Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership — House of Commons, 2015-12-10
Topic: Foreign Trade
Guto ap Owain Bebb (Conservative, Centre-right): No, I will not take an intervention on that issue. The point needs to be made and it has been made We are clearly having a dishonest debate on this issue. Claims have been made that have not been substantiated and we have had accusations of secrecy that do not stand up to scrutiny. It is clear, too, that issues are being raised about ISDS, but I argue that that case was demolished by the right hon. Member for Warley. The hon. Member for Swansea West has offered no explanation of why not one of the 94 agreements has been the subject of any complaint to my inbox; we seem to have these concerns only because TTIP is a deal with the US I have now dealt with some of the concerns expressed by the hon. Member for Swansea West, but I think we should also look at some of the opportunities that will come from TTIP. My right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) was right that tariff barriers are comparatively low. It is clear from talking to regulators on both sides of the Atlantic—the European Union and the US—that the regulations are often not specifically there for the safety of the public in the US or the EU; they are there as a means to offer a protectionist stance for some industries It makes very little sense, for example, for our booming and hugely successful exporting car industry to undertake a crash test that is completely different in the US from that in the EU. The crash test is different because the regulations are different, and the effect is to add over £600 to the cost of Mini Cooper. The dashboard has to be changed to accommodate the mechanism for the airbags necessary to comply with US test regulations. Nobody believes that a crash in the US is any different from one in the EU, but the test is different—at huge cost to the car industry. If the TTIP agreement were to be secured and some of the regulatory burdens removed, there would be potential for a 7% growth in exports Similarly, when we talk about the need for a manufacturing-led recovery, it is difficult to believe the concerns of Labour Members when the opportunity arises to get rid of some of the counterproductive and anti-competitive regulatory burdens but they are not willing to work with manufacturing sectors to reduce them More importantly, the regulatory burdens are extremely unfair on small and medium-sized enterprises. Larger companies have the capacity to deal with the regulatory burdens in the US and subsequently to deal with the regulatory burdens in the European Union. The small businesses in my constituency have world-class products to offer, but are not in a position to sell them to the US because the regulatory burdens provide a barrier to their potential to trade. Small businesses that send packages online through the internet often find themselves in difficulty when dealing with the US because they do not know whether the rules and regulations applying to imports through the postal system into the US would be the same as they are in Europe. Again, larger businesses—the Amazons of this world—can cope quite easily with those challenges, but smaller businesses operating in my constituency cannot To talk about this agreement being one for large multinationals is to miss the point. The point of the agreement is to reduce the regulatory burden, which large companies are quite happy to impose because it closes the opportunity for small businesses to compete against them.