International Agreements Committee
10 November 2026
Contents updated on 10 Nov 2026
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International Agreements Committee Actual start House of Lords
Follow its sittings17:08 - 17:51
Speaker 1
Good, well, welcome everybody and thank you very much indeed to our two guests, Sir Sebastian Wood, the chair of the China-Britain Business Council, and Professor Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese studies at King's College London. Just to remind committee members and our guests of the context, we are writing a report on trade in a turbulent world clearly sparked by significant tariff volatility coming from the United States, but also driven by the issues that organisations such as the World Trade Organization face and surrounding pressures that come from trade with significant trading partners, particularly China. So, we are very grateful today to have both of you here to answer these specific questions, which will then feed into our report. If we could start with Lord German's question.
17:51 - 18:55
Speaker 2
Thank you very much, Lord Chair, and welcome.
Thank you very much for coming to see us today. I'd like to start with a very open question and it really is a to set the scene, I think, of where would you put UK-China trade at present? And given that the figures which we've been provided with suggest that each year the deficit between what we import and what we export, both trade and services together, is getting larger, and therefore you might ask, and a question I suppose worth asking, is how dependent are we now, and increasingly dependent, on trade with China, and is there a difference between consumer behaviour and trade behaviour, business behaviour, in their attitudes towards this? I have a supplementary, if I may, afterwards, but I think just to set that open picture, I'd be grateful. I don't mind whoever wants to field it.
18:55 - 18:56
Me first?
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