My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 51. I thank my noble friend Lord Bassam for setting the scene for this debate. The amendment inserts a new clause into the Trade Bill which protects the NHS and publicly funded health and care services from any form of control
from outside the United Kingdom. Like my noble friend, I thank the BMA and the Trade Justice Movement for their briefings and the Library for an excellent brief. I also thank the noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Fox, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for their support.
The Government are pressing ahead with trade negotiations with the United States, the EU and elsewhere, despite there being no system of transparency or scrutiny of trade deals. Your Lordships’ House passed an amendment to the previous Trade Bill on parliamentary scrutiny. Since then, the Government have not made good on promises to give Parliament a say in new trade deals. Noble Lords should support a similar amendment to this Bill. The Trade Bill should be amended to protect the UK’s high food and animal welfare standards, and to protect the NHS and public health from provisions in trade deals.
The Covid crisis has hit global trade. It is essential that the UK’s trade policy maintains the right to regulate, protects the NHS and supports countries in the global south. We are concerned that, at present, Parliament does not have adequate powers to guide and scrutinise trade negotiations. My noble friends Lord Stevenson and Lord Lennie explained this to the Committee on Tuesday and the current process provides no legal mechanism to directly influence or permanently block trade agreements. This could mean the UK entering into trade deals that have a significant impact on public health and the domestic healthcare sector without Parliament having a meaningful role in scrutiny. As the Trade Bill is currently the only legislative vehicle for Parliament’s oversight of trade negotiations, we believe that additional scrutiny mechanisms are vital to protect the NHS and public health as the UK begins to negotiate independent free trade agreements in earnest.
As my noble friend said, this amendment seeks to ensure that our NHS is protected. It is necessary because this Government, and the one before them, have form in this area. Last year, noble Lords discussed the Healthcare (International Arrangements) Bill. It gave the Secretary of State powers, as the Constitution Committee put it, to make any healthcare deal with anyone, anywhere in the world. I am pleased to say that your Lordships’ House successfully refocused that Bill on to the issue of 27 million European health insurance card holders and their interests at the time, instead of laying the groundwork for trade deals involving our NHS. On 5 February last year, I said that
“it seems to open the door to healthcare negotiations across the rest of the world. In other words, it also lays the basis for trade and foreign affairs discussion concerning healthcare. One must ask: which countries do the Government have in mind, and for what purpose and why is the Bill addressing world issues and not limited to the European Union?”—[Official Report, 5/2/19; col. 1484.]
That was remedied by your Lordships’ House. However, it is clear that if that Bill had been agreed as originally drafted, it would have opened the way for this Government already to be in negotiations with the USA and others, and to give them open access to our NHS.
While the Government have repeatedly pledged that the NHS is “not on the table” in trade negotiations, leaked documents reveal that that is not the case, as my noble friend Lord Bassam outlined. Let us be quite safe.
The Trade Bill should be amended to protect the NHS; we should have these safeguards in place, in statute. It is vital that the Bill protects the health and social care sectors by safeguarding future options for rolling back either privatisation or restructuring. We need to protect our right to restructure our health and social care services into a more collaborative model. Trade agreements must not be permitted to lock in current or higher levels of privatisation within the NHS in England, nor lead to privatisation in the devolved nations without their say so.
To do this, the Bill must ensure that the health and social care sectors are excluded from the scope of all future trade agreements. The Bill must rule out investor protection and dispute resolution mechanisms in UK trade deals to ensure that private foreign companies cannot sue the UK Government for legitimate public procurement and regulatory decisions that we decide to take with regard to our public services, including the NHS. If a future Government want to change the structure of the NHS, they must not be prevented from doing so by trade deals.
It is worth noting that an EU investment treaty recently resulted in the Slovakian Government being ordered to pay €22 million in damages to a foreign private health insurance firm after it decided to reverse the privatisation of its national sickness insurance market. Investor protection mechanisms have also been used extensively to challenge public health initiatives like tobacco plain packaging. There is a great deal at stake here. We need to include protections to ensure that NHS price control mechanisms and the UK’s current intellectual property regime are maintained.