Trade Bill — House of Lords, 2020-12-15
Topic: Foreign Trade
Deborah Bull (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty. I pay tribute to him for his tireless advocacy on behalf of the creative industries, particularly the music sector. As he pointed out, the amendment does not seek to recreate the past, as was suggested in response to a similar amendment in Committee. It seeks very specifically to secure the continued success of UK services, and in doing so to preserve the employment the sector provides, the economic contribution it generates and, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, outlined, its potential to contribute to this country’s recovery from the pandemic The UK is predominantly a services economy, with services contributing around 80% of economic activity in 2019 and providing jobs for 85% of the UK workforce. It is not a coincidence that the primary destination for UK services exports is the EU’s single market. One of the best-established empirical results in international economics is that bilateral trade decreases with distance. The closer the country, the easier it is to get feet on the ground. Aside from services provided remotely, all modes of service require this physical presence. Thus, there is an inextricable link between mobility and service success British in Europe, an organisation representing the 1.2 million British people living in other European countries, gave extensive evidence in June to the Select Committee on the Future Relationship with the European Union on the extent of the problems British citizens will face if they are denied appropriate mobility in Europe. To date, these concerns have been largely ignored, but they are proving to be well founded, with anecdotal evidence emerging of UK passport holders already missing out in exactly the ways anticipated even before the end of the transition year, with employers reluctant to hire UK citizens, job offers withdrawn, and, in one recent widely publicised example, British passport holders excluded from the casting call for the role of a British prince in a new film due to "new Brexit rules" Contractors working across multiple European countries face even more complex issues in being obliged to comply with multiple different formalities to gain a temporary right to continue working as a provider of cross-border services. Without a framework in place, British service providers will face exactly this patchwork quilt of unilateral solutions and immigration rules in the different EU countries to which their work takes them. Big companies that have the resources to tailor and adapt will probably survive, but individuals, freelancers and owners of small businesses will once again be the ones to suffer These small businesses are also likely to be hit hardest by any failure to secure an adequacy decision with the EU. A recent report from the New Economics Foundation and UCL estimated that SMEs are each likely to have to find between £3,000 and £10,000 to cover additional costs of compliance if they want to continue to transfer data from the EU to the UK, with the aggregate cost to UK businesses in the region of £1.6 billion. This is money that could certainly be better spent, especially as UK business recovers from the pandemic Even before Covid, the impact of leaving the EU without a mobility framework to replace the current one threatened the sustainability and the success of UK services. We know that Covid has had a devastating effect on those parts of the sector that rely on human gatherings: hospitality; air travel; the creative industries; arts and entertainment. In the creative industries alone, Labour Force Survey data from the ONS reveals job losses of 55,000, a 30% decline since March and significantly higher-than-average numbers of people leaving creative employment. This is clear evidence of the scale of the crisis in a sector which has, over recent years, contributed over £111 billion annually in GVA The absence of a mobility framework will not just put at even greater risk these elements of UK services that are already on their knees but risk also those which have been better able to weather the Covid storm—IT, financial and legal services—because of the barriers that it will impose on the continuation of trade. The UK service sector is one which can claim to be world-leading, and I am still at a loss as to understand why it has received so little attention throughout the Brexit negotiations. That is why I support this amendment, and in doing so, once again ask the Government to do everything that they can to secure an appropriate mobility framework with the EU. This will protect not only the jobs of four in every five UK citizens but the crucial contributions that services make to our economy and, through that, to communities up and down the country.