Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill — House of Commons, 2018-01-08
Topic: Foreign Trade
Gareth Craig Snell (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is trying to tempt me down a particular course of discussion around single market membership, which I do not really wish to address as part of the Bill, but I do understand his point. In this Bill, not only do we have a set of Trade Remedies Authority procedures that are not particularly well defined and an attempt to wed ourselves to a mandatory lesser duty rule, we are also seeking to include an economic interest test—again, something that very few countries use. The only time we would see either a public interest test or an economic interest test is when we have multinational organisations such as the EU. We will not be in that position, yet we will be wedding ourselves to an extra layer of bureaucracy and complication to our trade remedy process that does not necessarily give the best outcome for British industry Unfortunately, there are a lot of the areas where this Parliament and this House should have some right of scrutiny, but where that is being brushed aside. This will all be done through written ministerial guidance, secondary legislation and statutory instruments. There is nothing in the Bill that immediately gives this House and all Members present the opportunity to properly define what we want to see regarding market and trade remedies There are a number of matters, which I am sure will come up during Second Reading of the Trade Bill tomorrow, that relate to the membership of the Trade Remedies Authority, the way in which it will be run and its budget. There are also questions around the cost of the investigations and who will be responsible for that cost. In the EU process at the moment, the trade itself makes up a good proportion of the cost, but it does so knowing that whatever remedy it gets out will more than offset the cost of the remedy process. There is no guarantee that that is the case for whatever system we set up once we are outside the customs union and the single market. That could simply result in a situation where industry does not take the risk—where it does not want to put the funding in place to do the investigation and to work out the dumping and injury levels because it does not know what they will look like beforehand. Therefore, any remedy would be of no benefit to the industry once it has made up those initial costs, so it simply will not do it. We will have a situation where we are not able to protect British industry and British business because the system is complicated and opaque The Financial Secretary to the Treasury is no longer in his place, but he has agreed to meet the British Ceramic Confederation to talk about some of the issues I have raised. I am grateful to him for doing so, and I hope that he will hear sense in the comments made this evening. When we leave the EU and come out of the customs union and the single market, there are a number of things that we can do to strengthen British business, put us in a better position and demonstrate to the world that Britain is still a manufacturing nation. We still make things. Nowhere is that more evident than in Stoke-on-Trent, where we make things and sell things of great beauty and high art around the world. We can continue do that, but only if we put the protections in place. Once we are outside the EU, we will have the freedoms and flexibilities to put in place the protections we want Having read this Bill, I fear that the Government are trying to come up with the lowest level of protection that they possibly can, which is of interest economically to only a few groups of people and whereby the Minister himself would have the ability to override future decisions. Therefore, I support the reasoned amendment; I hope that the Government have heard my comments; and I look forward to scrutinising this legislation further.