European Affairs — House of Commons, 2018-03-14
Topic: Foreign Trade
Victoria Grace Ford (Conservative, Centre-right): This is an extremely important debate. The 27 other countries in the EU make up our largest trading partner, which accounts for almost half our trade. Many thousands of jobs on both sides of the channel rely on that trade. This is a sensitive time for the most complex negotiations for a generation. Businesses need clarity, especially about what will happen at our borders. They need to know what our long-term trade will look like, especially in key 21st-century sectors such as pharmaceuticals, advanced manufacturing and the service sector. They also need clarity on what transition or implementation will look like Honesty and transparency are needed, but let us look at the Opposition’s offer. They say that they want to negotiate a customs union with the EU, but the Leader of the Opposition stood up in Coventry and said that he wanted to negotiate exemptions in relation to privatisation, competition and state aid rules. The week after that, I was in Brussels. Not a single country that has a customs union with the EU has an exemption for state aid rules. Even Turkey has to comply with all state aid and competition rules, in accordance with the EU treaties and/or EU laws. When I was in Brussels, time and again I asked politicians from other EU countries whether they would give the UK preferred access to the single market and a customs union with the EU but also allow us an exemption from state aid rules. Time and again, those politicians looked at me and rolled their eyes. The Opposition’s position is not honest or achievable, and I believe it is deeply misleading In trade negotiations, the devil is in the detail. The Prime Minister’s speech was very welcome. It moved us on with a huge amount of detail, and I especially welcomed the detail about the aviation sector, the tech sector, the science and innovation pact—boy, do we need to continue co-operation on science and innovation—and security I want to focus on three areas. On services, UK sales to the EU in services are 40% of our trade. The sector has grown as a percentage of our trade in nearly every year. In today’s modern economy, we cannot separate goods and services. My mobile phone, for example, feels like a good, but its contents are all services. If a cancer scanner is sold in Europe, it is sold with a maintenance contract—a service. I am about to buy a new car, and it will come with a financial lease arrangement—a financial service. Walking away with no deal on services is not a good deal. It is especially not good for financial services. Some 2,000 people in my constituency work in insurance, but many hundreds of thousands of German savers have bought life insurance products from British companies. Both sides need a deal that covers services On borders and the customs union, while we need an agreement about what happens at our borders, there is much more to the customs union and negotiations than just tariffs. In particular, we need to resolve the country of origin rules for complex manufactured products. The British car sector employs about 169,000 people directly and nearly 1 million indirectly. Many of the cars it produces contain components from all over the EU. Under WTO rules, those cars are not European enough to be European cars or British enough to be British cars. They would become orphan cars, if I may put it like that, and not eligible under any of our trade agreements with the EU or elsewhere. That is why it is particularly helpful that the Prime Minister has left open the negotiations on not just a customs agreement, but a customs partnership, which is an offer for us to mirror EU customs codes at our borders My third point, which is really important, is about transition. The transition period needs to be agreed now, because otherwise real issues will arise for people who work in the City and with goods. On the back of my mobile phone is a CE mark. Every product put on the market in Europe has one, and anything that is imported to the UK needs a CE mark. The mark is offered with a 12-month certificate. If a mobile phone is imported into the UK from elsewhere in the world, it will need a certificate that is valid past not just the end of this March, but the end of next March. Unless we resolve transition this month, what happens to CE marks on goods placed on the market here and elsewhere in Europe will not be resolved. There are not enough notified bodies elsewhere in Europe to take the place of the British notified bodies today I am grateful to the Government for getting us to the negotiating point to date, for achieving the deal in December and for the great moves forward and detail in the Prime Minister’s speech a couple of weeks ago. Let us resolve the transition period by the end of the month—that is crucial—and let us not lose sight of the devil in the detail of the negotiations ahead. The Leader of the Opposition’s position is not achievable, and we need to focus on finding deals that are.