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Trade Secretary Liam Fox has broken a pledge to MPs to have an ‘independent’ UK ‘trade defence regime’ in place for 29th March. The Trade Bill that will legally birth the new body has stalled.
This month DIT Minister George Hollingbery quietly assigned its entire ambit to Fox himself, on a ‘temporary’ basis, as part of Brexit ‘contingency’ measures, but with zero Parliamentary oversight.
DIT has spent approximately £3.5 million on creating a ‘shadow’ Trade Remedies Authority to oversee post-Brexit trade, currently employing around 90 civil servants, however the legislation is not in place to allow the new body to start work.
This month DIT Minister George Hollingbery quietly assigned its entire ambit to Fox himself, on a ‘temporary’ basis, as part of Brexit ‘contingency’ measures, but with zero Parliamentary oversight. DIT’s new law was ushered in overnight via Statutory Instrument.
On March 6th when the legislation ‘came into force’ DIT Minister George Hollingbery MP wrote to notify Angus MacNeil MP, chair of the International Trade Select Committee in a letter since published on their website.
Hollingbery wrote: “I have decided to put in place contingency arrangements that will temporarily confer trade remedy functions on the Secretary of State, allowing the Department to operate trade remedy functions ‘in-house’ until the Trade Remedies Authority is legally established. Yesterday, on the 5th March, I laid the relevant secondary legislation and I note that it came into force today”.
Livin’ on a Prayer
“The UK trade remedies system might start life without adequate parliamentary scrutiny.”
Steve Peers, Essex Professor of EU Law, Human Rights and World Trade
Hollingbery had created the new law under a controversial aspect of the EU Withdrawal Act that allows the Government to amend Acts of Parliament via a ‘negative’ Statutory Instrument – without scrutiny by MPs. A ‘negative’ Statutory Instrument can be challenged for a period of 40 days after it comes into force via a technique known as a ‘prayer motion’, to annul it.
The Hansard Society blogged last year that Parliament has no real power over whether MPs’ ‘prayer motions’ are heard. Their blog explains: “Early Day Motions (EDMs), which an MP must table in the form of a ‘prayer’ to object to a negative SI, are motions for which no fixed parliamentary time is allocated.”
“Whether an MP’s objection to an SI is ever debated will therefore still lie almost entirely in the hands of the government, not the House of Commons. In the last full parliamentary session (2016-17), for example, 23 prayer motions were tabled of which only 10 were granted time for debate.”
Steve Peers Professor of EU Law, Human Rights and World Trade at the University of Essex, commented on the process “Trade remedies are economically and legally important, and it is unfortunate that the UK trade remedies system might start life without adequate parliamentary scrutiny.”
In the last full parliamentary session … 23 prayer motions were tabled of which only 10 were granted time for debate.
Hansard Society Blog, on scrutiny of post-Brexit laws, 11 July 2018
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“The DIT did not seem to know that you were in post. They told us that you weren’t in post.”
Angus MacNeil MP, chair of the International Trade Committee in Parliament
Hollingbery’s letter follows warnings from Select Committee MPs as early as last May that the DIT would be off-track to deliver the new Trade Remedies Authority