My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak for only the second time in a debate and my first time in Committee, but as with my maiden speech, it is on matters of great importance to the businesses and consumers of the United Kingdom as we prepare to take our first steps as an independent trading nation for the first time in over half a century. I look forward to working with your Lordships to bring this Bill on to the statute book. I listened to the vast experience of Members of the House when we debated the Bill at Second Reading, an experience which I have already heard repeated in this Committee, and I know that noble Lords will take great care to scrutinise the provisions of the Bill thoroughly.
As I said at Second Reading, the intention of the Bill is to ensure continuity and certainty for the UK and our trading partners once the transition period ends. It will establish an independent body to protect UK producers from injury caused by unfair trading practices. It will enable better use of data to facilitate and improve trade. It will also ensure—the subject of this group of amendments—that UK businesses continue to have access to £1.3 trillion a year of government procurement contracts globally through our independent membership of the WTO’s Agreement on Government Procurement, or GPA. What the Bill will not do is lower our standards in any area.
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Amendments 1 to 4, which I will address together, would collectively place statutory obligations on the Secretary of State to enter into negotiations with GPA parties, with the aim of advancing our policy objectives across labour standards, environmental protections, SME participation and public health in UK procurement opportunities covered by the GPA, before making regulations under Clause 1. The same group of amendments was tabled in Committee in the other place. I would like to reiterate a point that my right honourable friend the Minister for Trade Policy made then: the UK’s continued participation in the GPA does not prevent procuring bodies taking any of these considerations
into account in public procurement. I fear there may be some misunderstanding on the part of noble Lords about this.
The GPA provides a framework to ensure that public procurements covered by the agreement are carried out in a transparent and non-discriminatory way. It allows our firms to bid for these contracts overseas, and overseas firms in countries participating in the agreement to bid here. However, the procuring party is free to consider a range of factors in its procurement—I will come to the detail of those in a moment—as long as they are in line with GPA requirements. So, this is no way waters down the ability of procuring parties not to do that. All it is saying is that firms from countries that are signatories to the agreement have an equal and fair whack at them in the procurement process.
As noble Lords know, the UK has an active domestic procurement policy agenda across the issues identified by noble Lords in their amendments. For example, the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 requires public procurers to consider how certain procurements could improve the social, economic and environmental well-being of the relevant area. These requirements will endure, are entirely consistent with the UK’s GPA obligations and will remain in place at the end of the transition period. There are many other such requirements that I could cite to noble Lords.
The GPA clearly sets out that parties shall periodically undertake further negotiations to progressively reduce and eliminate discriminatory measures. As we accede to the agreement as an independent party, we will participate fully in these negotiations with the aim, wherever possible, of furthering our public policy objectives. I am sure your Lordships will agree that this is the right way to enhance our domestic agenda. Moreover, if the Secretary of State were to open negotiations with all 20 GPA parties to produce something radically different that put these standards into the GPA, rather than into public procurement contracts, we would not be finished with this process before the end of next year, let alone this year. This would undoubtedly disrupt the UK’s accession process and, frankly, put UK businesses at risk of losing guaranteed access to the GPA market.
Turning to Amendment 5, of course this Government recognise the importance of labour standards in public procurement. We have introduced robust measures to strengthen the protection of workers’ rights and tackle humanitarian issues in supply chains over the past five years. For example, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 includes measures designed to ensure that government supply chains are free from forced labour, and it provides guidance on identifying and managing the risks of human trafficking in existing contracts and new procurement activity. The Act applies equally to procurements carried out under the GPA and those which are not. There is no carve-out in this legislation for businesses that happen to have won a contract through participation under the GPA umbrella.
I can assure your Lordships that I listened intently to the points about the ILO and completely sympathise with what was said about the importance of workers’ rights. I can assure your Lordships that contracting
authorities are permitted by the GPA and in UK domestic law to include conditions related to the UK’s ILO obligations and workers’ rights and protections. No provision of the GPA prevents or limits authorities’ ability in this regard. No provision of the GPA waters down in any way our participation in the conventions that we have been party to, and this will not change as we accede to the GPA as an independent party at the end of the transition period.
Turning to Amendment 6, I am sympathetic to the ideas that lie behind it. Of course, the Government fully appreciate the importance of engaging with businesses to ensure that they make the most of opportunities created by the UK’s independent trade policy. It would be a funny programme of activity if we spent all this time putting into place international trade agreements and adhering to the GPA, and then did not communicate their benefits to firms throughout the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. This is not a paper exercise but one that we are carrying out to benefit British businesses large and small. Just to reassure the Committee, I will come to the “small” part of that spectrum before I finish my remarks. That is why the Department for International Trade has established an extensive programme of engagement which includes stakeholder briefings, events, round tables and webinars, as well as face-to-face support for exporters through our network of 275 international trade advisers.
For procurement in particular, of course, the UK benefited from access to GPA contracts through our membership of the EU. However, we are committed to increasing the number of businesses that benefit from the GPA and other international agreements. Anything that noble Lords can do to publicise the advantages of this agreement would be much appreciated. We have a dedicated stakeholder group which provides a forum for senior officials to update businesses and other external organisations on our GPA accession, and for businesses to learn about the opportunities and challenges in bidding for overseas government procurement opportunities. General guidance for businesses and exporters is available on GOV.UK. If businesses have a specific question about the GPA, they can contact the department directly using the GOV.UK inquiry service.
Let me assure noble Lords that we will continue to use these mechanisms, because it is in our interests to do so in order to help businesses take advantage of GPA membership as we accede as an independent party. Information on our engagement with businesses is published in our annual report, which will cover engagement on procurement trade policy, including in relation to the GPA. Publishing a separate report on the support being given to businesses specifically for the GPA will not be necessary, I would suggest.
I turn to Amendments 100, 101 and 102. First, I remind noble Lords that the UK is seeking to accede to the GPA on broadly the same terms that we have had under EU membership, and that those terms have already been scrutinised by Parliament. I shall come back to the point made by the noble Lord on the procurement thresholds in a moment. The UK’s market access schedules and the text of the GPA were shared with the International Trade Committee in 2018, in preparation
for our departure from the EU. They were then laid before Parliament in 2019 in line with the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, or CRaG, and they concluded without objection in 2019. I assure noble Lords that the UK’s market access schedules will not change before we accede, but any changes to the GPA will again be scrutinised in line with the CRaG process. To reassure the noble Lord, Lord Fox, we expect our participation in the GPA, along absolutely substantially the same lines as now, to seamlessly transit at the end of this year so that British businesses on 1 January have the same advantages to compete for contracts overseas as they did on 31 December.
Once the GPA has entered into force for the UK—and I stress this again, to contradict a misapprehension—the negative procedure, which of course applies to both our Houses, will apply to regulations made under Clause 1 to implement the terms of the UK’s independent membership in domestic law and to respond to a limited set of scenarios within the GPA thereafter. One such scenario will be updating the list of government entities in Annex 1 of the UK’s GPA market access offer. This update is largely technical; for example, it will reflect machinery of government or departmental name changes. Do we really think that we need to go through the affirmative resolution process to change the name of the business department when no doubt it changes its name again at some point in future? We have to be practical about these matters.
I humbly suggest that given the limited nature of the powers under Clause 1, and the scrutiny that has already taken place for the UK’s GPA accession, it is not necessary to apply the affirmative procedure to regulations made under the Clause 1 powers. Despite what the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said, we are absolutely not trying to avoid scrutiny. I have made that point a number of times in your Lordships’ House and am happy to emphasise it again today.
We will act swiftly to implement the terms of the UK’s GPA membership in domestic law. We will not delay making the necessary regulations, because of course we could be in breach of our GPA obligations under international law if we were to do so.
I promised that I would come back to the point about SMEs. The noble Baroness, Lady Burt, and other noble Lords made valuable comments about this. We attach a great deal of importance to SMEs and, over the last five years, the Government have introduced a range of measures to help SMEs to compete for government procurement opportunities. Nothing in the GPA and nothing to do with acceding to it will change that. The measures that we have carried out include the prompt payment measure introduced in 2019; a reduction in bureaucracy; introducing the Public Procurement Review Service; and introducing two dedicated Crown representatives for the SME and the very small SME sectors. I would be happy to write to noble Lords and place in the Library further details on those measures.
There is always further work to do to support SMEs. We will continue to support them to compete for government procurement opportunities in the UK and, through our accession to the GPA, to compete overseas as well. One benefit of the FTA agreements that we are in the process of negotiating—as we are
seeing clearly in the Japan FTA, which we agreed recently—is having specific dedicated chapters to SMEs to make their lives easier when they trade internationally.
On the point made about thresholds and reading across what is presently in EU law, which of course has now been read across into UK law, the GPA provides a simple and flexible framework. Going forward, there will be scope for reform, which might allow us to improve commercial outcomes, remove complex and unnecessary rules, and reduce burdens on business, while continuing to comply with the UK’s international obligations. We will accede to the GPA on broadly the same terms whereby we have opportunities at present; it will give our businesses the same opportunities going forward as they had previously under the EU umbrella. The threshold for procurement in the UK will be set at the same current GPA thresholds from the end of the transition period.
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I realise that I have not managed to answer in detail all noble Lords’ questions. As ever, there were two striking questions asked by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, and I shall write to him following this debate with comprehensive answers, particularly to his point about the devolved Administrations and procurement.
I hope that I have provided reassurance to noble Lords on the matters that we have debated today. I ask that the amendment be withdrawn.