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Free Trade Agreement: Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway

My Lords, speaking as a member of your Lordships’ European Affairs Committee, whose report we are debating, I welcome these three agreements. That may surprise the Minister, who has taken a certain amount of criticism on some of the other debates that we have had on trade agreements, but I do. It is important to avoid the legal and, potentially, practical hiatus in our trading relationship with those three countries that would have followed from our ceasing to be covered by the EEA at the beginning of 2021, this year. Now, as a result of those agreements, that will not happen, which is certainly good news.

However, I have to say to the Government that they would get more credit on an occasion like this if they did not claim, as official spokesmen have done, that these agreements were in some way a massive break- through, a first new-era post-Brexit set of free trade agreements. That is the sort of hyperbole that I am afraid, since it is not true, tends to discredit what is actually a perfectly well-done job. These are nothing of the sort. We have actually been in a free trade area relationship with these countries for many decades, since before we joined the European Community when we were part of EFTA with them. I have to admit—to my shame, because there is the problem of ageism—that I was part of the negotiations for the free trade agreement with Norway and the other members of EFTA when we joined the European Community.

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We have been in an even closer trade relationship with these countries since the establishment of the single market and the conclusion of the EEA agreements at the end of the 1980s, when we were all effectively in that single market together. So, as with other rollover agreements that we have debated, this is largely—although I agree not entirely—a case of running hard to stand still. Perhaps, when he replies, the Minister could spell out in what respect these agreements go beyond what we had as a member of the European Economic Area.

Then, as was referred to by both previous speakers, there is the question of applying these agreements in Northern Ireland. We know by now that nothing about the protocol is ever plain or simple, but will trade between Northern Ireland and these three countries be regulated by these three agreements or by Northern Ireland’s de facto—and in some respects de jure—inclusion in the EU’s single market? That rather matches the position of these countries.

Speaking of the EU’s single market, it is after all a living, evolving reality. Can the Minister say how the UK will be able to avoid our businesses and businesspeople

finding themselves at a disadvantage to their continental competitors, as the latter improve their access to the markets of these three countries? This will occur whenever the European Union develops a new instrument for dealing, for example, with trade in services, as it will automatically apply through the consultative procedures that Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland are bound to follow. How will we keep pace with that? What steps are the Government taking to ensure that the linked issues of access to fishing waters and tariffs on fishery products are settled, from 2022 onwards, at the beginning of the year and not, as this year, half way through it?

I do not apologise for straying a little beyond the precise confines of this debate on trade agreements with these three European countries because, as our post-Brexit trade policy evolves, it is important to situate the individual parts of it within an overall frame- work. I wonder if the Minister can say where matters now stand with respect to negotiations with the United States which, we are constantly reminded, is our largest single-country market. What are the implications for our bid to join the CPTPP of Pacific bordering nations or the recent similar bids to join that organisation by China and Taiwan? Will the bids be considered together or separately, and what will the consequences be for our trade relationship with China if we both find ourselves in the CPTPP and bound by its rules?

I revert finally to something I have raised with the Minister before: what progress is the Department for International Trade making in preparing to negotiate, with the countries of Africa and Latin America, those new-era, ground-breaking trade agreements, rather than the simple rollover ones that have been negotiated so far? Should countries in those regions not be given a higher priority than they have received so far? My own unhesitating answer is that they should, and I hope the Minister says that in future they will be given a higher priority.

The Minister has been patient and meticulous in replying to all these debates. I hope he replies to as many of the questions I have posed as possible when he responds to this debate, and the rest in writing thereafter.