Rishi Sunak sidesteps question about whether having private swimming pool means he’s out of touch – as it happened

Rishi Sunak examines a pothole on a visit to Darlington. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

3.19pm BST

Afternoon summary

• Kemi Badenoch has cast doubt on her department’s projections for how much the Asia-Pacific trade deal the UK government has signed will help economic growth.

• Rishi Sunak has sidestepped a question about his decision to pay for an upgrade to the local electricity grid so that he could heat his swimming pool meant he was out of touch. (See 2.13pm.)

• Kwasi Kwarteng, the former chancellor, has revealed that he is sometimes charging broadcasters £1,000 a time for interviews. These are from the i’s Paul Waugh.

.@KwasiKwarteng admits to @theipaper he charges £1,000+ to be interviewed on TV.
And TalkTV and GBNews have paid him.
"People should be compensated for their time when they have left office....When you’re a backbencher, you don’t even have a driver..." https://t.co/rrhIhdAX73

— Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) March 31, 2023

Full story here, with @adamsherwin10 https://t.co/73XrlZAUT9

— Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) March 31, 2023

• Raw sewage was spilled into English rivers 825 times a day last year – despite the fact there was barely any rainfall and most of the country was in drought.

3.12pm BST

Back to CPTPP, and here are two articles on the deal that are worth reading.

• Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Daily Telegraph claims this shows the EU is undergoing “a slow, comfortable, economic relegation”. He says:

As a practical matter, UK accession kills off any likelihood that it will ever rejoin the EU customs union or single market. There will be no ‘dynamic alignment’ with EU directives. The course is set irreversibly in a different direction.

The CPTPP members have one shared objective: to make trade as smooth and easy as humanly possible, subject to basic civilised standards. It is governed by twin principles of mutual recognition and equivalence.

This is entirely at odds with EU ideology. Brussels obliges supplicants to adopt identical laws, rules, and standards – under the writ of the European Court – in order to secure access to the European market. It does not accept reciprocation as a governing principle of trade.

The EU’s neo-colonial ambitions have reached obvious limits. Its share of global GDP will drop to 14.6pc this year. It is losing roughly one percentage point every three years. Europe will remain a valuable market. Its regulatory apparatus will punch above its weight for a while yet.

Yet the EU is undergoing a slow, comfortable, economic relegation.

Steve Peers, a professor of EU law, says it is wrong to say the deal means the UK cannot rejoin the EU.

Here's the provision on possible withdrawal from the CPTPP. The claim that joining it means that the UK cannot rejoin the EU is obviously false. pic.twitter.com/Dec5X2vzq6

— Steve Peers (@StevePeers) March 30, 2023

• Sam Lowe, a trade policy expert, explains on his Substack account what the deal actually does. Here is an extract.

Finally, the rules of origin bit. From a goods perspective, the absolute main benefit of CPTPP for UK firms is the diagonal cumulation provisions.

To re-cap: for a product to qualify for the preferential tariffs of a trade agreement, the exporter must demonstrate the product is sufficiently “local”. And every trade agreement has different terms and conditions stipulating what counts as sufficiently local.

For example, a UK free trade agreement might say that for a car to qualify as local 45% of the value of the car must have been created in the UK.

The benefit of CPTPP is that it [broadly] allows for inputs sourced from any of the members to count towards your “is it local” assessment.