might only crystallise over years to come.
The idea that we could relaunch an ancient yacht as a beacon of British innovation and enterprise is entirely symptomatic of the nostalgic nonsense that has infected the Government’s approach to the new trading relationship that we must develop in a post-referendum world once the UK leaves the EU. We face the biggest constitutional and commercial challenge of our lifetimes, and we are here today to discuss relaunching a long-retired yacht. The Germans and the French must be quaking—not in their boots, but with laughter. The Chinese and the Americans, who are looking on in astonishment, must be wondering why we are incapable of seeing the gravity of our own situation.
It greatly concerns me that this debate sends a signal to the rest of the world that we still see the best of Britain as being behind us. We are a world leader in financial and legal services, the automotive and engineering sectors, pharmaceuticals, biosciences, business, energy, construction, fashion, art and music. But at this precise moment—when the fashion and textiles industry is asking where it will get linkers from in a post-Brexit world, when Nissan and Jaguar Land Rover are suspending future investment decisions until they have clarity on market access, and when the pharmaceutical sector is at its wits’ end over losing the European Medicines Agency from the UK—the best that this Government can come up with, as they studiously avoid giving us a running commentary, is to bring us here today to debate the recommissioning of Her Majesty’s yacht Britannia.
Government is not about playing with toy boats as virility symbols. The Government should be engaging with British business and setting out strategic proposals on an industry-by-industry basis, to promote Britain and our exports overseas. They need to tell the financial services industry—our biggest export sector—how they propose to protect the passporting regime that has allowed British financial institutions to transact business across the EU. That facility has been material to our capacity to attract foreign banks to establish their European operations throughout the UK. Those banks are now openly discussing and actively investigating relocations to Dublin, Paris, Frankfurt or Luxembourg.
Given how many trade missions the royal yacht Britannia undertook on behalf of the British Invisible Exports Council, perhaps the Back Benchers who signed the letter supporting the motion might better spend their time exploring the threats to the financial services industry in the UK. How much would it cost to refit a yacht of that size and bring it up to modern technological standards? How much would it cost to crew and maintain the vessel? How many Royal Navy staff would be taken away from active service elsewhere to crew the yacht? What security and counter-terrorism measures would need to be undertaken to ensure that the yacht would not be a sitting duck terrorist target?