Comprehensive Economic Partnership (EUC Report)

Lord Oates Excerpts

Thursday 26th November 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to debate this report. I have the privilege of serving on the International Agreements Sub-Committee and the rapid production of such a comprehensive report is due in no small part to the skills of our chairman and those of the clerk to the committee, Dominique Gracia, and her team, who have done a brilliant job pulling it together in such a constrained timetable.

In the limited time we have available for debate, I want to focus particularly on the data provisions in the agreement, how we use trade agreements to advance decarbonisation and the importance of building trust in trade policy.

First, on data provisions, the IAC received evidence from Dr Emily Jones and Beatriz Kira, of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, which raised a number of concerns. In particular, I hope the Minister can tell us more about the decision of CEPA to expand the scope of protection of mandatory disclosure of source code and software beyond that in the EU deal to include algorithms expressed in that source code. Will the Minister tell us in his response the reason for that expansion, which is a matter of concern given the impact that algorithms can have on decision-making and the need for this to be transparent to the public?

Secondly, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, has said, while it is welcome that the agreement retains the references in the EU deal to international environmental commitments, including the Paris Agreement, and commits both parties to working to secure mutual environmental aims, it seems like a missed opportunity not to have sought more, particularly on green technologies and services. The impact assessment predicts an increase in greenhouse gases as a result of the treaty, and while in itself it is not a significant increase, we need to think about how we can use trade policy to bring down greenhouse gas emissions, not to raise them—however small the amount may be.

In future deals, we will need to take a radically different approach, and we have an opportunity to do so in the New Zealand negotiations, given New Zealand’s credentials in this regard and its ground-breaking initiative to negotiate an agreement on climate change, trade and sustainability with Norway, Costa Rica, Iceland and Fiji. I hope we will take the opportunity this offers to create a forward-looking trade agreement with New Zealand which puts protection of the planet at its heart.

Next, I want to address the issue of public trust in our trade policy, which has not been well served by the way in which the Government have tried to oversell this agreement. Announcing the deal on 11 September in a press statement, the Secretary of State for Trade said:

“The agreement we have negotiated …. goes far beyond the existing EU deal”.


However, the impact assessment for this agreement suggests that it will increase UK GDP by £1.5 billion per annum in the long term, whereas the impact assessment for JEEPA, the Japanese-EU trade agreement, published in May 2018, estimated that it would increase UK GDP by £2.1 billion to £3 billion over the long term—a significantly larger figure. The Government will doubtless argue that the figures cannot be compared because they are modelled differently. However, if the Government will not provide us with comparative modelling, we can only go by their own previously published figures, and they do not in any way bear out the Government’s claims that this deal provides significant benefits over JEEPA—in fact, they show the contrary.

Overselling in this way undermines trust. That may be less important in respect of this deal, which has not given rise to significant public concern, but it will be a real problem when we come to more controversial deals, such as a potential agreement with the United States. I therefore urge the Minister to ensure that lessons are learned from this experience and, in future, that deals are communicated objectively on their merits rather than spun to be something other than they are. In this case, the Government should simply have stated the reality: that a rollover deal, with a few additions and a few subtractions, had been secured. That was the reality, full stop. That is what the Government should have said.