Question to the Department for International Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade, what proportion of his Department's budget will be spent on funding the Trade Remedies Authority.

As we prepare to operate an independent trade policy outside the EU, we are creating the Trade Remedies Authority (TRA) to protect domestic industry from injury caused by unfair trading practices, such as dumped or subsidised imports, or from injury caused by unforeseen surges in imports.

The Department for International Trade (DIT) has budgeted up to £12.8m in 2018/19 of which £8.9m is under a Ministerial Direction issued on the 29^th of March 2018 by my Rt hon. Friend the Secretary of State for International Trade to authorise initial spending on setting up the TRA ahead of the Trade Bill gaining Royal Assent.

(https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trade-remedies-authority-tra-dit-ministerial-direction)

The budget is subject to change as legislation and implementation work proceeds.

Funding for 2019/20 will be confirmed later in the financial year following Treasury decisions on additional EU exit funding allocations and the Department’s business planning process.

Funding beyond 2019/20 will be an issue for the Spending Review.

As per the 2018-19 Main Estimates, DIT’s total funding is £360.6m.

It was announced in March 2017 that DIT would also receive £74m of EU exit funding, which can be found in the Chief Secretary’s Written Ministerial Statement, HCWS540. (https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statement/Commons/2018-03-13/HCWS540/)

The proportion to be spent on funding the TRA is therefore 3%.