Recommendation 26

The Department said that it is its job to explain, engage and communicate and that when communicating information about trade agreements, it tries to set out what this might mean for consumers.72 We asked the Department why its forecast of the value of UK exports arising from the agreement with Australia had increased by 600% from £900 million in June 2020 to £6.2 billion in December 2021. The Department could not tell us what the difference was, and we considered the lack of clarity to be a failing of some of the Department’s documentation and its communication to parliamentarians. It thought that the majority of the rise was due to changes in its approach to modelling the forecast economic benefits, as part of continuous improvement, and that this is set out in publicly available documents.73 The NAO also underlined the need for the Department to provide greater transparency in the impact assessment for the UK-Japan trade agreement. The report said that the Regulatory Policy Committee, academics and the two Parliamentary committees leading scrutiny have highlighted that the costs to businesses and environmental impacts are areas where better quality information is required.74 Parliamentary scrutiny of trade deals