I thank the hon. Member for his congratulations on my biography of Harold Wilson; that is greatly appreciated. On scrutiny, if only the Prime Minister had held the trade brief in the past and been able to do something about it then.
Is not the truth perhaps that the Government are running away from scrutiny because they are failing to support exporters properly? The Opposition have been arguing that the Government are not doing enough to support exporters, and over the summer that became clear. The former Minister for exports, the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer)—he intervened on the Secretary of State but is no longer in his place—appears to agree. He argued that the trade access programme is underfunded and said of it:
“We support too few shows, we don’t send enough business, our pavilions are often decent but overshadowed by bigger and better ones from our competitors.”
Perhaps it is therefore no surprise that there has been failure in the Department for International Trade.
We then have what the Secretary of State said about her own Minister for Trade Policy, who I think is still the Minister for Trade Policy today. She said:
“There have been a number of times when she hasn’t been available, which would have been useful, and other Ministers have picked up the pieces.”
The former Chancellor says that Conservative trade policy is letting down farmers, the former Minister for Exports says that the Government are not supporting exporters as they should be, and the Secretary of State is criticising the performance of one of her own Ministers. This is not the good ship Britannia delivering trade for global Britain; it is more like “Pirates of the Caribbean”, with a ghost ship manned by a zombie Government beset by infighting, mutiny and dishonesty. The calamity might have been mildly amusing were it not so serious a matter for our country’s future, with people across our nation needing a trade policy that delivers for them.
In other negotiations and future negotiations, countries will look at what was conceded in these negotiations and take that as a starting point. We already have a UK-Japan trade deal that benefits Japanese exporters five times as much as UK exporters. On the Australia deal, the Government’s impact assessment shows a £94 million hit to our farming, forestry and fishing sectors and a £225 million hit to our semi-processed food industry. On the New Zealand deal, the Government’s impact assessment states that
“part of the gains results from a reallocation of resources away from agriculture, forestry, and fishing”,
which will take a £48 million hit, “and semi-processed foods”, a £97 million hit.
The Opposition will press four issues in Committee: farming and animal welfare; climate change; labour standards and workers’ rights; and, as has been raised in interventions, the role of the devolved Administrations in the process of negotiation and ratification, and the protection of geographical indicators. Let me deal first with farming and animal welfare. Labour is proud of our farmers and the high standards that they uphold, and we are confident in British produce to be popular in new markets, but we also recognise the need for a level playing field for our farmers.
The Government claim that they are trying to mitigate the impact of the two deals with tariff-free access being phased in. In the New Zealand deal, there are tariff rate quotas and product-specific safeguards that last 15 years. Similarly, in the Australia deal, the phasing-in period on beef and sheepmeat is 15 years, but the quotas set by the Government for imports from Australia are far
higher than current imports. As I have previously pointed out in the House, on beef imports, when Japan negotiated a trade deal with Australia, it limited the tariff-free increase in the first year to 10% on the previous year. South Korea achieved something similar in negotiations and limited the increase to 7%. But the Government have negotiated a first year tariff-free allowance with a 6,000% increase on the amount of beef that the UK currently imports from Australia. On sheepmeat, they have conceded a 67% increase in the first year of the deal.
It is not as if other countries have not done significantly better—they have—so why did our trade Ministers not achieve the same as Japan’s and South Korea’s? Why have our Ministers failed to ensure that Australian agricultural corporations are not held to the same high standards as our farmers?
The Government have agreed to a non-regression clause on animal welfare. To be clear, that does not mean equality of standards across the two countries—it is not fair competition. What will actually happen is that meat produced to far lower animal welfare standards will get tariff-free access to the UK market.