Tag: Nick Thomas-Symonds

The speech made by Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade, in the House of Commons on 29 June 2022.

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for her statement and for advance sight of it. The extension of safeguards will come as a welcome relief to the steel sector. It is not anti-competitive to provide a level playing field for our steel industry. I also support the decision to exclude Ukrainian steel.

Labour backs our steel communities up and down the country. Our steel sector is foundational for our economy; we must support it, now and as we transition to net zero. However, it is regrettable that resolution of the issue has once again gone to the eleventh hour, just as it did when the present Foreign Secretary extended the safeguards last year, and that the Secretary of State did not even attend the Select Committee this morning to face scrutiny.

Labour has called on the Secretary of State to extend the safeguards, but also to change the law in advance of this latest decision. When the same safeguards were extended last year, Labour called on the Government to introduce emergency legislation, which we would have supported, so that the national interest could be invoked by Ministers in relation to Trade Remedies Authority advice. It is too weighted towards the interests of importers rather than those of domestic industry, and too narrow in scope in that it does not give sufficient weight to issues such as regional employment and support for nationally important industries, and, indeed, the international context for these safeguarding decisions. The United States and the European Union have such measures, and in the case of the EU, the World Trade Organisation has not found the extension of the safeguards to be in breach of its rules. In short, if there is to be a challenge at the WTO, it will be a mess entirely of the Government’s own making.

Although, of course, I thank the Trade Remedies Authority for its work, there are still issues with its framework.

Ministers appeared to agree with Labour’s analysis when, a year ago, the Government announced a wider review of the Trade Remedies Authority framework “as an urgent priority”, in the words of the then International Trade Secretary—the present Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss). Well, it has not been a priority for Ministers. That review has disappeared into the long grass, leaving the country in the position we are in today. Had the review been completed, with wider factors eligible for consideration by the TRA, the Secretary of State would be in a much stronger position, just like other major economies that have steel tariffs in place and have had no problems at the WTO. Ministers knew that this issue of extending the safeguards was coming, but they did not plan for it properly, either in terms of our domestic law or internationally, by working with those countries that have extended safeguards without any problems.

Let me also put on record that the last-minute rush to extend safeguards in no way makes up for the shortcomings in support for the steel industry from this Government, and that Labour has set out plans to secure the industry’s future for years to come by investing £3 billion in the transition to net zero over the next 10 years.

May I ask the Secretary of State when that wider review of the Trade Remedies Authority framework will be completed? May I also ask whether she intends to introduce further legislation once the review is completed? Will she publish all the TRA papers relating to this decision, and will she tell us what lessons have been learned from the WTO ruling on the EU safeguards that have been extended? Finally, can she reassure steelworkers and their families that the framework will have been fully reformed before this matter is considered again?

The speech made by Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade, in the House of Commons on 5 January 2022.

I am grateful to the Secretary of State for her statement and for advance sight of it.

I would say at the outset that we on the Labour Benches are in favour of negotiating trade deals that benefit UK workers and businesses and promote our values around the world, and we will not hold the Government to impossible standards, but we will hold Ministers to what they have promised people they will deliver from the negotiations. Those promises make it even more important that Ministers show strength at the negotiating table and defend UK interests to the utmost. Other countries, in future negotiations, will look at what was conceded to the Australian negotiators and take it as a starting point.

We already have a UK-Japan trade deal that benefits Japanese exporters five times as much as it does UK exporters. A worrying pattern is emerging of not standing up for UK interests. It is what makes the Government’s failure in so many aspects of this deal so costly for the United Kingdom. The Government’s own impact assessment shows a £94 million hit to our farming, forestry and fishing sectors and a £225 million hit to our semi-processed food industry.

The Government claim that they are trying to mitigate that with tariff-free access being phased in over several years, but what is being done is totally inadequate. On beef and sheepmeat, the phasing-in period is 15 years, but the quotas being set by the Government for imports from Australia are far higher than the current level of imports. On beef imports, for example, when Japan negotiated a deal with Australia it limited the tariff-free increase in the first year to 10% on the previous year. South Korea achieved something similar and limited the increase to 7%. But this Government have negotiated a first-year tariff-free allowance of a 6,000% increase on the amount of beef the UK currently imports from Australia. On sheepmeat, in the first year of the deal, the Government have conceded a 67% increase in the tariff-free quota. Why did Ministers not achieve the same as Japan and South Korea?

Why have Ministers failed to ensure that Australian agricultural corporations are not held to the same high standards as our farmers? The Secretary of State mentioned animal welfare standards in her statement, but what the Government have agreed is a non-regression clause. To be clear, that does not mean that the standards will be the same in both countries. That is not fair competition. What will actually happen is that meat produced to far lower animal welfare standards will get tariff-free access to the UK market. So much for the promise of the Secretary of State’s predecessor that the Government had no intention of striking a deal that did not benefit our farmers. Is it any wonder that Australia’s former negotiator at the WTO said:

“I don’t think we have ever done as well as this”?

On climate change, which the Secretary of State mentioned, the COP26 president said, on 1 December, that the deal would reaffirm

“both parties’ commitments to upholding our obligations under the Paris agreement, including limiting global warming to 1.5°.”—[Official Report, 1 December 2021; Vol. 704, c. 903.]

But an explicit commitment to limiting global warming to 1.5° is not in the deal. Perhaps the Secretary of State can tell us what went wrong in those final days. Does the Secretary of State also accept that the failure to include that explicitly in this important deal damages the UK’s ability to lead on climate change on the world stage—[Interruption.] Ministers shout at me, but they told the House on 1 December that it would be included. What went wrong?

The Secretary of State has confirmed that she has asked the Trade and Agriculture Commission, as she is required to do, for advice on the impact of the deal on statutory protections for agriculture. Will she confirm when the Government’s own report will be available?

On scrutiny, why are the Government promising a monitoring report approximately two years after the agreement comes into effect, and every two years thereafter? Why not every year? In addition, the Secretary of State spoke about the impact of trade deals on the whole of the United Kingdom. Can she confirm what steps she will take to address any concerns raised by the devolved Administrations, and how she will formally involve them in the ratification process?

Tariff-free access to our UK market is a prize Ministers should not give away easily. However, looking at the concessions made by this Government, are people not right to worry that the Government are more interested in a quick press release announcing a completed deal than they are in standing up for UK jobs and livelihoods?

The comments made by Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Shadow Home Secretary, on 16 December 2021.

Labour supports a free trade deal with Australia that promotes UK interests, increases exports and creates jobs across the country. This deal is a crucial one for the Government’s trade negotiating strategy going forward as it sets precedents for what other countries are likely to demand in future agreements.

We will scrutinise the details of this agreement very carefully and will hold the Government to promises made to farming communities, its pledges on environmental protections, and on food and drink standards.

But notable from the outset is that the Government ‘list of benefits’ contains no mention of climate targets or the impact of the removal of import tariffs on UK agriculture.

Labour will hold the Government to account on the benefits it has promised to deliver from this deal.

The comments made by Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade, on 8 December 2021.

The 2019 Conservative manifesto promised to negotiate a number of free trade agreements, including with the United States, within three years.

Time is ticking down and Ministers have not even identified the resources they need to implement existing agreements and conduct other negotiations at the same time. This is letting down UK workers and businesses.

Not only that, it is deeply concerning that the devolved administrations do not have the information they need to consider trade deals, this is extremely incompetent.

Ministers must get a grip of this and act urgently. Promoting British jobs and standards around the world should be a top priority.