UK Parliament / Open data

Trade (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) Bill [HL]

I am grateful, as always, for the debate we have had around these important points. I hope noble Lords will agree that I have covered in previous groups the importance of reviewing these free trade agreements and how they impact our economy. As I say, I passionately believe that they will be enormously positive. The noble Lord, Lord McNicol, may be overestimating the threats in areas such as privatisation, steel dumping and so on. We have strong protections from the TRA protecting our economy in areas such as steel. This free trade agreement does not affect our ability to control that area of our economy.

I am afraid that I cannot see how this FTA would lead to increased levels of privatisation. We have been very careful about protecting key areas of our economy. To some extent, my job as Investment Minister is to encourage flows of capital into the UK, and we were asked earlier for impact assessments around that. I would be comfortable with seeing flows of capital from CPTPP member countries into the UK: we are aligned with them, and they are our allies—we want to do more trade with them—but I do not think it will lead to the negative consequences to which the noble

Lord alluded. However, I am comfortable to have further discussions. As I said earlier, we should look carefully in these debates at the sorts of areas that we wish to review to make sure that the impacts around FTAs are properly understood, but I would be very reluctant to have them codified in amendments to this Bill, for obvious reasons.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
834 cc369-370GC 
Session
2023-24
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords Grand Committee
Back to top