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Will Parliament get its teeth into Keir Starmer's trade deals? - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 94

23 May 2025
©UK Parliament
©UK Parliament

You wait ages for a post-Brexit trade deal – and then three show up at once. With the Government unveiling new agreements with India, the US and the EU, we explore why Parliament has so little influence over these major international agreements. Liam Byrne MP, a former Labour Minister and current chair of the House of Commons Business and Trade Committee argues that this needs to change.

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According to Byrne, Parliament should make its voice heard much earlier in the process – before negotiations even begin. He wants a greater role for select committees to examine the details of deals as they develop and insists that MPs must be given the chance for a meaningful debate before any final agreement is approved. Without these changes, Parliament risks being reduced to little more than a rubber stamp.

Meanwhile, a call to find 10% in savings from the House of Commons budget over the next three years – reportedly around £54 million - raises pressing questions. Could cost-cutting measures strip away the very support systems that allow MPs to scrutinise laws and hold the Government to account? And as proposals circulate for “call lists” to tell MPs when they’ll be able to speak in debates, Ruth and Mark ask: could this mechanised approach undermine the spontaneity—and the substance—of Commons exchanges?

And farewell to Sir Roy Stone, who for 20 years was the lynchpin of Commons business, as Private Secretary to a succession of Chief Whips. Following his death earlier this month, we reflect on the legacy of the man who embodied the fabled “Usual Channels” — the behind-the-scenes negotiations that keep the legislative and scrutiny work of the House of Commons on track. Respected across party lines, he was the subject of a rare tribute session in the Commons, and Ruth and Mark discuss why he commanded such respect from hard-bitten Whips and Ministers.

Liam Byrne MP. © UK Parliament

Liam Byrne MP

Liam Byrne is the Labour Member of Parliament for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North, having been the local MP since 2004 when he won the Birmingham Hodge Hill by-election. He was appointed a government minister in 2005 and promoted to the Cabinet in 2008 as Minister for the Cabinet Office. He was Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 2009 until Labour lost power in 2010. In Opposition, he was a shadow minister then stood unsuccessfully to be Mayor of the West Midlands in 2021. In September 2024, with Labour back in government, he was elected Chair of the House of Commons Business and Trade Select Committee. He is also Chair of the international Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, an Honorary Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham and a Visiting Parliamentary Fellow at St Anthony’s College, Oxford.

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And coming up this week.

Ruth Fox: You wait ages for a trade treaty, then three come along at once. Liam Byrne, chair of the Commons Business and Trade Committee, explains why Parliament still won't get much of a say on Britain's new deals with America, India, and the European Union.

Mark D'Arcy: Can you cut the cost of Parliament without harming democracy?

Ruth Fox: And farewell to the man who guided the Commons through two decades of crisis.

Mark D'Arcy: So Ruth, let's start by talking about those trade treaties. [00:01:00] It's been an unusual couple of weeks for Sir Keir Starmer because he's actually had quite a run of good news. Those successive new trade deals announced first with India, then with the United States. You remember those scenes in the Oval Office with Peter Mandelson, cackling away with Donald Trump, and then the biggest one of them all, the EU reset. Now, these agreements will have to be underpinned by formal treaties, but as we've often remarked on this podcast before, MPs and still less peers get very little traction on the terms of those deals. Because this is the Government exercising the royal prerogative, the executive's right to make international agreements with minimal oversight from Parliament itself.

Ruth Fox: Yes, I mean, Mark, these are the residual powers which used to historically be exercised by the Monarch, but which are now exercised by ministers either directly or on the advice provided to the Monarch and which may be used without the consent of Parliament. And there's the rub, because a lot of these deals, I mean, you're talking about, as you say, a reset [00:02:00] with European Union, a deal with India, America dealing with tariffs, not just the kinds of deals that pertain to foreign policy, and the realm of foreign policy and international relations, but they cut deep into domestic economic policy.

And therefore, keeping Parliament at one remove is a problem.

Mark D'Arcy: And at the moment, the system for dealing with treaties for historical reasons, as you say, is actually pretty weak. The system we've got is that treaties are laid before the House for 21 days and it's up to parliamentarians to decide whether to object.

It rather echoes the procedure that I know you loathe for dealing with delegated legislation. Indeed, it's not a positive engagement with the legislation. It's a, do you want to veto this kind of question that's put before MPs. Peers actually don't even have that much.

Ruth Fox: No, essentially what we've got for international agreements, of which trade deals are a subset, is that the arrangement is basically modeled on what we [00:03:00] had a hundred years ago.

Back then, a foreign office minister in the Ramsay MacDonald government decided that actually Parliament ought to at least know which agreements were being negotiated by the Government and agreed and came up with this idea, this model, which became known as the Ponsonby rule, that he was Sir Arthur Ponsonby.

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