Trade Bill

Lord Fox Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansarad): House of Lords
Monday 21st January 2019 Lords Chamber

I will be straightforward with my noble friend. I am not looking for a change to the Bill. I am using the amendment to extract from the Government a commitment that this is something that needs to be looked at. When one is participating in the GPA as one member state, the provisions of our own SME strategy might be distinct and different from the way that the European Union has related to SMEs. I declare an interest as a director of Low Associates Ltd, a small business which contracts to the European Commission.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 5 and before going any further I want to associate ourselves positively with its spirit. We are probably going to hear the word “continuity” many times over the next four days, but I feel that the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has forfeited the right to use it. The clue is in the word “revisit”, which, by its nature, is not continuity but is proposing what he and we believe to be a beneficial discontinuity. It is quite clear that in this country and in other countries—as the noble Lord set out, this covers not just UK SMEs but SMEs in general, and certainly that is the wording in his amendment—economies and employment flourish where SMEs flourish. That is a good thing and we would ask the Minister whether this amendment is necessary for the future, to make sure that we do not fall foul of our own rules in terms of discriminating in favour of small and medium-sized companies.

I reiterate the fact that, as well as trade policy, commercial policy is central to this. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, mentioned the government strategy: it is about how the Government choose to drive these policies home, through their commercial strategy and through the size of the packages they put out to bid, for example. We saw a recent example around the broadband structural bidding, in which it was quite clear that the overall size of the package militated against small and medium-sized companies bidding. That is nothing to do with trade policy, it is to do with the commercial policy of the Government at the time. So we support this with the proviso that the Minister comes back and says whether it actually achieves what the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, is hoping to achieve. I also enjoin all members of the Government to deliver the commercial part of the spirit of this amendment.

[Baroness Hooper (Con)]

My Lords, both these amendments provide us with a useful opportunity for discussion on important areas of trade, but both are without a doubt, to my mind, without the Bill. If we approach them in this spirit I think we can accept them as a useful addition for the future. I support my noble friend Lord Lansley’s Amendment 5 and will concentrate upon it because there is always a lot of rhetoric about SMEs and the need to encourage and support them, particularly in this context of increasing and developing international trade and their trading opportunities, and especially in this brave new world that awaits us after Brexit. Therefore, to have a specific quota for procurement is a very good way of drawing attention to the needs of small businesses and to encourage them to come forward when the time comes. Because it is not just a question of legislation: with all trade, it is a question of getting people out and about in the countries where we hope that they will find trading opportunities.

When we talk about international trade, of course there is much more to it than that. There is the whole issue of language skills and specialised negotiating skills which, by their very nature, small and medium-sized businesses may not be able to cope with. They are not likely to have the specialised staff or even the budgets to deal with this. I think that for the future we can certainly build on this amendment and the intention behind it, but as I said at the outset, not in this Bill. I trust that my noble friend the Minister will be able to reassure us that these interventions are not wasted but will be of great use when we come to deal with individual trade Bills in the future.