Boris Johnson promises if he becomes Prime Minister next week he’ll fly out at the earliest opportunity to seal a “trade deal” with the United States. President Trump and other representatives of the United States have openly stated that NHS would be on the negotiation table in a UK/US deal, with Trump’s apparent hasty backtracking doing little to reassure. After over 160.000 signatures to the parliamentary petition to safeguard NHS in trade negotiations, the UK Parliament will debate the issue on 22nd of July (a parallel petition on Change.org has over half a million signatures). The government has provided a written answer to the parliamentary petition, which seeks to calm concerns, but in fact their answer brings up perhaps more worrying insights on how the government approaches the NHS as part of trade negotiations.
“Calm down dear”
The government claims it will not sell NHS to outsiders, and that trade agreements cannot change the fundamental fact that NHS will be based on universal services free at the point of need. This sounds reassuring, but it does not in fact answer the request to keep the NHS out of negotiations. Trade agreements can affect how NHS services can be provided even when they would not directly affect the fundamental guiding principles. Decisions on how to run public services will always be taken by UK Government and not by its trade partners, but these decisions may need to be compliant in future with what the UK government has agreed to in trade agreements.
Public services are on the negotiation table
In most new trade agreements public services are on the negotiation table on one way or another. This can be through public procurement obligations or in relation to negotiations on services, investment and investment protection. Governments define the limits of how and what is put on the table. There are two approaches in trade deals on services – “positive listing”, where governments can explicitly decide which services to include under the trade agreement, and “negative listing”, where they have to rely on specific exceptions and protections from more generally binding obligations extending to all services. United States negotiation objectives clearly set out their desire for negative listing: “Where any exceptions from core disciplines are needed, the negotiation, on a negative list basis, of the narrowest possible exceptions with the least possible impact on U.S. firms”.
