Legal and trade experts to give evidence on trade instruments

Tomorrow the House of Lords International Agreements Committee, chaired by the former trade minister Lord Johnson of Lainston, will continue its inquiry into how the UK should deploy its trade instruments by questioning experts in international trade law and policy.  

The session will take place on Tuesday 21 April 2026 at 2pm and can be followed live on Parliament TV. 

Giving evidence will be: 

• Sam Lowe, Partner, Flint Global  

• Dr Mona Paulsen, Assistant Professor of Law, LSE Law School  

• Prof Holger Hestermeyer, Professor of International and EU Law, Diplomatic Academy of Vienna  

Questions the committee is likely to ask include: 

• Which of the trade agreements that the UK has signed with third countries since leaving the EU is particularly effective or well-utilised, and by which sectors? 

• What types of international agreements support trade in these areas of comparative advantage for the UK, such as financial services, digital and the creative industries? 

• How persuasive is the Government's argument that narrower or non-binding instruments deliver value by being negotiated faster and more flexibly than FTAs? 

• How would the documented increase in the UK's use of non-binding instruments be explained? 

• To what extent does the recent use of non-binding trade arrangements containing tariff commitments challenge core WTO principles, such as Most-Favoured-Nation treatment and the “substantially all the trade” requirement under GATT? 

• How should the UK weigh the commercial benefits of closer regulatory cooperation with partners against concerns about regulatory autonomy, public policy space, and accountability to Parliament? 

• Can the proliferation of sectoral tariff agreements, particularly in a non-binding form be seen as a temporary adaptation to a turbulent global economy, or as a structural shift away from a rules-based trading system? Should the UK accept such a trend or resist it?