The government has insisted that legal services will form part of future trade talks with India amid criticism that the sector was sidelined from the latest negotiated deal.
Last year’s UK-India free trade agreement made no mention of legal services, allowing India to continue to restrict UK lawyers’ practising rights. The controls have been a subject of discussion for decades, with no resolution apparently in sight.
The free trade agreement was laid before parliament last month and debated in the Lords this week. Lord Hunt of Wirral (David Hunt), a Conservative minister in the 1990s and a practising solicitor, said the exclusion of legal services was one of the most ‘serious and damaging failures’ in the agreement.
He pointed out that the Law Society and Bar Council described the omission as a missed opportunity.
Hunt added: ‘The very practitioners who would have benefited most directly from meaningful market access provisions for legal services have looked at this agreement and concluded that it falls far short of what should have been achieved.’
Business minister Lord Stockwood (businessman Jason Stockwood) said that through the negotiations, the government had strengthened ties with India’s legal system, even if nothing concrete had been agreed.
He added: ‘As the deal progresses, we hope to enter into further negotiations about access, particularly around legal services, but we recognise that this is the start of the deal rather than the conclusion.’
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