Trade Bill

Lord Risby Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 11th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Risby (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Viscount, who always speaks clearly and directly. It also gives me great pleasure to add my congratulations to my noble friend Lady Meyer, whom I have known for many years. She brings efficiency, competence and great humanity, as shown in her speech, and I know that all those characteristics will be well represented in her contributions to your Lordships’ House.

It is a personal pleasure to add some comments on the Trade Bill. For some years, I have been one of the Prime Minister’s trade envoys, trying to help British businesses with commercial opportunities abroad. I pay tribute to my fellow trade envoys in both Houses of Parliament, across all parties, who do this voluntarily but with much enthusiasm and, in many instances, considerable success.

I also applaud the Secretary of State for International Trade for his incredible energy and dedication to the task at hand. I can only hope that whatever vitamin pill he takes is made in Britain. He has a strong ministerial team, not least in my noble friend, who brings such immense experience to her role. Her department offers such help and professionalism to me and my fellow trade envoys.

We should remind ourselves of the Bill’s objectives, which are not complicated: to keep important trading partners that currently have relationships with us via the European Union; to collect and share information, where there is certainly much more work to be done because it is imperfect at the moment; to enable us to defend our commercial and industrial sector from inappropriate trading practices; and, most importantly, to establish powers to move from having current trade agreements via the EU to dealing with them ourselves, given that trade policy has been an exclusive EU competence.

Sitting, as I do, on two of your Lordships’ EU committees, we have heard repeatedly, and passionately at times, about the need for British business and our business partners abroad to have a sense of continuity and order during and after the Brexit process. This is all inextricably intertwined. In addition to these key elements of our economic life and prosperity post Brexit, it is crucial that we stand out as a beacon of free, unimpeded trade, upon which historically we have thrived and in which we have been a role model. Although President Trump may have highlighted perceived unfairness and lack of balance in bilateral or multilateral trade architecture, there is a great danger of a destructive, tit-for-tat approach developing. That could seriously undermine the world economy, which has in some measure been sustained by much more open markets over the years as well as low interest rates and generous liquidity.

One of our greatest challenges in this age is the problem of migratory flows from poorer countries. It is so obvious that any attempts further to restrain free international trade would most seriously affect the poorest people on our planet. In this context, I welcome the strong links developing between us and the WTO.

This country has an enviable reputation for transparency and has led the charge against bribery and corruption, whether direct or indirect, which regrettably influences commercial decisions in some countries. However, I should add that, in my role in trade promotion, our firm commitments and tough laws to preclude this are much appreciated and commented on by Governments seeking to tackle this corrosive activity.

One element of our departure from the EU is our participation at present in the Agreement on Government Procurement. It is crucial that we maintain access to global public procurement markets, so I welcome our involvement in and intention to join the GPA after we leave the EU. As many of your Lordships will know, government procurement is a substantial part of the business profile of many of our actual and potential markets.

For some years, I have been the deputy chairman of the Small Business Bureau, trying to encourage a suitable tax and regulatory framework for the sector. However, it is a fair generalisation to say that our economy has been very consumer driven. I express my admiration for and appreciation of the Government’s real attempts to stimulate the small and medium-sized businesses in our country into getting involved in overseas trade activity. Many of our European neighbours have moved on much more successfully than we have in changing the culture of export promotion, particularly with respect to the SME group.

In this context, I want to touch on my personal experience as a trade envoy. In the past few months, we have signed contracts in Algeria, the country of my particular responsibility, to the tune of about $1 billion, mostly in the energy sector but also in the defence sector. This followed a trade show held last year in Algiers, organised largely by our embassy there, where numerous small, superb, defence-related British companies showed their brilliant range of activity.

My final observation is on the role of securing business in situ. Last month, in Cape Town, the Prime Minister announced the most welcome new partnership for Africa, an additional £4 billion programme for UK investment in African countries that will pave the way for £4 billion of private sector financing. That includes £3.5 billion through the Government’s development finance institution, the CDC, and an African investment summit, set to take place next year. This is very important in the context of what we are trying to do to explore new markets.

The House should be very grateful to my noble friend Lady McIntosh for pointing out the importance and efficacy of having specialists—in agricultural products in this case—attached to our embassies. However, I wish to be blunt: the trade promotion grind is often done at a local level. The Prime Minister talked about our national interest. In my view, it is patently absurd that the Foreign Office budget is less than 1/10th of our overseas aid budget. Indeed, the Department for International Trade’s budget is a quarter of that of the Foreign Office. It is totally disproportionate.

Particularly in countries which are quite statist, a number of our fiercely competitive European neighbours have established chambers of commerce or invested in a whole range of skilled, local employees, often fanning out and securing business in their particular countries by talking to governors or key business people. The digging out of investment opportunities by people in situ will be a critical part of the architecture of our winning export business in the future, particularly in the new regime which we will have.

I conclude by saying that there are huge challenges which face us post Brexit and I want to acknowledge the key role, which I greatly admire, of those who are involved in this activity, particularly in our posts abroad. It has to be recognised, as part of the topography of trade promotion abroad, that they are appropriately resourced to enable us to compete effectively, which is in all our interests whatever our attitude is to Brexit, and to ensure our capacity to trade successfully in the future.