I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of her statement. While there is much to digest from last night’s agreement, I hope she will forgive me if, in the short time that I have, I focus on the impact of the deal on our farming communities.
As I have already mentioned today, according to the Government’s own forecasts, this deal will lead to reductions in growth and jobs in the UK’s farming sector because, as the scoping paper says,
“New Zealand producers may be able to supply UK retailers and UK producers at lower cost relative to domestic producers.”
In those circumstances, any other Government would normally keep in place quotas to stop their farmers from being undercut, but, just like with the Australia deal, our Government have set those quotas so high as to be utterly meaningless. In year 1 of this new deal, New Zealand can export four times as much lamb as it did last year before any tariffs kick in; it can export more butter to Britain than it has done in the past six years put together before facing a single tariff; and it can export 25 times more beef, entirely tariff-free, as it can right now with a 20% tariff. For all practical purposes, this deal therefore gives us unlimited, tariff-free trade from New Zealand to go with unlimited, tariff-free trade already agreed with Australia, confirming this as the precedent that every other major exporter will now expect to follow. Not just that, but we are eliminating the tariffs on dozens of products from Australia and New Zealand that fall well short of our domestic welfare standards. This includes our domestic restrictions on antibiotics, whose production is doing huge damage to the environment.
These are bad deals for our farming industry. They will undermine the competitiveness of our farmers and the standards that they are required to maintain. In other words, these deals are exactly what the Trade and Agriculture Commission was established to prevent. That brings me to the appointment of the new TAC members confirmed by the Secretary of State earlier and to the written ministerial statement, which the House has just received, containing her response to the TAC report, seven and a half months after it was submitted.
There are two crucial issues at stake in those announcements, and they are inextricably linked to the deals with Australia and New Zealand. The first concerns the TAC’s recommendations to establish a national framework of standards covering food safety, animal welfare and the environment, and to use that framework to determine which imports from Australia and New Zealand should benefit from the elimination of tariffs. We know that that recommendation is entirely feasible and entirely practical, because DEFRA Ministers are currently consulting on applying exactly the same principle when it comes to labelling food products for their impact on animal welfare. Their consultation proposes a clear distinction between
“baseline UK welfare regulations which UK farmers are required to meet”
and “imports of lower welfare” that are undercutting our farmers.
May I ask the Secretary of State three questions? Why has she rejected the recommendation on the use of a standards framework to determine the scope of tariff reductions? Can she confirm that, as a result, a number of products described by DEFRA as “imports of lower welfare” will have their tariffs reduced under the deals with Australia and New Zealand? Can she explain why it is possible to differentiate on standards when it comes to labels placed on imports, but not on the tariffs they face?
The second fundamental issue is around the role of the TAC in relation to Australia and New Zealand. Members of Parliament, the media, the public and, most of all, our farming communities were repeatedly
promised last November that the new TAC would provide Parliament with an assessment of every trade deal for how it would affect the competitiveness of UK farmers and whether it would undercut the standards they are required to meet. No matter how that role was defined in statute, we all know what we were promised. If the new TAC is not going to assess these two trade deals in that way, not only is that utterly shameful, but it will turn the TAC into a total waste of time.
I hope the Secretary of State will honour those promises, because if we ever needed a better illustration of why we need the TAC to perform that role, we have it in the deals agreed with New Zealand and Australia. That is why it is more vital and more urgent than ever that the new TAC should be able to do the job that the House was promised and act as the voice of the farmer when it comes to passing verdict on these two new deals. I ask the Secretary of State again: will she let the TAC do its job?