Trade Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 8th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, so many speeches, so much good material—I have often wanted to hear more. I am sure that during the passage of the Bill we will indeed hear more from our Second Reading speakers on the issues raised today. In particular, I look forward to hearing more from our two maiden speakers. I hope that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Blackburn will follow up on what he had to say about human rights when we initiate a discussion on the unilateral scheme of preferences. This is not in the Bill. It was in the Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Act 2018, which we did not have the opportunity to debate since it was a money Bill, as noble Lords will recall. I hope that we will get an opportunity to debate it during the passage of this Bill; it raises issues of human rights.

I was delighted to hear the maiden speech of my noble friend on the Front Bench. He bowled his maiden over excellently, took wickets, and now joins the little club of former private secretaries who have themselves become Ministers. I hope he enjoys it as much as I did.

I share with the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, her support for free trade. However, unconstrained global trade is as dangerous as unconstrained competition in a domestic economy. We need the WTO; we need it to work. We need plurilateral agreements such as the government procurement agreement that we have been talking about, but we need more; we need agreements on services, digital trade, intellectual property and beyond. We need the WTO to make that happen. We should not think about trade simply in terms of bilateral agreements. We are looking to be in the regional agreement for the Pacific. Frankly, I hope we will get an agreement with the EU that helps us to create a regional European market, operating together in support of free trade. I hope we will talk much more about trade during the passage of this Bill.

On the issue of scrutiny, and thinking back to the last Bill, many noble Lords in this debate have not quite understood. We got the commitments we were looking for from the Government on how they would go about the process of scrutinising free trade agreements. They published them in February 2019. I hope my noble friend will reiterate that that is the Government’s intention. He and I know that that is not the end of the story; we will be looking for further commitments. There is some limited statutory underpinning.

A number of noble Lords have referred to my honourable friend and parliamentary neighbour when I was in the other place, Jonathan Djanogly. His new Clause 4 on Report in the other place was not wholly right, in my view, but I hope we pick up elements of it relating to the process of scrutiny, leading to ratification. Taking the point from my noble friend, there are amendments we can make here that they may look kindly on in the other place.