Liam Byrne responded by acknowledging Tan Dhesi’s points and noting that while the CPTPP has been subject to significant scrutiny, there remains a need for better parliamentary oversight in scrutinising free trade agreements. He stressed the importance of ensuring that economic models used are up-to-date and reliable. Byrne recommended holding a debate on ratification within the 21-day CRaG period to allow proper scrutiny of the treaty.

That is an excellent question. The hon. Lady may have seen a really good report produced by not our Committee, but the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, on 29 January 2024, which makes precisely that point. We need a better way of scrutinising trade agreements. The CRaG structure allows us to delay things, but not necessarily veto them. When CRaG was introduced back in 2010, it was an innovation, because in the past, that was something that Governments did without any scrutiny whatsoever. Now we are in a different kind of world, in which we are signing free trade agreements at, I hope, increasing pace. However, the House will still have to navigate when we want open trade, when we want to de-risk trade, and when we put economic security first and free trading second. These are dilemmas in which there is not an obvious answer. We cannot prejudge the answers to those questions; they will have to be debated case by case.

The way that we approached our analysis was to look at food standards and whether they would be diminished by our joining the treaty. The Trade and Agriculture Commission looked at three questions, which are talked about in paragraphs 40 to 42 of the report. We reported the Trade and Agriculture Commission’s advice, which was that there would not be a diminution in the statutory protection of food standards in this country, and that we would, in fact, be allowed to reinforce some of those protections. However, as the hon. Gentleman importantly flags, we are now finding that sometimes the devil is in the detail. Despite having joined CPTPP with Canada, we now appear to be struggling to get in place a free trade agreement with Canada. The reassurance that I can give him is that we do not see this treaty lead to a softening of the trade standards that we so treasure in this country.

I am grateful to the Minister for that question and for welcoming the report. We look forward to welcoming him before the Committee at some point in the near future to talk about some of our forthcoming reports on export-led growth. The point he makes is right and I am glad that, for once, he and I agree on the numbers—that has not always been the case. The reason we wanted to flag it is that the Government’s impact assessment states: “CPTPP membership acts as a gateway to the wider Indo-Pacific region which is expected to account for the majority…of global growth between 2021 and 2050.” We appreciate that all Governments need to hard-sell their policy achievements—that is the nature of the game we are in—but it is important that we do not oversell the treaty. The reality is that it accounts for only quite a small fraction of the Indo-Pacific market, which is trumpeted in the impact assessment and in the integrated review as one of the treaty’s virtues. We must be clear-eyed and hard-headed about precisely what gain comes from this treaty specifically, and it would help us all, frankly, if the Government set out their road map for growing the treaty in future.