Examination of Witnesses

Part of Trade Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 9:30 am on 23 January 2018.

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Nick Dearden:

Certainly. We think there should be several stages. First, before the negotiations, Parliament or a parliamentary Committee should give consent to those negotiations and should have some role in setting out the broad framework or objectives. We also think that at that stage the Government should have a responsibility to conduct and publish impact assessments and public consultations. It is set out in great detail how those should be conducted in the European Union and the United States.

As the negotiations are proceeding, Parliament should be able to scrutinise Ministers on what they are negotiating. It should be able to see negotiating texts. We think there should be a presumption that negotiating texts should be transparent to everybody, but even if there are specific reasons why they cannot be, they should certainly be transparent to MPs. If the Government want to change their mandate, they should have to come back to Parliament or to a parliamentary Committee to ask for that.

When negotiations are finalised, there should be a guaranteed debate and, at the least, an up-or-down vote. That would make a huge difference, because at the moment at none of those stages does Parliament have any control: it is not allowed to know what is going on in the negotiations; it has no role in setting the mandate; it is not allowed to see the negotiating texts; it is not guaranteed a debate; and it cannot vote against a trade deal. We think that what I have suggested would bring us into line with other modern democracies.

I will give a very small example. CETA, which still has not had a proper debate in the House, has been discussed in detail for days by the Wallonian Assembly in Belgium. They take seriously the regulatory aspects of trade deals and we think that, post-Brexit, we need to be looking at a similar model.