The Business and Trade Committee has published a new report setting out
its intended approach to scrutinising prospective free trade
agreements (FTAs).
The Committee intends to take a targeted, thematic approach to
scrutiny of FTAs, and the Committee will usually publish a report
that assesses the likely consequences of a prospective FTA. In
most cases, the Committee will call for a debate on the
Government’s negotiating objectives.
This approach continues the method recently used by the former
International Trade Committee (ITC). The Business and Trade
Committee acquired the ITC’s remit to scrutinise the Government’s
trade policy, including how it negotiates and enacts free trade
agreements. The ITC was disbanded in April 2023 to mirror the
abolition of the Government’s Department for International Trade.
This approach, the Committee finds, will be “more productive than
exhaustive textual scrutiny of an agreement that has been
finalised and signed, and when no scope for influence or
manoeuvre remains.” Rather than waiting to carry out line-by-line
analysis of an already finalised FTA, the Committee may be able
to influence the eventual content of an agreement.
Under the Constitutional Reform and Governance (CRaG) Act 2010,
the Government is required to put a treaty requiring ratification
before Parliament for 21 sitting days. In some cases, the
Committee would press for a debate on the agreement on a neutral
motion, which simply asks Members to consider a given topic, with
no binding outcome.
However, if concerns previously raised in a Committee report on
an FTA were not adequately addressed in a final text, and the
Committee believed that the agreement should not be ratified, it
would ask the Government to enable debate on a substantive
motion, which would require the House of Commons to take a view
on the subject.
, Chair of the Business and
Trade Committee said:
“We have asked ourselves how we can best contribute to
Parliamentary scrutiny of the Government’s approach to
negotiating and implementing free trade agreements.”
We believe the targeted approach taken by the former
International Trade Committee – analysing negotiating objectives
for an FTA and identifying key policy issues – is the most useful
way to equip the House for debate and empower it to hold the
Government to account.
Line-by-line scrutiny of agreed texts, which are sometimes
thousands of pages long, would take up all of our limited time
and resource and would not enable the House to effect positive
change.
I will lay out further our position in a Select Committee
Statement to the House on Thursday 13 July, and look forward to
carrying out our role in scrutiny of the Government’s trade
policy.”
