Trade Bill — House of Lords, 2021-02-23
Topic: Foreign Trade
Jeremy Purvis (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for moving this amendment and allowing us to debate this issue. I will turn to that in a moment When the noble Baroness was speaking, I reflected on the constitution arrangements that we have. I think that she and I both favour change in our constitution to change the mechanism of appointment to this place and make it a fully democratic House. Nevertheless, in his remarks the Minister referred to having trade scrutiny and decision-making that is appropriate to our constitutional arrangements. Our constitutional arrangements say that this is a revising Chamber, and we are doing our duty in asking the Government to think again. When the House has voted by large majorities on every occasion that it has debated scrutiny amendments in either my name or that of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, it has made its view plain. It is therefore incumbent on the Government to reflect on that, not simply to exercise the Whip One of the votes that the Minister referred to tested this point slightly. Last time round, the other place was not asked to have a separate vote on these amendments because, in the way that they scheduled all this, the Government bundled them all into one. Members of the Commons with a particular view on scrutiny, human rights, genocide or anything else were asked to support or oppose the Whip in one particular vote. I do not think that that reflects very well on the way in which the Government have approached the Trade Bill and these stages However, as people more famous than me have said, we are where we are. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, for his work on getting us to this position. I have enjoyed working with him, the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and others. It has genuinely been cross-party work. I also share the thanks expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, to Jonathan Djanogly and others in the House of Commons for their work. In many respects, they have been courageous. Consistently voting or making a case against one’s own Government is a courageous thing in politics, but they are doing it out of a great sense of sincerity that going forward trade agreements for the UK are now deep and comprehensive by definition and touch on very wide aspects across public policy and regulation and therefore for parliamentary scrutiny to be effective, it should inform debate, and if accountability is to be operable, that debate should lead to votes. Ultimately, that is the approach about which we have sought to persuade the Government There have been indications of the Government being more flexible in certain areas. This is an interesting Bill which, as the noble Baroness said, has taken so long. A White Paper about trade policy appeared and disappeared mid-Bill; there has been no successor to it. The words of the Minister today are helpful and we now have the Grimstone rule, which is that ratification of a new trade agreement will not take place without a debate. That is important. It is not as much as I wanted or as much as the Government were going to give us at the start of this process, many years ago, but this is the third Minister who has handled this Bill and it is third time lucky, as far as the commitment that we will at least be able to vote on the agreements coming up There had been a rule for treaty ratification called the Ponsonby rule. It was replaced by statutory provision, because we were not satisfied that simply a ministerial rule, commitment or convention would be appropriate. While we may be putting this issue to bed in this Bill, at this moment, the issue has not been put to bed. Other Bills in the future will do as we did with the Ponsonby rule, which was to put it on a statutory footing. We will have to live with the Grimstone rule for the moment. It is perhaps, shall we say, a tweaking of the Government’s position. Nevertheless we accept it for the moment, as the House was clear, in all its votes, that more scrutiny, accountability and debating are required. I assure the Minister that we will come back to this at other times.