My Lords, this group follows on naturally from the previous group and relates to parliamentary approval of agreements. In moving Amendment 35, I will also speak to the others in the group.
I was pleased on Tuesday last week to hear the Minister allay the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, about the lack of parliamentary accountability in continuity agreements. He said:
“I reassure my noble friend Lady McIntosh that the agreements that this amendment seeks to exclude have been subject to comprehensive EU scrutiny processes at mandate, negotiation and concluding stages. We were fully involved in those processes.”—[Official Report, 29/9/20; col. GC 31.]
Yes, we were involved through our MEPs. It is worth developing what the Minister was referring to a little further. I am grateful to him for bringing this comprehensive scrutiny process to the Committee’s attention. It prompted me to do a little more research, because I was interested in what he said.
4.30 pm
The European Commission document, Negotiating EU Trade Agreements: Who Does What and How We Reach a Final Deal, illustrates the stages at which elected parliamentarians are involved and have a say in the process. At the stage of preparation, the Commission
informs the Parliament of any proposed agreements. I accept that that is the case here. The second element is that the Commission “automatically sends” the negotiating directives to the Parliament; that does not happen here. The Council then
“adopts a decision authorising the Commission to open negotiations.”
On the negotiating stage, it says:
“When the Commission plans to table negotiating proposals with its counterparts, it … informs the European Parliament about them”.
That would not happen here, under the Government’s proposals. The Commission
“also informs the European Parliament at every stage of the talks about the latest developments.”
The European Parliament may make resolutions about the trade negotiations, based on those discussions with the Commission. Those resolutions are positions which the committee could take on whether the talks should proceed to the next stage. That is not happening here, but it happened under our previous continuity agreements.
At the next stage, the Commission sends final texts to the Parliament. When the Government announced that we had reached agreement with Japan, the Minister repeated the Statement by the Secretary of State. He told me and others in the House then that we should wait and see for the published text, which is very different from what our MEPs were able to have. At the finalising stage, the document says:
“The Commission sends the Council and Parliament the text of the agreement”,
when it is ready for signature. That will not happen here either. Finally, the Council agrees the text for the signing; in effect, that is the equivalent of a Government signing using the royal prerogative. I reached the conclusion that the Minister was right: this scrutiny and accountability by elected parliamentarians was indeed comprehensive.
This amendment, as with others in the group, is in effect a continuity amendment. It seeks to roll over the provisions that UK parliamentarians had in the making of FTAs, which they should also have going forward. I see no merit in disruption to parliamentary accountability. I see less merit in Northern Ireland parliamentarians being disenfranchised twice: first, as they have no MEPs to have a vote on trading regulations covering the single market, which this home nation will continue to be a member of; secondly, at Westminster, where they will have a say in trade agreements that will also affect them. This bare reality is now being seen in the Northern Ireland Assembly, as referred to on an earlier group by my noble friend Lady Suttie and others.
The Government’s discontinuity proposals can be seen in contrast to those of our biggest non-EU partner, the United States. It has been suggested that parliamentary decision-making, accountability and approval along these lines would bind the hands of our negotiators. In the United States, the Bipartisan Congressional Trade Priorities and Accountability Act 2015 sets the parameters of US trade policy and the negotiating objectives, as I mentioned in an earlier debate in Committee. Robert Lighthizer, the US trade representative, does not strike me as someone continuously bemoaning the fact that his hands are tied by Congress.
Congress delegates to the Administration the negotiation of agreements as our Parliament does to its Executive, but after the mandate has been agreed by Congress and Congress has nominated participants in the process, the trade representative knows the parameters of what will be acceptable and what will not be. That strengthens his hands; it does not bind them. Now, our MPs will not be empowered much more than being given information that the Government wish to share at the time of their choosing, at their discretion, on an ad hoc basis and not through a legislative framework.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and others have indicated how these agreements are so different from their predecessors. Liz Truss, the Secretary of State, says that we will go way beyond continuity in the Japan agreement and have scrutiny that goes way below what was there for the original Japanese agreement. However, the Minister has said that we will go beyond the CRaG process for that agreement—but not as far as the Japanese Parliament; the National Diet will vote in both its houses on the Government’s proposals before ratification. Why will we not have that ability?
Earlier in Committee, the Minister said that
“when negotiating new free trade agreements we have gone above and beyond the baseline CRaG process”.—[Official Report, 29/9/20; col. GC 32.]
Why? If CRaG is so good, why have the Government decided to go beyond it? Why did they feel that they should go above and beyond? What did they recognise as deficient in the CRaG process and something that they wanted to go above and beyond? Can the Minister explain? If his position—I commend him for it—is that the CRaG process is the baseline, why not do this for all agreements going forward and make a statutory framework so that everything is clear? Parliamentary scrutiny and accountability should never be dependent on the discretion of Ministers telling us what they think we should know and when. Last week in the Commons, Mr Speaker warned of this in stark terms. In an earlier debate, the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, eloquently made the case that it would be unthinkable to do this for our health system, so what is materially different for our trade system?
Let me be clear on what the Minister has told us: that British parliamentarians were involved in comprehensive scrutiny and accountability for the mandating, negotiating and concluding stages of our continuity agreements and that, for new agreements, CRaG is the starting point and the Government are willing to go above and beyond it—all okay so far. This amendment would put on a continuity footing a comprehensive approach that we believe is appropriate given the scale and breadth of trade agreements going forward. It builds on the CRaG baseline.
Finally, I have reflected on what Ministers have said repeatedly, both during debates on this Bill and previously, about the CRaG process. I reread the Second Reading debate on what was then the CRaG Bill. Interestingly, in his speech outlining it to Parliament, Jack Straw made a point of separating EU treaties from the CRaG process. He said:
“That is because there is already more extensive provision requiring those to be ratified by this House and by the other place.”—[Official Report, Commons, 20/10/09; col. 805.]
Even at the outset of the CRaG process in 2009, a distinction was made that European treaties, which have different processes, would be considered as different from others. In these amendments, we argue that CRaG is the baseline and that we should put building on it on a statutory basis so that there is proper accountability and scrutiny for Parliament for deep and comprehensive trading relationships going forward. I beg to move.