My Lords, I first thank my noble friends, Lord Grimstone, the Minister, and Lord Younger of Leckie, together with their officials, for the time they gave me yesterday to discuss my concerns on this and other amendments.
Rather like the Agriculture Bill, we have a slight overlap of amendments. Inevitably, I am afraid that I will have to touch on Amendment 23 from the noble Lord, Lord Purvis of Tweed, and Amendment 17, which relates to investor-state dispute settlements. I will major a bit more on those when we come to them, but they are interlinked, because of Amendments 69 and 73.
The earlier amendments, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Grantchester and Lord Oates, refer to the international agreements. This is a continuity Bill, and I have little doubt that this Government—my Government—and indeed a Government in the colours of the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester would abide by their international agreements. What concerns me more, however, is the wording picked by my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering in Amendment 69, where she talks not of international agreements, but of
“standards established by primary and subordinate legislation in the United Kingdom”
and, in Amendment 73, where the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, talks about the
“appropriate authority to take action in pursuit of the UK’s climate and environmental goals”.
I am in total support of the Government in their ambition that climate change and environmental issues should be right at the centre of our trade policy. I hope that, when he sums up, my noble friend will confirm that that is indeed the Government’s position. My noble friend Lord Grimstone told me that yesterday, but it would be nice to have it on the official record.
However, my problem lies in looking at other countries that have tried to impose stricter standards other than international agreements and then get taken to court under ISDSs. I have two examples that I will expand upon. The first is Philip Morris v Australia in 2015. Philip Morris lost that case, and rightly so, but the problem was that it cost Australia 22 million Australian dollars, which seems an unnecessary amount of money for our Government to have to fork out if they are taken to court in a similar case. The other case that I shall mention at this stage is Cargill v Mexico, where Cargill was awarded $77.3 million when it won a case against a tax on high-fructose corn syrup that was introduced to address health concerns.
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There are two prongs to these amendments, as I see it. One is the actual wording and one is what happens when you do not have the wording and how exposed are the Government? As we look forward, as most noble Lords have said, we want to ratchet up our standards, our laws and the way we tackle the environment and climate change, but it would be a tragedy if we let this Bill go through and it did not give us the chance to help to protect the Government to be able to do that as and when they wanted to in the future.