The hon. Gentleman makes the perfectly reasonable point that we need to look at the whole scrutiny process to make it effective and to update so that it is fit for the current situation.
I have indicated that the current Prime Minister thinks the Australia deal is one-sided. Frankly, that is just one of many criticisms that Conservative Ministers and MPs have levelled at their own Department for International Trade and their own Ministers. The former Exports Minister, the hon. Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer), rightly said that the trade access programme is underfunded. He 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.”
That could be due to the fact that the budget for our trade show access programme began to fall sharply.
I looked carefully at when in the past 12 years the trade show access programme started to be cut in the last 12 years—I have the figures here for every year. It seems to have happened in the middle of the last decade when a new Chief Secretary to the Treasury was appointed, so I wondered who that was. The Minister has been in post for only a short period on this occasion, but we have had a number of robust exchanges previously, which I have always enjoyed, and this is not a subject that he has ever sought to debate me on before. When I checked who that confident, new, shining Chief Secretary to the Treasury was who started the cuts to the tradeshow access programme, however, I found that it was none other than the current Minister for Trade Policy.
Ministers for Trade Policy have a chequered history under recent Conservative Governments. We have just seen the Leader of the House of Commons, the right hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), in her new role. She was criticised for her attentiveness and availability as Trade Minister, not by me or any Opposition Member, but by the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed, who 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”.
Meanwhile, if we read the remarkable coverage of the tenure of the most recent former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk, at the Department for International Trade, it is amazing that there was even limited progress, given that the main aim appears to have been securing photographs for Instagram. I will say this for her time as International Trade Secretary, however: although her requests when travelling in Australia were for sauvignon blanc and fancy coffee, they are nothing compared with the Australian delicacies that I understand the right hon. Member for West Suffolk (Matt Hancock) has sampled when out there.
All hon. Members on both sides of the House would agree that a trade deal offers our friends in Australia a fantastic array of British exports, but I fear that they will want to reconsider their options when the first expensive import that arrives is a tariff-free version of the right hon. Member for West Suffolk. I will leave that
subject there, aside from the passionate plea that I always make when important elections are under way, such as the bushtucker trial: it is important for people to continue to make their voices heard, and I am sure that people across the country, especially in West Suffolk, will be keen to continue exercising their vote on a daily basis.
The disorder and chaos that we have seen across Government in recent months, and specifically at the Department for International Trade, speak of a Government who lack focus and direction. I speak to huge numbers of businesses every week and they continually express how damaging the instability is; it has real consequences in damaging our exporting opportunities. The utter chaos of financial instability, the tanking of the pound and the damage to our country’s standing are extraordinarily serious.
That instability and lack of clarity are why we have ended up in a situation where promises have been broken and vital progress has slipped. The trade deal with the USA has not been delivered. The trade deal with India done by Diwali has not been delivered. The promise that 80% of UK trade would be under FTAs by the end of 2022 has not been delivered and will not be delivered. It does not have to be that way.