Andrew Griffith
MP for Arundel and South Downs · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. First, let me pay tribute to my own predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Central Devon (Sir Mel Stride), and let me welcome the Chancellor to his role. He is already responsible for the highest borrowing costs for 28 years.”
“The Chancellor does not know the answer. On the Treasury’s own statistics, it would take 38,000 average income tax payers to make up for the loss of Chris Rokos. That is a lot of breathing space paid for. It means higher taxes for everyone else, or lower public spending. We know what Labour will choose.”
“I welcome the moratorium on, and potential saving of, West Sussex, in response to my opposition and that of thousands of residents who did not want our historic county cleaved in two.”
“Friend the Member for Droitwich and Evesham (Nigel Huddleston), were involved in the commencement of the planning for the negotiation that we are discussing today.”
“Without that, the Government could never have launched the consultation this morning on deepening our trade relationships with Indonesia, the Philippines, the UAE and Uruguay—all countries with whom the UK should seek closer ties. The next Conservative Government will go further and faster on trade.”
“Finally, I look forward to hearing an unabashed welcome for the benefits that will flow to his Maidenhead constituents from the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mr Reynolds). Had his party’s policy been in force, this agreement could not have been struck at all.”
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“We deserve a Bill with a proper thought-through plan. The Government have turned a negotiation into a crisis, a crisis into an emergency and an emergency into this nationalisation. We know that Ministers, however well-meaning, will be unable to resist using their power to tilt the playing field in favour of steel businesses that they themselves own: no longer the referee, they will be on the pitch wearing one of the teams’ shirts. There is no better example of that than their plans on steel tariffs.”
“When the Government last ran British Steel in the late 1970s, the company’s losses hit £1.3 billion a year. Since Labour’s botched nationalisation of just a year ago, it has already spent £500 million of taxpayers’ money—£1.3 million a day. Where is the Government’s published, costed and scrutinised plan for what nationalised British Steel will look like in five years’ time, or even in one year’s time? I have read the Bill and there is not one. There is no provision for a proper impact assessment before the sweeping powers are used. There is no acknowledgment of the monumental decommissioning liabilities—in the billions—that will sit on the Treasury’s balance sheet. There is a sunset clause, but it can be extended indefinitely by Ministers—a sunset where the sun never sets. The House deserves better than this.”
“We have a plan for sustainable steelmaking. The Government do not have a plan for sustainable steelmaking. Ministers themselves have admitted that the blast furnaces in Scunthorpe will close. They are reverting to a plan that already exists. The Bill is an indictment of this Government’s modus operandi—a spray and pray Government who write blank cheques from the taxpayer and call that a strategy. We are doomed to relearn the hard lessons of the 1970s: if it moves, tax the hell out of it; when it stops moving, subsidise it. It was socialist idol Tony Benn who wanted to nationalise everything that moved, and one result that the Government may care to look at was the state-owned Kirkby Manufacturing and Engineering company, which simultaneously made car radiators and orange juice.”
“The hon. Member would be better addressing that question to his own Ministers, who, notwithstanding the nationalisation, acknowledged that the blast furnaces will cease—they will go dark and close on this Government’s watch. The Bill does not protect blast furnaces and he should invite the Minister, when he winds up, to talk about the future there. There was a plan to invest in British Steel in Redcar to secure those jobs, but the Government pulled the chain—”
“There was absolutely a plan before the election to open arc furnaces in Redcar—that was absolutely case—and to move Scunthorpe operations to Redcar. I asked the Secretary of State to address the issue of tariffs. There is no better example of the folly of these plans—”
“No, I am going to make some progress on tariffs. A number of hon. Members have raised this very important issue, shedding light on the way that the Government are tilting the playing field on tariffs. Under this Government, we have already seen a flurry of Trump-style tariffs—doubling steel tariffs and halving quotas—that elevate the interests of one firm over the automotive, aerospace, advanced manufacturing and defence sectors. Firms involved in the supply chains of AUKUS and Tempest are now looking at shifting tooling and jobs to other countries, instead of manufacturing components here.”
“My hon. Friend makes exactly the right point, and that point has been made by other hon. Members and across the manufacturing industry. We are at risk of losing critical parts of our defence, aerospace and automotive supply chains.”
“There is no point securing what the Secretary of State thinks is in the national interest for one steel manufacturer in a particular location if the foreseeable consequence, unintended or otherwise, is to ship offshore large parts of our high-end automotive manufacturing, engineering and defence industries, so that they are lost forever and conducted in other countries. I have raised that serious point with the Minister, and I ask him to address it.”
“My right hon. Friend and my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden and Solihull East (Saqib Bhatti) have made exactly the right point: we need a more thoughtful approach. I have written to the Secretary of State, as have many of my colleagues, asking that the tariffs are delayed for six months while the Department does more work; that the Government investigate more specialist grades of steel; that within the broader tariff buckets, they look again at the steel alloys used in the defence, aerospace and automotive sectors that are simply not made here today, because there are perhaps unintended consequences of the tariffs; that they be more forensic in their approach; and that they bring forward the measures the Conservatives have talked about on industrial energy costs, which are damaging not just the steel industry but many other industries’ and our basis on which to compete.”
“We would not pit industries against each other, as Labour is now doing, and we would not sit idly by for a rerun of the 1970s horror show that Labour made Britain sit through the last time around.”
“I know that on the Government Benches, some of the truths that we share today may not be immediately popular, but past Governments failed because they were happy to do what was popular in the moment, without looking at the long-term consequences. The truth is that we should not be nationalising British Steel, and certainly not with the Bill in this form—my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden and Solihull East made the point about the sweeping nature of the clauses, whatever we think about the Secretary of State’s intentions. We have demonstrated in the past, and we will again, that there are other options, such as partnering with the private sector and negotiating a better deal. The Conservatives would fix the cause, not the symptoms; we would save steelmaking in this country not through state quick fixes, but by fixing the state itself.”
“I am afraid that the hon. Member ought to look again at the calendar, because I was not only not in Government but not in this House—I was getting on in business trying to help grow the British economy. When the same issue arose in Port Talbot, it was the previous Government—indeed, my right hon. Friend who is now the Leader of the Opposition—who took action and were willing to back the private sector owner to secure the future of steelmaking in Wales. That was what we did in Government. We are talking about the issue of tariffs because it is intrinsically related to the Government and the taxpayer taking ownership of one participant in a complex industry supply chain.”
“I will be very brief. I thank the Minister for his remarks. One ideological difference he has not mentioned once is the huge gulf between those on our side and his party on energy, and the Government are not going to have a sustainable steel industry due to energy.”
“Although the Conservative party does not, of course, oppose a consultation on this subject—if that was a commitment given by the Government it is in the interests of good faith and democracy that they proceed to have such a consultation—we would nevertheless be extremely cautious about rushing too quickly to legislate. In the interests of time and productivity, I will leave my remarks there.”
“This Government cannot deliver a once-in-a-generation change to workers’ rights—330 pages of new legislation that has caused a degree of indigestion in the employment market as it passes through it like an egg through a snake—and then immediately come back and say that we need to unleash even more uncertainty. The law that we pass most often in this House is the law of unintended consequences. Although we are well-meaning, it behoves us all to have regard to the ever-increasing proportion of our young people who are unemployed and unable to find work, in part no doubt due to the additional regulatory burden.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Bromborough (Justin Madders) on securing this important debate. I regret that he himself was a victim of unemployment, cut down in his prime by a capricious boss, although I have greatly enjoyed working with the current Minister, the hon. Member for Halifax (Kate Dearden), to try to do what we all seek to do: improve the employment lot of our fellow citizens. Single worker status is not a minor legal tidy-up; it would be a fundamental restructuring of the labour market—the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Bromborough mentioned that in his opening remarks. For that reason, the Conservatives believe that we should proceed cautiously. We cannot have it both ways.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker, for your dispensation to speak on behalf of my constituents. Not once in six years in this House have my constituents written to me saying that we need to cleave West Sussex in two, with two educational catchment areas, two different highways authorities, two social care services and two expensive town halls and council offices. Will the Minister, at this late stage, listen to my constituents, reject the proposals put forward by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens to cleave our ancient county in two, and join me in saving West Sussex?”
“The Government do not create jobs; business does. With unemployment rising, this is the last chance to ask the Secretary of State a question ahead of the start of April when a tsunami of business rate rises will hit. Shops and restaurants will see a 50% increase on average and the business rates of hotels will double. He and I both represent wonderful Sussex constituencies full of hospitality, high street and tourism businesses, but young people need those jobs. For their sake and for others, will he finally postpone his business rate rise?”
“The Secretary of State forgets that I have not even been here for 14 years. Some days it feels like that, but I can assure him that it is not the case. There was no answer to that question, so let me try another. Does he agree that there is something pretty badly wrong with employment law in this country when Peter Mandelson, the friend of a convicted paedophile and leaker of classified Government documents, walks away with a £75,000 pay-off? The permanent secretary thinks that is good value for money. Will the Secretary of State review Labour’s policy of uncapping employment tribunal payouts for the highest earners?”
“Recently, albeit after she had left Government and perhaps moved beyond the influence of those on the Treasury Bench, she spoke about the overall challenge of employment for our wider economy—the coastal, seasonal and hospitality businesses on the frontline, where so many young people, whom we are all here to represent in a non-partisan fashion, had their very first shot at a job, as I did myself. The right hon. Lady said: “I think we’ve got to recognise, it’s not even a double whammy, it’s not even a triple whammy. I talk about the challenges on business rates, the challenges on VAT, the challenges of the minimum wage going up and the living wage going up”. Will the Minister update us on the Chancellor’s latest thinking on this measure?”
“Members would not dream of taking out their phones under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer, but if they did so right now and looked at the Financial Times , they would see that Treasury sources are briefing that the Department will be scaling this measure back. That would be part of what I think is U-turn No. 16, although it is very hard to tell—being a bear of little brain, I cannot always keep up with the number of U-turns the Government have made. My final words come from the author of this strategy herself: the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), who was my interlocutor throughout the passage of the 300-page, 1970s, red tape, job-destroying unemployment Bill.”
“It is far less often that I find myself in common cause with the Tony Blair Institute or the Resolution Foundation, which have both, in the last 48 hours alone, reiterated their concern about the changes that the Minister advocates we vote for and pass today. This is not some Tufton Street think-tank expressing concern but the Resolution Foundation: the finishing school for aspirant young Labour Ministers—sadly, some of the talent that sits elsewhere on the Labour Benches is overlooked—and the ideological heart of the modern Labour party. The Resolution Foundation has said that this change is the wrong direction to go in and called for a moratorium. I am sure that right hon. and hon.”
“Why would any of us in this Committee be passive or neutral about passing measures that every economist and business group that has looked at them believes are likely to discourage firms from taking a chance on those young people? I often find myself in common cause with the Federation of Small Businesses. It does wonderful work and represents the smallest and most fragile businesses across all our constituencies, which we all want to see succeed on our high streets and grow. They are where growth comes from. The same is true of the British Chambers of Commerce, which also has concerns about the approach the Government are taking to the wage rates for 16 to 20-year-olds—people getting their very first chance at work.”
“The latest figures show that 957,000 young people are not in education, employment or training. Although the Government inherited that number, they are actually making it worse—and that is before the impact of the regulations and the unemployment Bill, with which the Minister is deeply acquainted. If we look at the overall level of young people who wish to find work—those who are formally looking for work—we see that the figure for youth unemployment is 16.1% for young people between the ages of 16 and 24, the very young people in respect of whom the above-inflation rate changes make up the largest part of the regulations before us.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I wish the Minister all the very best; she has already demonstrated that she is an effective performer on behalf of her constituents. In your time, Mr Stringer, you will have seen many Ministers pushed out to defend the indefensible, but very rarely are they caught in the action of passing a statutory instrument while, in real time, the Treasury is peddling and briefing stories of a U-turn—before the ink is even dry, before the vote has been taken and before the regulations have been agreed to. Why is that? I think colleagues across the House, who want the best for our country and for young people, recognise that there is a growing crisis of young people being unable to access the work market.”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I wrote to the Chancellor on behalf of a constituent on 10 December last year; I followed that up on 6 January and 20 January, but on each occasion I received no substantive reply. It was only when I tabled a written question that Ministers finally informed me that my correspondence had been passed to HM Revenue and Customs. They told me three weeks ago that they would reply by 11 February, yet they have not done so, nor have they written to me. It has been more than two months since I first raised the matter with the Chancellor. I have no answer for my constituent. Can you advise me, Madam Deputy Speaker, on what further avenues there are to ensure that this Government treat Members of this House properly?”
“There is an absence of provisions for mobility to allow our service industries to really integrate in India, restricting our consultants, engineers and architects from practising on the ground.”
“However, as any business leader will tell us, the devil is not just in the detail of such deals, but in what is not in them. I welcome the excellent report by the Business and Trade Committee, which is very thorough and an important part of the scrutiny process of this House. We are a nation for which services represent nearly half of our global exports. I am afraid it appears that the Government have accepted a deal that is disappointingly thin on the sectors where Britain leads the world. The inclusion of services in this deal was the No. 1 priority of the previous Government’s negotiations. Instead, this deal settles for locking in existing levels of liberalisation—all good—rather than breaking new ground on services.”
“And let us be absolutely clear: this agreement is a tangible benefit of the decision the British people made in 2016 to leave the political institution of Europe; the fruit of the independent trade policy we regained, allowing the United Kingdom to negotiate once again as a sovereign state, just like Canada, Australia and Switzerland —Britain first, not Britain hoping against experience that its interests would float to the top of a soup of 27 other conflicting flavours. Since July 2024, the Indian economy has grown by 11%. For context, the European Union has grown by 1.9% in the same period. Under this Government, the British economy has grown by just 1.6%. Exports matter, so this deal has the potential to be a key part of a growth plan for our economy.”
“His advocacy of free trade, including in this House, was always about its benefits for ordinary people: cheaper food, higher wages and fewer incentives for people to wage destructive wars that had a huge impact on ordinary people. We Conservatives agree. Those on the Conservative Benches will always be the party of free trade, where it benefits our country. That is why it was a Conservative Government who signed new landmark trade agreements with the EU, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and negotiated the entry of the UK to the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-Pacific partnership. It is why it was the Conservative Government who laid the foundations for this free trade agreement with India.”
“I am delighted to see not just the excellent Minister for Trade, but the Secretary of State. [ Interruption. ] I did; just bank the win. I read that the Secretary of State is being earmarked as a caretaker Prime Minister, so we are pleased that he has the time to spend with us—I think we have 10 minutes before Labour colleagues have to run upstairs. Richard Cobden said: “I believe that Free Trade will do more to civilise the world than all the treaties of peace that have ever been signed.” He was the former Member of Parliament for Stockport, but he was a resident in my own West Sussex constituency, near Midhurst.”
“It will come as good news for households as the price of goods in their weekly shops fall. Leather shoes, clothes, home furnishings and more will be cheaper under this deal. However, it is disappointing that this welcome reduction in tariffs is very far from symmetrical. Indian exporters benefit immediately, while British exporters sit in the waiting room. Scottish whisky producers, whom we have heard about, manufacturers of electric vehicles, the medical consumables industry and chemical producers will have to wait for between five and 10 years before tariffs are fully reduced.”
“I could, of course, be talking about the policies of this Government, but in this case I am talking about the Indian Government and the jeopardy for some significant British investors. Again, this is another missed opportunity—a deal that we support but that could have been better. I understand that the chief negotiator on the deal has confirmed that, sadly, there are no plans to return to the table to get an investment treaty across the line, but I would be very happy to stand corrected on that. Perhaps that point could be addressed in the Minister’s winding-up speech. As we heard from the Minister, on day one the deal will grant Indian exporters of such wonders as textiles, gems and engineering goods immediate duty-free access to the British market. This is a welcome deflationary measure.”
“Our services sector would welcome that, but I hope the Minister will agree with me that not to achieve that now would be to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It would be a humiliation for this Government and I hope he will address, when he winds-up, the precise plans to secure that agreement. In a similar vein, the bilateral investment treaty that was planned to be agreed at the same time—it was in the original objectives for our deal—has also not been delivered. This is the deal that was offered, rather than the deal that could have been negotiated and improved. That leaves British investors exposed to sudden policy changes, unfair treatment and expropriation.”
“We were holding out and negotiating for a better deal. Let me give the Minister an example of that—a quite surprising example, in many ways—which is the complete omission of a legal services sector deal from this agreement. The Law Society called that “a missed opportunity for a significant breakthrough”. The chair of the Bar Council said it was “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” missed. How ironic that a Government of lawyers, led by lawyers and stuffed full of lawyers, could not get even that aspect of the agreement across the line. The deal places a 36-month target—I hope it is a target, not an aspiration or ambition—for the conclusion of a mutual recognition of a professional qualifications agreement. That would be a great opportunity.”
“Well, I was going to be generous to the Government and say something slightly positive. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that Governments of all flavours could do an infinitely better job of listening to businesses. They are the people at the frontline in the real world. His constituents have very deep links to the economy of India and it represents a real opportunity. We support the deal, but the only tone today is one of slight regret about the missed opportunities. Of course, it is easy for a Government to get a deal if they take the deal being offered, rather than negotiating and seeking to improve that deal. Therein is some of the difference between the approach of our Government and— [ Interruption. ] Well, we did not get it because we were not willing to take the deal that was on the table.”
“The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I do not want to simply agree with him for the sake of it: it is not easy for Chancellors of whatever flavour to balance the books, but where we have wonderful industries such as all our drinks and spirits industries, including, if I may say so, our English wine industry, the Government must do everything they can to promote them—”
“A trade deal, however wonderful it may or may not be, will do nothing to help the ruinously high energy costs faced by the ceramics, brick and chemicals industries, along with so many others. This debate is not about that issue and it is not the responsibility of the Minister, but it is nevertheless an important factor; if we are going to lower barriers and frictions so that we can boost trade, increase the prosperity of our citizens and grow our economy, that absolutely must involve the full stack, including energy and what one does about employment law and regulation.”
“And Welsh, and from other parts of this wonderful kingdom. This Government, as the previous Government, have by and large got the importance of the wonderful Scottish whisky industry, but it is important to do anything that can be done to help. Of course, the way that one reduces taxes over time is by making tough decisions on Government spending, which would be one of the key things the Conservatives would do in order to be able to lower those taxes. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell), who is no longer in his place, made an important point about the protection of ceramics and related industries, such as our brick and energy-intensive chemicals industries, which are all important.”
“The document produced by the Select Committee lays out the impact for defence, modest as I believe it is. I will leave it to those on the Government Front Bench to answer my right hon. Friend’s important question about security—”
“I hope that my right hon. Friend is reassured to a degree by the Minister’s response. I will move on now—you will be pleased to know, Madam Deputy Speaker, that my speech is not as comprehensive as the work of the Select Committee. I would be grateful if the Government could clarify a few points about the position on food and agricultural products. There are protections for sugar, chicken, eggs and pork, and that has been welcomed by producers. However, there are concerns from the British dairy industry about opening the market, which describes the deal as a one-way street: dairy is excluded from UK exports to India, yet tariffs on Indian dairy coming into the UK are removed.”
“] I would be happy to give way to the Minister on prawn eyestalk ablation, which is an important point; perhaps, on winding up, he could make a more general point on trade deals and how the Government will protect our animal welfare and food safety standards.”
“I will try to leave the Minister with a short list of questions, rather than going through each and every one as we go. Notwithstanding what the Minister has just said—perhaps we can revert to this later—there are also concerns about the Government’s hypocrisy in respect of pesticides and animal welfare, particularly with regard to crustaceans. I do not know whether the Minister has quite the same degree of expertise in crustacean welfare and in particular prawn eyestalk ablation, which sounds more trivial here than it would to the prawn whose eyestalks are being ablated. Those concerns are particularly relevant because despite the Government publishing and vaunting their virtue in terms of animal welfare, these poor blinded prawns seem to be victims under this deal. [ Interruption.”
“I am in no way qualified to answer that. However, it is the Government’s position about crustacean welfare, and they should speak to it. Just before Christmas, they published a significant proposal to change the law on that. As ever in trade, this is not a point about the underlying fundamentals, on which the Minister will be advised by Government scientists and others—I did part of his job as Minister for Exports; it is a point about the symmetry and balance of the issue.”
“My hon. Friend puts the point in a better and more informed way than me. It is important, and it is for the Government to set out very clearly how they propose to maintain or create a level playing field on these matters so that producers operating here to British standards are not disadvantaged, while we all get the benefits of trade and prosperity that I spoke of.”
“I am happy to be rebutted or corrected, but by my calculations, under this agreement it could be up to £10,000 a year cheaper to hire a software developer on an average British salary from India than to hire someone from Britain for the same role, as employers will not be liable for those national insurance contributions. These are big numbers, and this will mean a big disadvantage to hiring an identical British worker at a time when there are 9 million people of working age not in work and when unemployment is rising—in fact, it has risen every month under this Government.”
“This is a very limited part of the process of scrutiny of trade deals—the rights of Parliament are perhaps not fully discharged just by the CRaG process. However, we have not even seen what the Minister referred to earlier as the HMRC agreement on this. What it means in substance—I will choose my words very precisely—is that Indian workers who come here to work will not pay a penny in British national insurance contributions, and neither will their employers. The Government decided that they would open this deal—this two-tier tax system for India—at precisely the same time as hiking their jobs tax on every single British worker.”
“I thank the Minister for that intervention; I drew some comfort from it, but we will have to see the detail of the exact crustacean protections we end up with. Finally, there is one glaring area that—even beyond the missing benefits to our important services industry—was a point of difference in the negotiations that we conducted and a reason why, when we were in government, we did not consummate that deal and why the negotiations remained outstanding. The Leader of the Opposition has been very clear about this: when she was leading the negotiations, she refused to sign this deal because of the double contributions convention. The Minister will know precisely what I mean by that. We still have not seen the detail of that convention, and every Member of the House should be concerned.”
“My hon. Friend makes exactly the right point. The former Secretary of State—the current Leader of the Opposition—has been very clear that that was a deal breaker. It was deal or no deal, and if that had been an absolute red line, we would not have signed this deal. It is not a virtue to take any deal that is offered. As I say, the Conservatives are in favour of trade, and we value our relationship with India, but we would not have crossed that red line.”
“I am glad to hear agreement across the House on the desire not to have a two-tier system. We all understand the need to pay our taxes to support our public services, but it will not feel right if two people are sitting cheek by jowl, side by side in the same place of employment—a factory or other work environment—but are contributing at a very different rate to the Exchequer for the public services that we all support.”