My Lords, I thank your Lordships for your contributions today. This has been an interesting debate in a particular area and I will try my best to cover all the points that were made. I start with the point made both by the noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara, about why we are revoking. Essentially it is because, as I laid out in the briefing, there is a very complex process to submit and all it requires the Commission to do is to investigate and produce a report—it has no teeth or requirement to solve anything. What is the logic of revoking rather than amending? The amendment, as I said, concerns primary legislation—that is our advice. When you look at amending to create primary legislation with the force of just creating a report, you wonder why
you would do that. Many countries have exclusively non-statutory approaches, including Australia and New Zealand.
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On the point about the TBR versus the TRA and the trade remedies, there is a difference between trade remedies and trade barriers. Trade remedies are the ability to apply additional tariffs or protective measures when there is dumping or when there are subsidies. That is a particular part of the Trade Bill and the Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Act 2018 and is separate from trade barriers. Trade barriers simply alert us to the fact that barriers exist. They are two separate things within the EU Commission today.
The main point made by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, was on new market access. I completely understand and appreciate his point about the information and that the Explanatory Memorandum was thin. I tried in my opening speech to make sure that noble Lords understood just how much will be behind this. To give the House a bit more detail, the team, which will be a dedicated team, consists of three or four people and will be 20 people in a very focused group. We will have an online system, user-tested with businesses to make sure that it is fit for purpose, which is why we are confident that it will be ready by 29 March. This is work that we already undertake in our trade policy group and noble Lords will know that this group has been significantly increased to hundreds of people as a result of the referendum.
To touch on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, about the numbers of investigations and reporting, I believe that, typically, the numbers are of breaches reported through the market access advisory committee—MAAC, to which the noble Lord referred. The TBR, again, is a separate system within the EU that sits alongside the MAAC, and that is where all of the reporting has taken place.
The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, gave the example of Turkey. It is true that it was withdrawn, but it would be a challenge to say that it was because of the threat of the TBR when 69 other elements that were raised to the European Commission were raised through the MAAC. Businesses are moving to the more informal way because they find that that is a better way to resolve their issues.