Speeches by Western.

“I will call Dr Marie Tidball to move the motion, and I will then call the Minister to respond. There will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up, as is the convention for 30-minute debates.”

“I also thank Sam and his family for attending this morning. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House has considered the provision of auditory verbal therapy.”

“Order. I remind Members that they should bob if they wish to be called in the debate. I never thought I would be saying these words, but it is my pleasure to invite Mr Jim Shannon to speak.”

“They are very keen on it. It would be one of their priorities.”

“The UK industry has different views about the situation, for understandable reasons, but the simple truth is that there are very, very cheap vehicles coming from China. If you talk to the bicycle industry in the UK, it will say that we acted too late and not strongly enough on Chinese dumping into the UK. Are we not in…”

“It seems that the Europeans are very keen on a youth mobility scheme; it seems to come up in lots of conversations. There is Erasmus+. They seem to view a scheme as almost a precondition to some sort of deal. What is the risk to us of having, say, a short-term visa scheme?”

“I will call Sorcha Eastwood to move the motion and then the Minister to respond. As is the convention for 30-minute debates, there will not be an opportunity for the Member in charge to wind up.”

“We could dump stuff at the border, couldn’t we? We could stop stuff coming in under such a mechanism.”

“It is striking that we were promised that we could take back control over our borders and so on, but that currently the US has a much stronger mechanism for stopping the import of products that could be the result of modern slavery. Isn’t that something we should be pressing on?”

“I am sure that you will have looked at the USMCA and its rapid response mechanism. We have taken some very concerning evidence from certain companies about how they source some of their products and the materials that go into those products. Are the UK Government looking to adopt the rapid response mechanism?”

“To move on, many will talk about the beauty and benefits of pure free trade agreements, but they impact more on, say, workers and the environment. The new Government have not updated their negotiating mandates in terms of labour standards for any free trade agreement currently under way. Why not?”

“You mentioned Germany, but Korea does a similar thing, as I understand it. Is that something you are looking to replicate and perhaps present in the trade strategy?”

“On the point made by Mr Alexander on trade intensity, in which he talked about metric, the data from pre-pandemic to 2023 show that the UK had a decline of 1.7% in trade intensity, whereas the G7 had growth of 1.7%. First, do you have any explanation as to why that is, and secondly, what happened in 2024? Did that tren…”

“It is a disgrace, though, isn’t it: less than 24 hours and not getting any compensation?”

“To come back, though, to the extreme example you gave, the weather forecasts are pretty good two weeks out. In the example of the ice-cream manufacturer, it is not like the 1980s or the 1970s where the forecasts were much more immediate. Surely they gauge up for the sale of barbecues or ice-cream or whatever. They know…”

“I am interested in drilling into this because it is an area I am not at all familiar with. Maybe, Mr Carberry, you can help me to understand what sort of notice periods are typical in some of this. You talk about being sector-specific. Could you give some examples of a more extreme sector at each end and what sort of n…”

“Do you think that there might be some merit in the Government looking, rather than at the abstract of whether it be 10 hours, or seven or whatever—it is kind of an odd way to approach it—but at a link between the number of hours at national minimum wage and, say, the cost of living, or what we used to call the breadlin…”

“Yes.”

“Mr Lillis, this is a nebulous kind of thing that we are trying to understand and numbers are almost a very abstract thing, but do you think there is any merit in the Government looking at linking hours, particularly on national minimum wage versus cost of living as a metric so that low hours becomes a relevant number w…”

“Ms Zhu, I am interested in the point about audit that my colleague was asking. Like any brand, you will want to ensure that there is good quality product coming out with the label SHEIN on it. Does the company visit the contracted factories that make SHEIN clothing? Yes, or no?”