Worldwide Free Trade

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Monday 16th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fairhead]

Let me take that in two parts. On the relationship with the EU, it will clearly remain a very important trading partner for us. We need to make sure that we have as frictionless an environment with the EU as we possibly can. We believe that the freedom to be able to make free trade agreements with other countries will allow us to have the trading agreements in the future that can boost our trade further. Regarding those qualitative assessments that we made as part of the impact assessment, we looked at one report from Head and Mayer which had looked at 159 academic reports about the benefits of FTAs. All I can say is that from that information, while it depends on the scale, the relationship and the supply side, the median increase is around 32% from a free trade agreement.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, the official international trade in goods statistics, which were published on Friday, show that in the year to February there was a growth of 1.7% in the EU’s trade with the rest of the world. Worryingly, those same statistics show a decline of 8% in UK trade with the rest of the world. As we embark on the first trade agreement in history with the EU 27 which will make trade harder rather than easier, if this House votes for the UK to remain part of the customs union with the EU—which, incidentally, saw a growth in our exports of 6% over the same period—we will be acting in the national economic and strategic interests of our country.

[Baroness Fairhead]

If we look at the exports total for the UK last year, it increased by over 11%. We therefore have seen export growth. We believe that the EU has to remain an ongoing and really important trading partner. We are working with trade and investment working groups across a number of countries—14 working groups involving 21 countries—in which we are exploring where we can improve trade further. As I said earlier, the CHOGM this week is particularly important because, in many ways, the Commonwealth is an area where we have underinvested in trading relationships. This is a great opportunity for all members of the Commonwealth to change that.