Business and Trade Committee
9 March 2026
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Business and Trade Committee House of Commons
00:05 - 01:02
Speaker 1
Welcome to today's session of business and trade committee as we pursue our inquiries into the state of the EU and United States trade relationship. Relationship. So, Chris, thank you very much indeed for joining us. Thank you for bringing Kate Joseph and Amanda Brooks together with you. Perhaps I could just open by reflecting on last Tuesday's spring statement because that obviously showed quite a significant deterioration in the trade outlook for the country.
We've got a widening of the trade deficit now forecast for the next few years. And, of course, since then, the European Union has proposed the final text of its Industrial Accelerator Act, which the SMMT says is a real threat to us. And alongside that, president Trump has torched the special relationship with a series of attacks on the prime minister. And why is the outlook for The UK trade picture deteriorating over the next few years? And is it likely to get worse given the events of the last week, including the conflict in Iran?
01:03 - 02:04
Speaker 2
I don't think it is gonna get worse in in the kind of cataclysmic version that you sort of laid out there, but I'll go through the individual issues if if I might. So let me just start with the accelerator act. Obviously, this is a draft. It's a first draft. You know the processes through the European Union.
We had been engaging with the European Union for some time on this issue of made in Europe because, not not only for the British argument, but as I've spoken to many of my counterparts in other capital cities in Europe, they've made the point that, their, airplanes, their automotives, many of them are made partly in The UK. So if you exclude The UK from made in Europe, then you're gonna provide significant long term problems for the whole of the economy of Europe, which is why I was glad that in the main, in most elements of the act, it was much better than we had originally anticipated. And I think that that's a result of significant lobbying partly by the secretary of state and a little bit by myself and by the whole of the team working in all the member states as well as, working with
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