Examination of Witness

Part of Trade Bill – in a Public Bill Committee at 2:45 pm on 16 June 2020.

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Nick von Westenholz:

In principle, the idea of mutual recognition agreements can work. There is nothing that we would object to in an MRA in principle. An important aspect of this is that, if we simply try to hold overseas producers to precisely the same standards as UK producers, that might create as many problems as it solves. We need to develop a mechanism for comparing standards as easily as possible to certify, accredit or whatever it might be a degree or level of production standards that we accept as equivalent to our own.

A lot of the things I have mentioned already demonstrate the complexity and difficulty with some of these issues. That is one of the reasons why we have suggested the establishment of a trade and food and farming standards commission to get under the skin of all these pretty tricky policy areas and set out a road map for Government of the sort of policies and legislation needed to tackle the issues properly. We would like that to be established in law, under the Trade Bill or any other legislation, so that it reports to Parliament and contributes to some of the shortfalls in parliamentary accountability and scrutiny that have already been flagged to the Committee. We think that that is a very good and sensible idea. That commission would absolutely look at such things as MRAs and broader issues of how you manage and measure equivalence.

On the Trade Remedies Authority, we have not flagged any specific concerns other than to acknowledge that the constitution of the committee is very broad, and quite a lot of leeway is provided to the Secretary of State in the formation of that committee. We would like to explore further the possibility of ensuring specific representation for specific sectors if necessary. Having said that, we would hope that the TRA, even in its current format as set out by the Bill, would consult fully and take into account all parts of the economy when advising on trade remedies.