Andrew Griffith

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. 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 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.