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

On Tuesday 19 March 2024 the House of Commons considered the Trade (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) Bill. In July 2023, the UK formally agreed to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), an Asia-Pacific trade bloc of 11 other countries: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. To complete the UK’s accession process for the bloc, the Bill makes limited, mainly technical changes to domestic law to make it compliant with the CPTPP. I support the UK’s accession to CPTPP. I therefore did not oppose this Bill. However, I have a number of reservations about the agreement and supported several efforts to amend the Bill to address some of these concerns. I supported a new clause that would have required the Government to publish a report and give Parliament a vote on any new country joining CPTPP. This is needed because of the security issues and the impact on particular sectors of the economy and on jobs in the UK of a country’s accession to the agreement.

I am also concerned at the inclusion of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions in the CPTPP agreement. ISDS is secretive, avoids perfectly effective domestic public legal systems, discriminates against small and medium-sized businesses and holds back environmental and other progressive public policy changes. I therefore supported an amendment that would have required the Government to place before Parliament a review of the financial risk of the implementation of the ISDS provisions in the CPTPP’s investment chapter. In addition, I supported amendments that would have required the Government to publish a comparative analysis of the impact of the implementation of the CPTPP on UK trade and GDP and an assessment of the impact of the performer’s rights provisions in the CPTPP will have on qualifying individuals in the UK. Unfortunately, all of these amendments were defeated by the Government. The Bill passed its Third Reading.

I do not consider joining CPTPP will make up for the Government’s failure to deliver a good trade deal with Europe or its broken promise to cover 80% of the UK’s trade with free trade agreements. I consider there are benefits to joining and welcome the opportunities that will be opened up for some British businesses.

There was 4 votes on the amendments and I voted in favour.