Catherine Fookes

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Andrew Lewin). The post-Brexit trade deals delivered by the previous Conservative Government have just been appalling. They have not worked well for Wales. We have been flooded with New Zealand lamb—and, as we all know in this room, Welsh lamb is of course the best-tasting lamb in the world. I congratulate the Paymaster General and Minister for the Cabinet Office, my right hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds), on his continued work on an SPS deal. We desperately need that for our hard-pressed farmers and for the businesses in my constituency of Monmouthshire. I recently had a business roundtable with businesses such as TXO, Siltbuster, GreenMeadow and others. They said to me that they are drowning—of the 2 billion pieces of paper that were mentioned earlier, the businesses in my constituency must have 1 billion of them. They are drowning in paperwork, and it is slowing them down. To be honest, after I met with them, during my two-hour business roundtable, I was astonished and amazed that they had all stayed in Monmouthshire, employing local people, while continuing to face such a barrage of barriers and administration. The No.1 thing that those businesses need is for us to remove some of those trade barriers. In order to smooth their trade, we need to keep our standards the same as those in the EU. That was the No.1 priority of all those businesses, and I congratulate all those who signed the letter saying that. We must have regulatory alignment if we are to grow. We must remember that this Government’s No.1 mission is economic growth. If we align with EU standards and continue to grow our trade with the EU, that is exactly what we will get. I am delighted to be a member of the UK-EU Parliamentary Partnership Assembly and to have gone to Brussels recently. We were welcomed with open arms by our MEP colleagues, because they said they felt that the grown-ups were back in the room; they were delighted with the leadership of the Prime Minister bringing us closer to Europe. I encourage the Government to continue to do that work.