UK accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership

The terms of UK accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership raise contentious issues. We recommend that during the 21-day scrutiny period under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, the Government facilitate a debate on the Floor of the House on a substantive motion on the ratification of UK accession to the Agreement. The Secretary of State for Business and Trade should write to the Leader of the House, setting out the case for holding such a debate in Government time.

It is difficult to estimate the potential benefits of CPTPP or its impact on economic growth, not least because the Secretary of State has resiled from the models used by her department to estimate benefits in the published impact assessment. It is, therefore, hard to debate what investment in trade promotion and export support would be appropriate to unlock the full potential of the Agreement. Nor has the Government explained its own ambitions for the future of CPTPP or provided any sort of roadmap for its evolution to include a much bigger proportion of Indo- Pacific markets. This renders speculative much of the commentary about CPTPP’s future advantages. We note that the Secretary of State wants to see the development of better ways to measure the impact of trade agreements but has not yet found a way to achieve this. We recommend that the Government provide a revised impact assessment, setting out its current expectations of the gains from CPTPP; and the Department for Business and Trade should explain what steps it is going to take to help ensure that UK business exploits the treaty to the full. The Government must also say what it will do to develop better ways of measuring the impact of future trade agreements—including the involvement of an independent body, to avoid the Department “marking [its] own homework”, as the Secretary of State put it.