Andrew Griffith

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.