Think Work First: The Transition from Education to Work for Young Disabled People (Public Services Committee Report)
(1 day, 6 hours ago)
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Baroness Morris of Yardley
That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Public Services Committee Think Work First: The Transition from Education to Work for Young Disabled People (1st Report, HL Paper 12).
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to speak to this report from the Public Services Committee. In doing so, I will offer some thanks—first, to the team of officials who supported us. I do not want people to think that we have more officials than anyone else, but I have a particularly long list, because it was Sam Kenny’s last inquiry as clerk, it was Dan Hepworth’s first inquiry as our new clerk, and we had Nick Boorer in the interregnum. We also had Tom Burke, Claire Coast-Smith and Clayton Gurney, as well as a special adviser, Professor Charlotte Pearson. In a difficult time, with a general election in between and a new Parliament, that team of officials served us very well, and I am grateful for their expertise.
I thank the officials of the many departments that contributed to this, but I have to say to the Minister— I realise that this was not due to her or her department—that we waited 10 months for a reply to our committee’s report. It was particularly annoying that this was during a period when this issue was at the top of the Government’s agenda. An excuse that, “We can’t reply to your report because we’re discussing the policy” did not go well with us. Could the Minister therefore kindly pass back that 10 months is too long, when the expectation is two months? Apart from that, we are very grateful to the officials who gave of their expertise.
I thank my committee members who, as ever, worked hard to bring their knowledge and skills. They helped to make it a happy committee that has brought about a good report. Most of all, I thank our witnesses—there were many over the year or more that we took evidence. I do not want to single them out, but I will single out two groups. One is the young people with disabilities who, in round-table discussions, talked to us about their lives. We probably learned more from them than from anybody else.
This is really—to use a football phrase—a report of two parts. The statistics paint a story of things not going right: of failure and of us not being successful in this area. It is still the case that, at 19, 43% of students with disabilities get level 2 in English and maths, compared to 84% of students overall. Look at the university drop-out rate and the drop-out rate from apprenticeships: you are more likely to drop out if you are a young person with disabilities than if you are not. The employment gap of 30% has barely moved in decades, and the pay gap shows that people with disabilities do not get paid as much as those who do not have disabilities. All that is true, and it is all one picture or view of how we are doing in this area, but it is not the only picture we found. There were many evidence sessions where we finished listening to examples of good practice that left us inspired, encouraged and knowing that we could get this right if only we made the best available to everybody. Overall, the system is not a success story, but overall there is hope and expectation that it could be.
I looked at presenting this in two ways. There is the universal provision—the institutions and the bits of the system that are designed to meet the needs of all people, whatever their background or ability—but, too often, this does not meet the needs of people with disabilities. These things affect every single one of us, whether you are talking about schools, colleges or workplaces; about how we assess the qualifications we give; about careers education and guidance; or about vocational pathways, apprenticeships or recruitment practices. They are part of the universal provision in this society, and they work less well on the whole for people with disabilities than they do for anyone else.
When you look at the specialist provision specifically designed to support young people with disabilities transitioning from education to work, you find some excellent examples, and we have lots of them in our report. But, on the whole, the summary is that they lack the continuity, with Governments of all parties changing names, changing focus, scrapping one thing and introducing another, and they lack the consistent funding at the necessary rate that is absolutely essential if they are to succeed. We often get isolated examples or pilot schemes at risk of being scrapped. That was one of the most frustrating things. When you sat and listened to somebody giving evidence about something that worked, you just wondered why, as a Government and as a society, we did not seem to have the capacity to roll that out to everybody else.
If this problem is to be solved, the transition from education to work has three elements that need to work. First, what goes on in our educational institutions needs to work; secondly, that process of moving from one to the other needs to work; and thirdly, it needs to work when people get into employment. We all know that, whatever our background or ability, those transitions from one set of institutions or one set of support services to the other is the place where you most often fall off the bus; that is where it most often goes wrong. That is even more so if you are a young person with a disability. I just want to look at each of those areas and examine some of the evidence we took.
On the educational institutions, we made a number of SEND recommendations. I shall not touch on those, because I know that the Government are producing a report that I hope will be launched shortly. I just hope that the Minister and the Government have looked at our recommendations. It would be great to see them reflected in the recommendations in the SEND review to be published in the new year, but I do not think it is particularly a priority for me to go over that now. When we look at these institutions, there are no doubt lots of individual lecturers, teachers, tutors and classroom assistants who do a great job. There are lots of people who make a successful transition from school to work and can name particular individuals without whom that would not have been possible. But we also heard that there are individuals who still have low expectations of what might be possible for somebody who has a disability. Both those things are true, which means that how well you get on is as likely to depend on who happens to teach you as anything else.
However, I really wanted to talk about the system in those educational institutions. I know that the Minister is particularly interested in this and I want to spend a bit of time on it in the hope that we might get somewhere with it. I know that the Government have produced a White Paper on 16-plus qualifications and vocational routes and I know that it is a priority. I also understand well that we are a high-skilled nation and that we have to push people to levels 3, 4, 5, 6 and wherever you want to go. What we heard was missing was anything substantial at levels 1 and 2. We are not saying for a minute that all young people with disabilities are at level 1 and 2; they are all levels, including master’s and PhD—the highest levels in the land. But some are at level 1 and 2 and working towards level 3 but may never get there.
We heard from a particularly impressive principal of a college in the East Midlands,
“we find ourselves scrimping around for qualifications”.
He is working with young people who are learning skills and working towards targets, but they are not recognised by any formal qualification because they never reach level 3 or anything like that. What was lacking was a robust qualification at levels 1 and 2 that can be used, first, to record the achievement and, secondly, as a stepping stone, perhaps over a number of years, to something at a higher level. Young people may be learning skills and working towards targets, but they may never be recognised in any formal qualification because we have not incorporated that in our schools framework.
One of the things that rang a bell with me, because it was familiar from when I taught all those years ago—it was sad to think it had not improved—was young people with disabilities, who were not at level 3, being put on one college course after another. These claimed to prepare them for employment and a job, but they did not. It was six weeks on this and six weeks on that—“Take another course. You’ve finished a year; sign up for something else”—but none of these were vocational pathways. When that young person started that course, they and their parents believed: they had the same enthusiasm, aspiration and hope as somebody starting a university degree or a professional qualification. It is no different; it is where they are at. They are as ambitious as anyone else, but there are too many courses that do not lead to a meaningful qualification and a route into employment.
So I ask the Minister to reflect, in the work she is doing on post-16 qualifications, to check what the vocational route is for young people with disabilities. As I say all the time, I am not putting all young people with disabilities into the level 1 or level 2 qualification framework as I know that is not true, but it is where we found a lot of work still to be done. The same is true for apprenticeships. It must be possible for somebody to go on an apprenticeship scheme below level 3. They have a role to play and a contribution to make. Some of the most heartening things we heard were from young people in work in level 1 or level 2 jobs feeling as proud as possible. When you spoke to their employer, they said they were useful members of that company. If we do not get that right, we are all losers.
The last thing that I want to mention about these education institutions is that this group does not get work experience. It is difficult to sort it out and they are not a priority. Can the Government make sure—especially when they are rolling out the work experience entitlement in years 10 and 11—that this group does not get left behind?
Then there is the transition into work. Low expectations in school move into low expectations in the workplace. I want to mention a few things we found problems with. First, careers advisers are great, but we heard time and again from young people with disabilities that the advisers had no specialist training and there was no continuity. That is not a criticism of careers advisers; it is a criticism of the system. Every young person, whether they have a EHCP or not, should have careers advice from a careers officer who has some sort of specialism in their needs.
Secondly, we had good reports about disability employment advisers, but there are only just over 700 of them, which means one or two for each Jobcentre Plus. That does not work. There are good schemes, such as Access to Work. When it works at its best, it really helps, but the shortest waiting time to get it in place is 90 days. By that time, we would all have lost enthusiasm, let alone somebody who has probably had to fight hard right the way through the education system to get to that point.
We spent a lot of time hearing about things that work, so what does work? Supported internships work. I know from chatting to the Minister that she has a historic connection with Whipps Cross Hospital. We left our day there absolutely enthused, chattering all the way back about what we had seen. It was out of this world. It should be recognised far and wide because it works.
Supported employment schemes, such as Connect to Work, work. We met young people on supported employment schemes. They told us different stories from the people whose opportunities I described previously.
I met employers and people who run vocational profiling projects in Essex and Kent and they explained how they were an integral part of careers guidance. Vocational profiling works and makes a difference.
What all those things have in common is that they manage to join the joins. They are not disjointed; they have some continuity. They are examples of schemes where work takes place between a young person and a specialist to identify the young person’s strengths, skills and aspirations and then match them to an appropriate job or career.
It took me some time to grasp what the difference was. What we usually do is give someone a job and then, once they are in employment, try to fit them in or find something they can do—or compromise, or spend six months preparing for what they can do. What this does, in conjunction with the employer, is work out with the young person what their strengths are, so that, when they do go into work, a job match has taken place, the employer understands the young person’s need, and there is continuity.
Those are the underpinning things that happen: supported internships, supported employment and vocational pathways. That is why 60% to 70% of children on supported internships that are part of the education system go into full-time work, and those who are on supported employment are more likely to go into full-time work than if they have not been in a supported-employment system. So what we found there was a successful route into work. The frustration is that that is taking place at the same time as this merry- go-round of college courses, six months at a time, which are not a vocational route into work.
I will say just one thing here. Some of those courses are available only to people with EHCPs. So I say to the Minister that, when the Government are looking at the SEND review in general, if they decide to have a more inclusive framework, it would be awful if access to EHCPs was lost: I would like to see that access go to anybody who has a need, not anybody who has managed to fight to get an EHCP.
I will finish by looking at the employment bit. It is the same story. We heard stories about where it works. I think the difference here was in culture and aspiration. Changing culture is more difficult than changing policy. But, where it has been changed, it is a success story. We found a lot of employers who were honestly nervous about taking on people with disabilities. They worried that they would say the wrong thing and it would not go down well with their employees, and they worried that there would be an economic cost. We also heard from the Chambers of Commerce, the Humber Learning Consortium, the Federation of Small Businesses and the Business Disability Forum that it can work. So, again, it is an example of people paddling like mad below the water to get some bits of it working, and they can give us evidence about what works.
I will finish by referring to the title of our report. The first bit—the strapline Think Work First—was something one of our witnesses said to us. She was running a very successful project getting young people with disabilities into work. She said that, so often, when you are working with young people with disabilities, you do not “think work first”; you think of lots of other things. She said, “It’s tough. If you want to get people into work, you think work first. That’s what the young people want”. I believe that is what we all want, and we have to have it higher up the agenda than we do at the moment. I beg to move.
Lord Shinkwin (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, and I commend her and her committee members on producing such an important and well-considered report. I will pick up on the point that the noble Baroness ended on, which is the title of the report. For me, it implicitly recognises that, for too long, work has been the very last thing that policymakers and politicians have instinctively associated with disabled people. The preconception that disabled people cannot contribute or realise their potential at work and, on merit, reach the top of their professions goes to the heart of our professional psyche. Indeed, its roots go deep in our societal culture. It is a culture which spawned the term “invalid”, a term still experienced today, in practice, in so many aspects of their life by disabled people.
So I thank the committee not only for recognising the scale of the challenge and for proposing a joined-up package of solutions, but for the title of its report, Think Work First. It is not just absolutely appropriate; it is instructive of the scale of the change in mindset that is required. For that is exactly the change we must make, and quickly—not just as policymakers but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, implied, all of us.
I will give two figures. The UK’s £2.9 trillion national debt and the £100 billion that we spent in the last year servicing that debt surely underline the fact that we are all paying the consequences and the costs of the 30% disability pay gap highlighted in the report and the unsustainable disability benefits bill for those who are out of work. It is therefore in all our interests to think work first. I am glad that, as the noble Baroness said, in several respects the Government have indicated that they intend to do so and to think work first, whether on vocational profiling, supported internships, in-principle support in education, including through EHCPs, and mandatory reporting of the disability pay gap, the efficacy of which, I argue, depends on disability employment reporting as well—this is a theme to which I will return. The fact that the Government are engaging with some of the committee report’s recommendations is surely a fitting tribute to its deliberations and its 36 common-sense recommendations.
I shall highlight the recommendations that I particularly welcome as a disabled Member of the House. These include increasing the number of supported internships; developing a transition information hub, co-produced with disabled people, as in Scotland; improving the support that young disabled people receive in the education system; the collection and publication of data on the number of careers advisers, especially those who have received specialist training relating to pupils with SEN; increasing work experience opportunities, including through supporting and incentivising local bodies, such as chambers of commerce, which I think is an excellent idea; improving the quality of accessibility information provided to students by universities; ensuring that work coaches and disability employment advisers fully understand the specific barriers that young disabled people face, including in the commissioning and use of assistive technologies; crucially, coming back to the committee and updating it on government action to reduce the access to work application backlog and delays; and the introduction of a four-week deadline by when employers must respond to an employee’s request for reasonable adjustments.
I could go on but I shall just highlight one other recommendation, which is making the Disability Confident scheme fit for purpose and credible by introducing rigour and transparency, so that employers are no longer marking their own homework and are instead subject to external, independent audit of the evidence as to whether they are hitting the thresholds for the percentage of their workforce that is disabled.
There is one other recommendation that I particularly highlight because, as a disabled person, I believe that it is crucial to the transition, indeed to the transformation, that we must all make to our cultural attitudes if we are truly to benefit, as a society, from extending equality of opportunity to disabled people and enabling them to realise, on merit, their potential at work. The recommendation that I am referring to is that the Government should ensure disability pay gap reporting, to which I would add disability employment reporting—that is, the percentage of an employer’s workforce that is disabled—being made mandatory for employers with 250 employees or more and for all Disability Confident leaders.
Page 43 of the report refers to the Disability Employment Charter, the brainchild of Professor Kim Hoque, who gave evidence to the committee and with whom I have been privileged to work for a number of years. Disability employment and pay gap reporting is the number one demand of the charter, which in practice has already been adopted, as the report comments, by employers such as EY, Capita and Clifford Chance. Mandatory reporting has also been supported as a recommendation by two commissions that I have chaired: first, the Centre for Social Justice’s Disability Commission, in its “Now Is The Time” report of March 2021; and, secondly, in the report produced in October 2022 by the Institute of Directors’ commission, “The Future of Business: Harnessing Diverse Talent for Success”. I pay tribute to Jon Geldart, the IoD’s director general, for his continuing commitment, and to Alexandra Hall-Chen, its principal policy adviser for employment, skills and sustainability, for building earlier this year on the commission’s work through the publication, in partnership with Disability@Work, of “Progress through Transparency: the Case for Mandatory Disability Employment and Pay Gap Reporting”.
As Professor Hoque made clear in his submission to the committee, mandatory pay gap reporting would be relatively straightforward if introduced in tandem with disability employment reporting. Establishing which employees are disabled will depend on the creation of a supportive work environment, using the Labour Force Survey definition of disability, so that disabled employees feel confident that they will not be penalised for their disability and that the data that they provide on their disability status will be treated as confidential. This is surely to the mutual benefit of any decent employer, keen to get the best from its workforce. Professor Hoque has also proposed a hybrid metric that accounts for both the employer’s disability employment levels and its disability pay gap in a way that does not unfairly represent those employers that, to their credit, are taking positive steps to hire more disabled people. I would be grateful if the Minister could update us on when we might expect the Government to respond to the consultation on mandatory reporting in line with the Labour Party manifesto and the Government’s King’s Speech commitments.
I finish on a rather despondent note, but one which underlines the urgency of moving ahead on the report’s recommendations. The CBI submitted what, to my mind, was a deeply discriminatory response to the consultation that I have just mentioned. I have told it so and I have asked that the response be withdrawn. It is completely unacceptable for an organisation like the CBI, or indeed any member organisation with a vested interest in the status quo, to perpetuate prejudice. I ask the Minister to confirm that the Government will treat responses that are based on outdated and costly attitudes, whereby disabled people are only ever regarded as a burden, with the contempt that they deserve.
In conclusion, the truth is that prejudice against disabled people is rife in Britain in 2025. In fact, I have never known it to be worse. The extent to which we have gone backwards since the demise of the Disability Rights Commission is disturbing, soul-destroying and, above all, disorienting. I never thought that we could be back in this place. That is why this report and its recommendations are so important. I urge the Government to show that they are responding to those recommendations with the urgency that they deserve.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)
My Lords, as ever, I feel quite embarrassed to follow that particular contribution. I begin my contribution by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for leading this inquiry so effectively, as indeed she has led every other inquiry since we worked together in the House of Commons 15 years ago, or whenever it was.
Lord Willis of Knaresborough (LD)
Was it longer? I am sorry; I try to think I am younger than I am.
This was a very challenging report. As ever, I thank the committee clerks for their excellent preparation of material and witnesses, particularly young people and their parents. Sometimes, when you do an inquiry of this sort and you meet real people who are involved with their youngsters in an issue that is really life-threatening, you go away thinking that you have to write reports that are fundamental to government support. That is really what has happened.
For me, this was an extremely moving inquiry, as it reflected quite dramatically my own involvement in the education of young people with highly complex educational and physical challenges during the whole of my career. In 1978—I am not going to do it year by year—I was given my first headship, of Ormesby School in Cleveland, at the same time that the late Baroness Warnock produced her ground-breaking report on the future education of children with special educational needs and physical impairments. For a variety of reasons, partly due to an on-site specialist primary school for children with complex physical challenges, the local authority and the governors agreed to adopt the Warnock recommendations and include, at secondary level, all pupils in south Cleveland with severe physical difficulties, including a key number of pupils who were severely disabled due to thalidomide. With the support of the Department for Education, we became the first state school in the UK to make such a fundamental decision.
The teaching challenge was significant but highly rewarding. However, post-16 education and employment were even more challenging, and I constantly receive letters from my former pupils and their parents who, despite their excellent educational skills, could not get appropriate employment. That challenge remained with me for the rest of my career. When I moved to Leeds, with the support of the former Labour MP, George Mudie, who I think all your Lordships will know, we expanded the inclusion of pupils with special educational needs and physical needs to include pupils with impaired sight and hearing, and Down syndrome. However, the task of moving pupils on to skill training or employment, even in a highly progressive city such as Leeds, became even more challenging, despite our attempts to include external and internal career staff.
Of course, there have been a number of initiatives by successive Governments to address these issues since: the Education Act 1981, the Children and Families Act 2014 and the Commons Select Committee report of 2019 all sought changes to the landscape and tried to address the issue of education and skills for employment training. Indeed, the current EHC plans and access to work are positive initiatives to address the issues, but so much more needs to be done.
The Government’s response to the committee’s report is, frankly, outstanding. Nineteen of the 36 recommendations have been accepted in full; a further 12 have been partially accepted; four have been noted for action; and only one has been partially rejected.
Incidentally, I say to the committee that, two years after the production of the Warnock report in 1978, the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, said, “On all the main conclusions and recommendations, we were in complete agreement”. I would like the Minister to agree with Baroness Thatcher that that is the case here as well.
The current legislation is not sufficiently strong or appropriate to reduce the 30% disability employment gap that has existed for the past 50 years. Further legislation, which will require action, is probably necessary. There may be criticism, or indeed ridicule, by some that the current Government’s mission, expressed in response to our report, saying that
“economic growth is at the heart of the policy to improve access to work”,
is unrealistic. But the recommendations in this report provide, time after time, opportunities to carry out the promised mission and I fully support them.
The title Think Work First: the Transition from Education to Work for Young Disabled People is the philosophy that needs to be in line from nursery to employment. But, frankly, that is not and never has been the case. I understand just how challenging it is to link employers in both the public and private sectors with appropriate levels of support for SEN and disabled students. But that must be the Government’s objective because, if it does not happen, changes to the education system to improve links to employers will quite frankly be very difficult. How the agreed recommendations will be initiated and, crucially, how they will be financed and when they will be introduced are what we need to hear in the Minister’s response today.
For me, the following are priorities. Too often in the past, SEN was regarded as the sole area for guiding pupils from education to employment. Thankfully, the committee, and indeed the Government, embraced as the key challenge that the Government must include in future policies all young people with disabilities, long-term health conditions and special educational needs, and their families. I say “their families” because what is constantly missing from successive Governments in support of young disabled students moving to employment or further education is including parents or carers in research and decision-making. We heard that from our witnesses and it is something we should emphasise.
Committee members were deeply moved by the description by both parents and students of the mediocre level of support that often exists in schools. Two fundamental challenges emerged, as they have over many years: the need for better careers education and the need for more appropriate internships. The previous Government’s commitment to double the number of supported internships should be continued and indeed combined with the proposal to develop an English version of Scotland’s Compass tool, to assist the transfer from education to employment. This would certainly help the transfer and support system, but schools will need to radically increase their existing careers education system, which frankly has rarely been successful, particularly for pupils with SEN and disabilities. Education, health and care plans are extremely useful, but the continued failure to adequately fund them must be addressed to prevent the constant delays that simply undermine support and lead to people leaving their employment.
Crucially, too, the Government must totally review the careers service in schools. To be honest, it hardly exists in many schools. This affects most students but can be devastating for SEN and disabled students. The committee wanted to see this issue seriously reviewed, with an analysis of the number of existing careers advisers, their training and their qualifications. It would be useful if the Minister could say whether this has happened or will happen and whether the introduction of improved qualifications is being considered.
The final points that I wish to make concern employment opportunities for young disabled people. Unless there is a change to current policy, which will be radically affected by the use of artificial intelligence, et cetera, the situation examined by Baroness Warnock, which has not really changed in 50 years, will simply continue for decades to come.
We can radically increase the quality of education and skills in our schools, colleges and universities for disabled and SEN young people, but unless as a nation we can increase the level of employment for young people—and, indeed, more mature people—in both public and private environments, little will change. The committee discussed how this would be possible, but without a bold recruitment policy to include a wider range of employers, it simply will not happen. I was disappointed when the Minister did not fully accept the committee’s proposal to seriously improve the availability of ready-to-work programmes such as that provided by Think Forward, which would have engaged local authorities with employers much more readily. I hope that the Minister agrees that without a legal framework to expand links between schools, colleges and universities, as well as local authorities, the increased links will not happen.
Interestingly, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Denmark all have legal employment requirements, which benefit companies as well as individuals, while Luxembourg is recognised as having one of the most successful arrangements for engaging employers with disabled young and elderly people, not only in Europe but throughout the world. There, companies with 25 employees or more are required by law to include a quota of disabled young people, and are compensated by removing social security payments and receiving benefits for an excess of basic requirements. Frankly, we have to give something to employers that will encourage them to do it, rather than simply saying that they must do it ad hoc.
Surely if, as the Minister stated in reply to the committee’s report, the Government
“was elected to deliver change”
and, crucially,
“is committed to tackling economic inactivity, particularly where it is driven by ill health”
which I totally agree with, taking a bold set of actions, including legislation, before the next general election, will help silence the critics and reward the significant population of disabled and SEN young people.
Lord Laming (CB)
My Lords, at the outset, I once again emphasise how greatly the committee was helped by hearing from children with a disability and their parents. They very generously helped us to have an insight and to understand something of their experiences. That was so valuable.
It is worth while constantly reminding ourselves that childhood is a time of very great change and individual growth. It is the foundation of personal development. That being so, I am sure we all agree that, as a society, our aim should be for each and every child to have every opportunity to reach their full potential. Of course, change brings with it uncertainty, so it is not possible to predict what the outcome for each child may be. That said, sadly, there is often the temptation in some areas to make an assumption about the future prospects of each child. This especially applies to a child with a disability. Indeed, for children with a disability, sad to say, it is not unusual for a catalogue to be created from a very early age of things that they will never be able to do or skills that they will never possess. That is tragic.
This is why we should put in place, at a very early stage in a child’s life, both a personal development plan and a programme of support, for the child and their parents. The parents of a child with a disability often face very real challenges, so they deserve our support and encouragement. Alas, the evidence from the committee shows that, at best, the services provided for children with a disability and their parents are, to put it mildly, very patchy. Indeed, it is right to record that in some places, the services offered to children with a disability and their parents were seriously inadequate.
The movement from education to employment is a milestone in the life of every child. In the case of a child with a disability, it is a key stage in their development. In too many places, however, the arrangements are unpredictable, unreliable and negative. The good news, though, is that the committee heard of some heartwarming and outstanding work with children with a disability at this important stage in their lives. In each case, the good work was based on a vision and the determination to ensure that each child matters. In some areas, there was a well-developed plan of preparation for the transition from school to work in place for each child. In other areas, there was nothing.
Sadly, in other places, parents described the transition when their child left school as being like facing a frightening cliff edge. Too often, no preparation had been made, no plan had been created and no discussions with the adult services had taken place, as if they occupied a different place in the world. Due to this, parents described it as being like starting from scratch all over again. Although children’s services and adult services are provided by the same local authority, incredibly, that did not mean that these services were interested in communicating with each other or able to do so.
Children with a disability and their parents deserve better, especially at this critical time of transition. It seemed that in some places it was assumed that a child with a disability would simply be regarded as unemployable for the rest of their life on leaving school. This approach must be unacceptable, and I hope the Minister will take this point very seriously. The reality is that across the country, the number of children with a disability who are helped into employment is remarkably small. That being so, we should all set ourselves a challenge to demonstrate that there is an increase in the number of these children with a disability moving into employment each year. I am afraid this is a rather neglected field.
We need to be altogether much more ambitious. However, we can take encouragement because, despite all I have said, there is good news. The committee heard some evidence that was both inspiring and instructive of what can be done. I will refer to just one example, which is simple but telling. We heard that in one local authority area, the children’s services and the adult services worked together to organise a hub meeting, in which local employers and young people soon to leave school could meet in semi-social circumstances. The employers described their work and the employment possibilities, and then the children set out their skills and hopes for the future.
In one such meeting, an employer described the work of his recently created business. In doing so, he acknowledged that, because he was mainly concentrating on securing more customers and making the organisation grow, he sometimes failed to carefully manage the details of things such as ordering stock, cost control, staff hours worked et cetera. A pupil responded by saying that, despite his limitations because of his disability, he loved working on spreadsheets. The employer indicated that he had no experience in designing or working with spreadsheets and did not know how to engage in that area of work. The employer invited the young man to visit the workplace and explore together what might be possible. It was good to hear that the young man was offered a job but even better to hear that it completely transformed the lives of both the employer and the young man. The lesson from this and from a great deal of what we heard is that it can be done because it is being done in some places. The challenge, and the challenge for the Minister, is that each of us should do all we can to make sure that this is working everywhere in our society. As a nation we must rise to the challenge for the good of everyone.
I commend the important messages in this report—sadly, some are negative and things need to be rectified, but some are very hopeful. We can do it because it is being done. Let us just get on and do it. I hope that the Minister and others will take from this meeting that there is, with great ambition, great hope ahead.
As I will shortly be stepping down from the Public Services Committee, so ably chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, I pay special tribute to the work of the administrative staff who are so competent and conscientious and such a pleasure to work with. I offer them my warmest thanks.
Lord Mott (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, who has been incredibly kind and generous to me since I first joined the Public Services Select Committee. I am sorry that he will be leaving us very shortly. I also pay tribute to and thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for excellently chairing the committee, leading to the report today. I echo the comments of many noble Lords in thanking the excellent team who provide the support that we require.
The gap in employment between disabled and non-disabled people had been narrowing for a number of years, at least until the Covid-19 pandemic. But since then, progress has stalled. According to the latest estimates, just over half of working-age disabled people are employed, compared to more than four in five non-disabled people. Tackling this gap is, of course, important from a financial standpoint, not least given the significant increase in the costs of working-age welfare and the broad consensus across the political divide of the need to reduce this. Crucially, tackling this gap for those who can work and want to work is far more important on a human level.
There will always be some people unable to work due to disability and they must get the full support that they require. As disabled people transition from education, we must do everything we can to help them find suitable and fulfilling jobs. Making use of all the talent we have in this country means more people with the security of work and with the independence, improved well-being and social inclusion that it brings.
It is timely for the Public Services Committee, of which I am a member, to have undertaken this inquiry: Think Work First: the Transition from Education to Work for Young Disabled People. The committee’s extensive report makes over 30 recommendations, ranging from education and employment services to workplace rights and support to employers. I hope that these will provide much food for thought for the department.
In my contribution today, I want to focus on how we can improve the bridge that links education and employment. This is where there are clear examples of things working well and where progress should be sustained. Getting real, hands-on experience is vital for anyone getting into the workplace, disabled or not. I saw this not only as an apprentice myself but during my time as chief executive of the Conservative Party, where I was delighted to help establish a paid internship scheme with the Patchwork Foundation, for which I remain a mentor, to help young people from disadvantaged and minority communities get experience working in politics.
We know that this type of experience is particularly valuable for disabled people moving into the workplace. If a young disabled person can get a supported internship, an accessible apprenticeship or quality work experience, they are more likely to go on to fulfilling work. Supported internships provide a structured, work-based study programme for 16 to 24 year-olds with special educational needs and disabilities who have an education, health and care plan.
I was delighted that the previous Government made a commitment to double the number of supported internships. We saw evidence of their particular success in the NHS, with 68 hospitals hosting supported internships and strong evidence that these often end with the NHS employer offering the interns full-time, permanent contracts. I urge the Minister to commit today to building on the previous Government’s commitments here and to take the committee’s recommendation to
“increase the number of supported internships, and … introduce ambitious, time-bound rolling targets for this”.
I agree that there are many opportunities in the public sector for such an increase, but the Government should also seek suitable and willing private sector partners.
Moving on, I support the efforts being made to help more disabled young people into suitable apprenticeships and I would be keen to hear from the Minister what plans the Government have to communicate the new criteria, promote apprenticeships to employers and training providers and incentivise employers to take on disabled apprentices, in line with the committee’s recommendations.
Finally, the committee is right to highlight the value of supported employment. The universal support programme, announced by the last Conservative Government, was allocated an initial £53 million to help 25,000 out of work, long-term sick and disabled people who face barriers to employment, with an ambition to go much further, with larger numbers of people helped, by providing sustained, wraparound help for up to 12 months for both the participant and their employer to help them stay in work.
The programme was welcomed and praised. Scope called it “good news” and said that it was something that it had been “calling for over many years”. But, as the report notes, there have been concerns within the sector that the current Government are not committed to the programme. Will the Minister today take the opportunity to allay these concerns and confirm that the Government remain fully committed to rolling out the programme? Specifically, I hope they will take forward the recommendations to
“set out clear timelines and targets for improving the regional and national availability of Universal Support, as well as metrics focused on employment outcomes for the disabled people who participate in supported employment programmes”.
Will more be done to link the universal support offer to the supported internships that I spoke to earlier?
Helping more people to find the security and fulfilment of work has always been at the heart of my politics. This should apply to everyone but, sadly, too many disabled people are still written off. We need to build on the progress already made, reverse the post-pandemic decline in progress and, in doing so, remember the sentiment of this report: Think Work First.
Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)
My Lords, I am very pleased to contribute to this debate on an important and extremely thoughtful report from the House of Lords Public Services Committee. I thank the committee members and their chair for this great publication.
I read it through both a personal and professional lens. After my accident nearly 30 years ago, I was lucky: I had access to resources, mental and physical support, and people in business who believed I could still contribute. Many young disabled people do not have that combination today. That is what this report challenges us to change.
The scale of the issue is sobering, as we have already heard today: the figures have barely moved in a decade. If we halve that gap, the Government estimate an economic benefit of £50 billion a year through higher tax receipts and reduced welfare spending. This is not just a social challenge—it is a national economic priority, particularly at this time of growth focus.
The committee identifies several structural problems: low expectations in schools, careers advice that is too generic, weak co-ordination between education, employment and health, and employers who want to help but do not know how. It also spotlights what works: internships, vocational profiling and integrated services. I agree wholeheartedly with all these points; the evidence base is strong. But I want to go further in three areas where we can act faster or think differently: co-design, partnership through business networks and entrepreneurship.
Too often, systems are built for young disabled people, not with them. One in four told the committee that they received no careers advice relevant to their disability. Too many described leaving education as “falling off a cliff.” That is a design failure, not a resource one. Co-design means embedding lived experience from the start: shaping programmes, testing ideas and feeding back on what works.
I want to expand the report’s framing. The committee highlights physical and learning disabilities, but we must also confront the mental health dimension. Around 60% of young disabled people experience a diagnosable mental health condition. Support too often ends when they leave school, and there is a well-documented cliff edge between CAMHS and adult services.
If you are trying to find work while managing anxiety or depression as a result of disability, you need joined-up help, not fragmented systems that treat “health” and “work” separately. Expanding individual placement and support models, which integrate mental health and employment services, is right; these programmes deliver employment rates up to 30% higher than conventional job search. I would go one step further: embed mental health co-design panels within local employment and skills partnerships so that young people help shape the services meant for them.
Sara Weller, a disabled entrepreneur and one of the very few disabled FTSE non-execs, who runs ActionAble, shows that co-design is not a “nice to have”—it is the biggest predictor of sustained success in changing services. Evaluations of co-produced programmes show 25% to 30% higher sustained-employment outcomes than standard models.
The committee is also right that local co-ordination is often missing. It calls for stronger partnerships between education, employers and local authorities. We already have a ready-made structure that could deliver this alignment—here I declare an interest as the president of the British Chambers of Commerce; its local skills improvement plans have already been touched on today. There is now one in every region, bringing together employers, FE colleges and local authorities to match training with job demand. Yet few LSIPs currently address disability inclusion, and that is a missed opportunity. Imagine if every LSIP identified inclusive employers ready to host supported internships, mapped FE colleges and linked SMEs to the Access to Work scheme. The infrastructure exists: 400,000 businesses have engaged through the chambers and more than 200 FE colleges are involved in LSIPs.
Research for the DWP shows that when local business networks engage, young disabled employment rates rise by around nine percentage points within three years. Making disability inclusion a mandatory strand in every LSIP, with measurable targets, would turn a general skills plan into a genuine inclusion plan—owned by business, informed by evidence, and aligned with “Think work first”.
The committee focuses on employment and supported internships. I fully endorse that but I want to add, perhaps unsurprisingly, entrepreneurship. For many disabled people, self-employment is not a fallback but a natural path. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 19% of working-age disabled adults in the UK are engaged in early-stage entrepreneurial activity, compared with 11% of non-disabled adults. Disabled people are nearly twice as likely to start a business, yet the system does not even meet them half way.
Only 3% of government start-up loans go to disabled founders, fewer than one in 20 accelerator or incubator programmes have accessibility designed in, and only 5% per cent of venture capital firms report collecting any data at all on disabled young founders. The barriers are practical and structural: inaccessible workspaces, inflexible benefit rules, opaque funding routes and low representation in networks.
Yet the potential is extraordinary. The Disabled Entrepreneurs Network found that 72% of disabled founders say their experience directly informed the product or service they created. They saw the problem and they tried to fix it. You can see it in adaptive technology, accessible fashion, inclusive design and health innovation, sectors where experience drives commercial and social value. Scope’s Future Innovators pilot, for example, supported 60 disabled founders and generated £3 million in revenue and 120 jobs in just two years.
We are seeing a new wave of organisations also backing entrepreneurs in disability. CREO, launched by Founders Forum, is building a national ecosystem to support disabled and neurodiverse entrepreneurs, connecting them with investors, mentors and accessible resources. It is a brilliant example of private-sector energy being matched with societal change. CREO’s early work shows that when disabled founders have access to mainstream networks and capital, their ventures grow 30% faster. Alongside CREO, initiatives such as the Disabled Entrepreneurs Network, the Disability Rights UK’s Leadership Academy, and UnLtd are proving that targeted mentoring, modest seed funding and inclusive design can unlock extraordinary innovation.
These efforts need to be scaled and connected, joined up with national policy and local delivery—with the LSIPs perhaps—linking local business networks with inclusive investment and mentorship. Let us make entrepreneurship a formal third route in every education-to-work strategy; that means embedding enterprise education in further education across the board, supporting internship and growth hubs and prompting the British Business Bank to report annually on participation rates. We could even pilot regional inclusive innovation funds—small-scale capital pots designed with disabled entrepreneurs to test what works. That is not just an inclusion policy, it is an innovation policy. If we removed half the barriers facing disabled founders, the Federation of Small Businesses estimates that up to 250,000 new disabled-owned businesses, which would add billions to GDP and transform representation in the UK’s innovation ecosystem. This is not charity—it is economic sense.
I am patron of Day One Trauma, a charity helping people at the point when they face massive physical trauma. It works in hospitals providing invaluable support to patients and families. One of the first and most requested pieces of advice is always about work: “What will happen now that I am disabled? How will I go back to work? What future will I have?” When I became disabled, I had resources: I had networks and opportunities, which meant that I could dare to believe that I would be able to embark on one of my crazy ideas for a new business—most of them terrible. I thought “work first” because, before it was clear that I was even going to leave hospital, I knew that was what would help me to carry on. But the combination of factors that enabled that mindset for me should not be luck—it should be policy. I urge the Government to turn Think Work First from a report into reality.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, report was, for me, slightly depressing but also reassuring. It was slightly depressing because I have either said or agreed with everything said in this report over the past 20 or 30 years. A series of themes here have dominated government ever since it has looked at this area, particularly in the education field. It comes down to the fact that you have X number of people who do not fit the education system that well who are still going through it.
Then we come to a series of roadblocks, such as level 2 English language. The president of the British Dyslexia Association, who is dyslexic, of course would say this, would he not? But you suddenly bump into things that get in the way. The one battle that I won partially was thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Nash— I give him eternal credit for taking on his own department—who turned round and said that a recognised dyslexic should not be made to pass functional skills English at GCSE level with a C, as it was at the time, to get their apprenticeship. It was inspired by meeting people like carpenters and hairdressers, who could not get a job that would allow them to be employed properly because they had a disability that meant they could not do something. That took a long time—and that degree of rigidity in standards is something that we must resist. To go through all the dys’s, a dyspraxic just will not fill out the form in time. For a dyscalculic, it is often even worse. I recently met somebody who had failed maths 14 times in trying to get an apprenticeship. The degree of black humour builds, does it not? We get around it; we do not address it. The Government have to interject here, to remove the traps on the way through.
I hope we are about to hear—the Minister is being threatened by a piece of paper from her officials—that we will try to remove this with a little common sense. It is just one of the things I think we have to do. We have to adapt the education and training programme to get through. I hope this will come forward. I was ignorant before I started this that Scotland has the Compass tool; apparently it works. I hope the Government will tell us how they will integrate this, or something very like it, into our own system, guiding people through.
Then it goes on about the fact that, as anyone who has dealt with the system knows, you are in education, then you are employed, then you are an adult and then you fall off the cliff. The one thing the Children and Families Act got right was that if you are identified as needing an EHCP it goes on until 25. That is the best thing about it. Maybe it should go on for longer, and maybe there should be more structural change. If you think about it for two seconds, it is obvious that you will need support and guidance to get through in a system where you do not fit. It has been designed for the 75% of the population that it does fit so you will have to make some adaptations or some ways through to make it relevant to everybody else. It is no-brainer, really. But you hit bureaucratic walls, structures and stereotypes all the time and you are hitting them damned hard. You have to try and make a place where the Government take action and actively overcome.
It is time for another declaration of interest that is relevant under the rules. I am chairman of Microlink PC which puts together packages for people going into employment. Assistive technology is usually part of this but sometimes it is just organisation. We find when dealing with employers, often big employers, that they just want to get the best out of their people. Big employers sometimes feel confident and structured. They need PR. They decide, “Yes, we’ll do this. We’ll get in early and deal with the problem. We don’t need a definition”—and it makes sense. The problem is that most small employers, as this report makes quite clear, do not know this. They think they can avoid it. Someone has a condition: if they cannot do this, what happens?
There can be small changes and small structures. In my case, I have to talk to a computer as opposed to tapping a keyboard. I have never met anybody who objected to me word processing by talking to a computer—if someone did, I think they probably have bigger psychological problems than the person talking to the computer. How are you going to encourage not only the support systems but the knowledge that these things are easily dealt with if you have the willingness to go forward?
When the Minister comes to reply to this debate, I am sure she will agree in principle with all these points. It is about driving things forward and saying that you have to do things slightly differently. As has been pointed out by virtually everybody here, the employment gap and the economic benefits are self-evident. If you are employed, then you are not claiming benefits and are an economic benefit to everybody else, so pure selfishness comes into it. Dyslexics have a stereotype that we are all entrepreneurs. I think quite a lot of us are but often that is through necessity and not through choice. You have to do something different or you will sit and rot. We have to embrace these things, and if we do not start to address the basic thrust of this report we will simply carry on as we are at the moment.
Also, I would hope that the Minister will say what the Government thought was good about the work done by the previous Government. What has worked and how will they carry it on? We all know what has not worked because we talked about it for a long time. But how are we going to continue the good work and get that drive? How will we say, “This has worked”? Where is the continuity?
If people need support and structure, how will that work? Access to Work is often talked about, but it is slow and linked to certain jobs. How do we take that through if we decide that we need that support and structure? Let us face it, people do not usually radically change the type of jobs they do; they are usually in a pattern, at least for long periods of time. How are we going to make sure the support is always there? It would be a very good thing if the employer did not have to go through the hassle of saying an employee must wait to get their new support system. It is about support, structure and information. I go back to the beginning of this, in schools. If a school’s careers adviser does not know that people from various disability groups can have careers in X number of lines, they cannot help. Where is the expertise coming in?
As the noble Baroness will undoubtedly be finding out when she deals with the special educational needs report, these are not easy things to do. We all look forward to that report; only one delay in that report will be quite good by governmental standards, but I hope it is just the one delay.
Extra knowledge is needed across a variety of structures. There are three disabled people in this room—that I can recognise, although I am probably missing someone—and they all have different problems. How will the Government make sure that people can get that expertise? Are we making sure that the professional involved can go and ask for help? They need to know that if they need to ask for extra help, it is not a negative but a positive. If we are doing this in teaching, we should be doing it for careers advice—it should be the same thing. If you have not met a certain condition before, you need to have knowledge. Having a central pool of support, having access to it, and saying that it is okay to get something through—and doing it reasonably fast—would make life immeasurably easier for everyone involved in the system.
What we really need is a change of tone; we need to say, “We are supportive and we will inform you”. The employer’s fear about employing somebody who works differently in their office must be overcome. That is very important, and the report is wise to draw attention to it. The fact that people are frightened about extra costs and the structures will always be there until we get a hold of it, shake somebody pretty hard and tell them not to worry. After that, we can show them how it is done. The Government need to say that they are taking these steps and that they will work on the other stages.
On getting special educational needs right, unless we are getting to another cliff edge—I think the noble Lord, Lord Laming, was the first one to say this—the Government are still just pushing the cliff edge slightly further down the road. They have got to go out there and say how they will address the whole problem. It is a big challenge, and the Government will not get it right in one Session. But, if they embrace it and get the tone right, future Governments of whatever colour will probably find it easier to go forward. It is a big challenge. I wish the Government well, and I look forward to what the Minister has to say.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have made such valuable contributions to this discussion. At a time when provisions for disabled students are further stretched and needed more than ever, this debate is incredibly important.
His Majesty’s loyal Opposition welcome that the Government appear to be following the committee’s advice and that they have prioritised vocational qualifications in their recent reforms. The previous Government understood the importance of a vocational pathway that aimed to provide opportunities to every schoolchild in this country and, as such, were committed to achieving parity between vocational and academic qualifications. The devil is always in the detail, so we await further clarification on the Government’s newly announced V-levels but, if they prove to be a continuation of the previous Government’s commitment, they would be a welcome step in the right direction.
However, simply offering a more streamlined qualifications system is not enough: particularly with young disabled people, it is incredibly important that sufficient guidance is offered. The committee’s recommendation of vocational profiling would provide this and we hope that, when the Government lay out their V-level plans in detail, they will follow the advice and wise counsel of the committee that was so ably chaired by the former Secretary of State for Education, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris.
His Majesty’s loyal Opposition are also grateful for the Government’s honouring of our commitment to double the number of supported internships. Allow me to repeat the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris: “supported internships work”—and work and work. My noble friend Lord Mott highlighted his personal experience as chief executive of the Conservative Party. It remains our firm belief that supported internships are one of the best pathways into work for the people furthest away from the job market. It follows that continuing to scale them up should be a priority for any Government, regardless of their political persuasion, whose aim is to get young disabled people into work, give them the opportunities that they both need and deserve and watch them flourish in an inclusive and team-orientated environment. I hope that the Minister will assure noble Lords that the Government will continue to proactively update your Lordships’ House on this issue.
A key element of providing these very opportunities, however, is the successful co-ordination between the Government and local authorities. We understand that the Minister for School Standards in the other place confirmed that the Connect to Work programme has begun in a quarter of areas, but please let us not have a postcode lottery. If initiatives are not rolled out countrywide, we risk perpetuating inequalities based purely on peoples’ addresses. Capacity for delivery varies dramatically across local authorities and it must be the Government’s responsibility to ensure that different needs are equally met. We trust that the Connect to Work programme will continue to be rolled out, but it must be done regularly and equitably. We would welcome a watertight guarantee from the Minister that this Government are committed to ensuring that that will be the case.
The more worrying issue is the co-ordination of education, health and care plans. The noble Lord, Lord Laming, highlighted a cliff edge or the need to start again after leaving school, as did the noble Lord, Lord Addington. The completion rate of EHCPs ranges from below 10% in some authorities to over 90% in others. The changes introduced by the Children and Families Act 2014, coupled with a surge in applications post Covid, mean that there are now over 600,000 children on plans. That is one in 20 pupils, with a further 150,000 awaiting assessment. With such a disparity in delivery already evident, a potential 25% increase in that number could mark a tipping point that is, indeed, a serious cliff edge.
Reflecting on this critical issue, the committee was clear that reforms are urgently needed to reduce application and delivery times and improve the provision of EHCPs. We understand that these are within the scope of the wider reforms to be announced in the department’s upcoming White Paper and, therefore, it may not be possible to comment on any changes right now. But, despite this, perhaps a reflection on another recommendation of clear timelines would provide much-needed clarity to both students and teachers.
We have been told that the White Paper is to be delayed, but, in the meantime, local authorities and schools are left guessing about what the future of EHCP provision will look like. The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is entirely correct when he says that prevention is better than cure. We know that early intervention is among the most effective ways of assisting disabled children into the workforce, but drastic changes will need to be made to ensure that this is available to all schoolchildren, regardless of where they live, and we look forward to hearing the Government’s proposed solutions.
This should be a non-partisan subject—a common goal, echoed by many noble Lords, to do everything possible for those who have found, and may still find, themselves in challenging circumstances. The Government appear to be taking many of the committee’s recommendations on board, but regular updates on reasonable adjustments, vocational schemes and equal provisions are most welcome. An evidence-based approach is being taken and the successes of the previous Government are being built upon. We very much hope that the pathway from education to work for young disabled people will remain on an upward trajectory into the future. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, so eloquently put it, if we do not get this right, we all lose out.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for securing this important debate on this report. We are grateful to the committee for its work and its report, which found that young disabled people, as we have heard during a good debate today, face systemic barriers that prevent progress.
I am sorry about the delay that the committee experienced before the Government’s response. I will not identify a particular department because this is a cross-government responsibility, and it is a cross-government responsibility to respond to the committee in a timely manner. The tardiness of that response does not reflect the work that the Government are doing, and I will say something about that in responding to the debate.
We know that the SEND system in this country is broken, which is why we are taking time to review the system and to get our reforms right. We agree that there needs to be a cultural shift in how we support young disabled people, and that success is dependent upon raising aspirations, challenging discrimination and ensuring co-ordinated support from school through to sustained employment.
The recently published Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper sets out our vision for a world-leading skills system that breaks down barriers to opportunity for all; meets learners’ and employers’ needs; widens access to high-quality education and training; supports innovation, research and development; and improves people’s lives. The Government are committed to helping young disabled people to access and stay in work when they leave education, with a focus on early support and intervention. The Government have considered the committee’s recommendations and changes are already taking place.
The report made valuable recommendations regarding education and careers support, including improving careers adviser training, which we have done, first by embedding vocational profiling for young people with SEND into the careers leader and online training modules aimed at special educational needs co-ordinators and the wider education workforce to support careers conversations. This will help individuals identify their skills, interests, aspirations and support needs for employment.
On the important point about careers advice being appropriate and supportive for young people with disabilities, the government-funded careers support for young people is inclusive, with an emphasis on working with our delivery partner, the Careers and Enterprise Company, and with key partners, including special educational needs organisations and local government, to ensure that careers provision is tailored to the needs of young people. Careers hubs across the country receive SEND training as standard, which informs their work with schools and colleges. There are now SEND-specific co-ordinators in the network. All new enterprise co-ordinators have SEND induction training by default through CEC’s strategic partnership with Talentino. Among them, there are 38 SEND-specific enterprise co-ordinators across the hub network. Training is also available for employers, to make sure that their outreach programmes are as inclusive as possible, because those programmes, and of course work experience, need to be available for all young people, particularly for the young people we are talking about today.
CEC’s employer standards framework embeds inclusion as a key measure of quality in business outreach work. We are aligning adult skills provision and careers advice with the Jobcentre Plus network, building a new unified public jobs and careers service. We will review the vital role that adult essential skills provision plays in supporting people with learning difficulties and disabilities into work. Recognising the report’s recommendation to improve the post-16 qualifications framework, which my noble friend Lady Morris focused on at the beginning of her contribution, we will simplify and strengthen vocational pathways, introducing new rigorous qualifications so that all learners, including those with special educational needs and disabilities, will have access to high-quality study pathways and a clear line of sight to employment or further study.
My noble friend makes an important point about the focus at level 1 and level 2, not just at level 3. That is why our reforms will include two new pathways at level 2, including a further study pathway for students aiming to progress to level 3 but needing a period of time for extra preparation, and of course new English and maths qualifications at level 1, which will provide a gradual route for learners, helping them build knowledge and confidence before resitting full GCSEs where appropriate. My noble friend also makes an important point about broader consideration of qualifications at entry level and at level 1. I accept her challenge that more work needs to be done there.
On vocational courses, I think there is now a clearer route for students. On the point about apprenticeships, the Government’s introduction of foundation apprenticeships in August this year provides another route into apprenticeships that is more inclusive and available.
The soon to be published curriculum and assessment review led by Professor Becky Francis will set out plans to ensure that every learner, including those with SEND, receives a high-quality education supported by a curriculum that gives them the knowledge and skills they need to thrive. Improving inclusivity and expertise in mainstream education settings is a key part of the Government’s ambition to ensure that all children and young people receive the support they need. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, emphasised this and talked about his important experience, during his time in education, in developing that. We know that good schools are already able to develop that type of inclusive education. We need, as the challenge has rightly been put, to make sure that that happens everywhere.
On our reforms, we are working closely with experts, including appointing a strategic adviser for SEND who is playing a key role in convening and engaging with the sector, including leaders, practitioners, children and families, as we consider the next steps for the future of SEND reform. The proposals that result from this co-production will be set out as part of a schools White Paper early next year and aim to restore confidence in the SEND system and deliver improvement so that every child can achieve.
However, we are not sitting and waiting for that to happen. We have already taken important steps, including the creation of 10,000 new school places for children with SEND as part of a £740 million capital investment to expand specialist units and adapt mainstream settings. Multimillion-pound programmes, such as the partnership for inclusion of neurodiversity in schools and early language support for every child, are being delivered in collaboration with central and local government schools and parents to test and learn new approaches, and inspection frameworks have also been updated to ensure that Ofsted holds school leaders to account for inclusion, with a new explicit focus on inclusion embedded in the framework.
The report also rightly called for more work experience opportunities and activities which prepare young people for employment. It identified the fantastic experience offered by supported internships and work placements and recommended that these are expanded to a larger non-EHCP cohort. At this point, perhaps I can go back 15 months to the point at which I chaired Barts Health, where the committee was able to go and see the fantastic work being done by Project SEARCH. It always inspired me when I was able to see that in the hospitals and across the trust, and the young people who then became important and productive members of the NHS staff in that trust.
The Department for Education is continuing to invest in building the capacity and quality of supported internships by providing up to £12 million to March 2026. Through this funding, the department is also expanding our pilot—to take up the point that my noble friend made—that is testing supported internships with young people who have SEND but do not have education, health and care plans, and who are furthest from the labour market, to support hundreds more young people with SEND to transition into sustained paid employment.
Through the youth guarantee, we are addressing the issue of young people not in employment, education or training by bringing together adult skills training, support to find work, and apprenticeships. The youth guarantee trailblazers are still in their first year of delivery, but already interesting examples are emerging of local approaches, focused specifically on young people with SEND. The trailblazer in the west of England, for example, has designed a programme to support young people with SEND to move into paid employment through tailored eight-week placements and structured support. By focusing on individual strengths, career coaching and inclusive employer engagement, the programme aims to build confidence, support transitions and enable sustained progression into the workplace.
The report also focused, as did the debate today, on the workplace, recommending steps which would promote workplace rights and inclusion, including measures to improve transparency, provide guidance and build awareness of disabled employees’ rights and employers’ obligations. At this point, I want to strongly support the case made by the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, about the contribution that disabled people make to the workforce and therefore to the economy, and to agree with him that, where people are short-sighted enough to see disabled people as a burden, they are doing not only disabled people but themselves and their businesses a disservice as well. The noble Lord, Lord Laming, through his excellent example, made that very clear.
There is an enormous win-win here for employers who are able to provide the working environment for young people with disabilities to shine in the way in which the noble Lord outlined. As the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, also made clear, to have opportunities for entrepreneurship and innovation is a further opportunity. Her points were important, and I will undertake to make sure that they are shared with my colleagues in the Department for Business and more broadly in relation to the points about entrepreneurship.
The Government agree that it is vital for both employers and employees to understand their rights and responsibilities under the Equality Act 2010, particularly around disability and reasonable adjustments. Existing measures already support this goal. The Equality Act 2006 established the Equality and Human Rights Commission and gave it the responsibility to promote and encourage awareness and understanding of equality and human rights across society. The commission also provides guidance and publishes the employment statutory code of practice, which serves as a key resource for employers and employees alike.
On the particular point made by the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, about the disability confident scheme, which is a UK Government-backed voluntary initiative designed to help employers to recruit, retain and develop disabled people and those with health conditions by aiming to challenge negative attitudes, promote inclusive practices and close the disability employment gap by providing free guidance, resources and a structured framework for organisations, we are exploring how to make the scheme more robust, as the noble Lord argued for. We are working with employers, disabled people and disabled people’s organisations to realise the full potential of the scheme.
However, the Government are not complacent. We are taking steps to strengthen equality in the workplace through initiatives such as the Employment Rights Bill, which will require employers to produce equality action plans outlining actions on equality. We are also committed to build on the success of gender pay gap reporting and legislate to make it mandatory that all large employers publish their disability pay gap.
As the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, outlined, the disability pay gap has remained stubbornly high for many years and shows that disabled people too often face additional barriers to getting into work and thriving in the workplace. This pay gap sits in the context of disabled people in general earning less than non-disabled people and being twice as likely to be unemployed. That is why the Government are taking action to improve employment support for disabled people and supporting British businesses to make workplaces more inclusive of disabled people. We are committed to building on the success of gender pay gap reporting and legislate to make it mandatory that all large employers publish their disability pay gap.
I understand that reasons for the disability pay gap can be complex, and I am grateful to the many disabled people, representative organisations and businesses that shared their views in our recent consultation on the topic. I do not suggest that publishing pay gap data alone will resolve this gap, but it will provide large employers with a clear and measurable indicator to help to identify where issues might sit and take action accordingly. These measures will help to create a fairer and more inclusive workforce.
In response to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Mott, about the universal support scheme, this Government’s £1 billion connect to work programme uses the funding originally planned for universal support and keeps the same important principles of high-fidelity supported employment provision for around 300,000 disabled people, people with health conditions and those with complex barriers to support by the end of the decade. Importantly, we worked with local authorities and mayors to increase flexibility in how this can be delivered. It is being rolled out across England and Wales and is already seeing people being supported into work, being as it is the largest supported employment programme in Europe.
I repeat my gratitude to the committee for bringing forward this debate, which has highlighted how essential it is that we provide the right support and training for young disabled people. Whether through high-quality apprenticeships, colleges or universities, skills give people the power to seize opportunity and gain the work that will make such a difference to them, our economy and our society. By working together across government, education settings and employers, we will provide a system whereby all young people will be able to follow the pathway that is right for them. As I suggested earlier—it has been a key theme for today’s debate—that will be good for those disabled young people, but it will also be good for our economy and society.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I will briefly reply to the debate and thank the speakers for their contributions. There has been a lot of unanimity and there is no need to go over the points again, but there was a good balance between optimism and concern. I think that, for somebody listening in, the optimism won out. This is a moment, because the opportunity for really fundamental change does not come around often. If you miss it when it is there, you sometimes do not get another chance for a decade or longer. With the SEND review, with the vocational qualifications framework being changed, with further education becoming a priority for government, with the skills White Paper and with the evidence of what works, quite honestly if we do not grasp this now, we should not be in the job. It is that important.
I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, and the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, who were not members of our committee. They brought different perspectives, and we had not looked at the angles that certainly the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, guided us to, in terms of entrepreneurship. If there is another iteration of that, I would be pleased to hear the Minister say that she would take that back. The noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, always brings, with his connections, a lot of information that we miss. If we can gather that information and add it to what we have done, we will have something helpful for the Government.
I thank the Minister for her positive, thorough, thoughtful and optimistic reply to our debate. I am encouraged by some of the things she said, particularly on supported internships, where there has been a degree of concern in the sector. That can build and build unless something is said, so I very much welcome the comments made on that. I finish by saying that the wish of our committee would be to see our recommendations embedded in the documents and policy frameworks to be published by the Government in the weeks and months to come. Then it really will have been a report that was worth its while.
Power Struggle: Delivering Great Britain’s Electricity Grid Infrastructure (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)
Baroness Taylor of Bolton
To move that the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Industry and Regulators Committee Power Struggle: Delivering Great Britain’s Electricity Grid Infrastructure (1st Report, HL Paper 132).
Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
I am very pleased to move that the committee takes note of our report and thank all those who have been involved in the writing of it, especially committee members—and especially those who have done a double shift today, because we had a very significant committee meeting this morning. I also thank our researchers and the whole committee team, who have worked hard on this, as well as our witnesses and those who wrote in with evidence, because it is a complex subject.
I think we can all agree that energy and energy policy is a fast-moving area. Our report was concluded five months ago, and I know that is a normal time it can take for a debate of this kind, but a lot has happened in the interim. Some of it is relevant to our report, and other parts are bigger parts of the Government’s overall policy. The report is very specific, however; it is about the electricity grid and its role in meeting government targets. That is a large enough topic, but it does not take on board energy policy as a whole.
The obvious starting point is to say that the electricity grid is obviously an essential part of modern life. During our inquiry, there were outages in Spain, in Portugal and at Heathrow, which showed just how central the grid is to modern life, how dependent we are on it and the levels of disruption that can be caused when things go wrong. The Government’s growth agenda, which is very clear, focuses on building more infrastructure and supporting energy-intensive industries, such as AI. That will only deepen our reliance on the grid.
We can all agree that the Government have set very ambitious clean power targets; the aim to decarbonise 95% of our electricity system by 2030 is certainly ambitious. The grid will play a crucial part in meeting that target by connecting more new low carbon sources of power to the grid and transporting that power around the country. Meeting the target will involve building new electricity generation and network capacity at a much faster pace than we have managed in recent years. Therefore, our inquiry set out to discover the main barriers to delivering the grid expansion that will be needed to meet that target.
Ofgem, which is the energy regulator, plays a central role in determining the future of the grid to prevent network companies from abusing their monopoly position. Ofgem controls the projects networks can build, the investments they make and the costs they can charge consumers through its price control. In doing this, Ofgem must balance its responsibilities to ensure that affordable energy bills, secure energy supplies and a decarbonised energy system—which can be in conflict—are decided in a proper way. Ofgem also decides how costs are spread between current and future generations, and how they are recouped through energy bills.
These are fundamentally political and distributional choices. For instance, Ofgem is currently trying to wrestle with whether those who are struggling to pay should receive greater support, potentially paid for by other customers. It can be legitimate for regulators to implement these political choices; it happens with a whole range of regulators and their responsibilities. However, there needs to be clear political direction on what the priorities should be. Ofgem’s statutory objectives provide no such sense of priority.
The Government have the ability to provide Ofgem with guidance on these matters, through the strategic policy statement for energy, which was published last February. But it is often the case that the Government give regulators extra instructions without providing the full level of priority that is often needed. We have found with many regulators that Governments give instructions but there is not always transparency on what exactly the instructions mean, and some regulators across the board are concerned about that.
The current Government have indicated that they will provide clearer priorities as part of their review of Ofgem. Can the Minister commit that, as part of the implementation of this review, the Government will provide clarity on how Ofgem should balance the affordability of energy bills with the need for greater investment in the grid? Will the Government change the statutory objectives for Ofgem and provide more detail on what should be the priority? Will the Government provide their own view on how those struggling with energy bills should be supported and how the costs should be met, rather than leaving it to Ofgem to resolve?
I want to say a word about zonal pricing, which the committee spent quite some time discussing. As part of building any new grid infrastructure, it will cost consumers and we believe therefore that there needs to be greater price incentive for major sources of energy generation and a demand for them to locate closer to one another, thus reducing the need for additional grid as far as possible. On balance, after taking considerable evidence on this, the committee decided that it was supportive of the idea to move towards zonal pricing of electricity, which we thought could have enabled better use of existing grid capacity.
One of our members, the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, who unfortunately cannot be here today, illustrated this to us very clearly by pointing out what could happen in his former constituency of Caithness, where there is abundant power, abundant land and a workforce. If there was zonal pricing, because of the potential for cheap electricity there, that might be a very good place for data centres.
On zonal pricing, though, we recognised and acknowledged that such a move had the potential to impact on investor certainty. We felt that that could be managed but clearly the Government felt otherwise and have decided to retain the existing national pricing system. I understand that the Government and Ofgem plan changes to network charges to try to improve those incentives, but we were doubtful about whether that would have the same impact as zonal pricing. I hope the Minister will consider what the impact will be of retaining national pricing and whether it will limit our ability to make our existing grid more efficient and decrease the amount of grid that would have to be extended going forward.
On connections—another area where we took a great deal of evidence—we heard repeated complaints during our inquiry that new energy-generation projects and businesses seeking connections to the grid face a slow, opaque and unpredictable service from the networks, with many being quoted connection dates of over a decade away. This was because the queue to connect to the grid previously made no judgments at all on whether projects were ready or necessary and simply went on a first-come, first-served basis. This led to enormous queues that theoretically contain more energy generation than we would need even to reach the clean power target. It is generally agreed that many of those applications were, in fact, speculative and very early-stage applications.
Since we were taking that evidence the Government, Ofgem and the National Energy System Operator—NESO—decided to take action to reorder the queue. Networks will be required to offer connections only to projects that have planning permission and are judged to be necessary based on the new projections from the Government and NESO on the types of generation we will need to meet these targets.
These changes are to be welcomed. They are necessary and should enable generation to be conducted to the grid more quickly. NESO and the networks must act quickly to provide these updated connection offers to those hoping to connect to the grid, but we are hearing—even yesterday—from those involved in the sector that this is not happening quickly enough and there is insufficient consultation to make sure that we get the fast-tracking of the connections that are pretty vital to what we need in order to go forward quickly.
Our inquiry also heard some concerns, particularly from the solar and battery sectors, that the current criteria for prioritisation in this queue could cause problems for those who want to have projects that will be needed and will be key to what we do going forward after 2030. We can understand the need to push things forward quickly but I think we need to think of the medium to long term as well as the short term. So before publishing, next year, the strategic spatial energy plan, which will guide these decisions, we believe that NESO must make sure that it is consulting very closely with all forms of generation suppliers to ensure that we get the kind of future investment that we really need.
The reordering of the queue should allow networks to provide a better, clearer and more consistent service to connection customers. We have heard that networks have sometimes provided unsatisfactory levels of service, including significant delays and charges for connections, so we welcome that Ofgem is reviewing the regulatory framework there for connections, and we support its proposals to strengthen the incentives and penalties networks face for their performance. But this does happen. These connection changes have to happen at speed, and they have to happen with a proper amount of consultation with those involved in the sector.
On planning, as in any area of infrastructure delivery it is a key challenge. Certainly it is in terms of delivering new grid projects in the planning system. We support the Government’s plans in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to allow local authorities to recover the full costs of planning processes and to ring-fence these important pressures on local authorities at the moment. That will be one way of making sure that we get the kind of service that is needed. But we are very concerned that planning authorities do not have the skills and resources—but particularly the skills—that are needed to process these at the speed that is necessary. Skills shortages are a problem not just for planning authorities but across the whole of this area, and it is probably one of the major challenges facing the country as a whole at the moment.
The Government, Ofgem and NESO are all doing very many positive and necessary things—or have committed to do so in the future. But all these elements need to be decided and implemented at pace. It is important that we get the momentum for getting these changes if we are going to meet our clean power target. We believe it is still unclear whether the energy system is capable of moving at the huge scale and pace that is necessary to do so many things in such a short time. We were told repeatedly by many witnesses that the Government’s target for 2030 was possible, but everybody agreed it was very difficult. We were told repeatedly that it is possible, but the key is that failure in any one element of these issues could cause real difficulties in terms of the Government meeting their target.
We have called on the Government to make sure that we are all informed of what is going on. The Government are saying that they are publishing various key indicators, but very often these are hidden in government figures that not only the public but certainly parliamentarians do not always follow with great care. Things on the website are not always the way to find out what is going on. So we would like the Government to commit to clear public statements to Parliament—a drumbeat of information coming forward—so that every six months or so we can just assess how clear it is that the Government and the industry are going in the right direction, and we are moving towards hitting our targets.
The objectives that the Government have set are clear, but so are the potential pitfalls. Time is running out and we cannot have any complacency. It really is time for everybody involved in this industry and in government to pull out all the stops to make sure we can go forward, and it is important that the Government make information available to Parliament and to the public.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the Select Committee on picking this topic: it is vital for the country. It is important to local communities, which is a theme of part of what I want to explore today. I am conscious that the committee identified a number of issues. As an aside, when one looks towards the end of the summary, all of a sudden the paragraph numbers go out of sync, which makes me wonder what the committee removed from the report. However, there is enough in here for us to consider in detail.
One of the first things would be that so much relies on the strategic spatial strategy, although Nick Winser was right to point out that we did not have one before, so how much change will it make? A lot of eggs are in the basket of having this strategic strategy and I want to get clarity from the Government that it will definitely be ready next year. If there is an opportunity, will the Government say whether we are talking about quarter one or quarter two, or are we talking 31 December 2026? I am conscious that clean power 2030 is a specific choice by this Government to accelerate and decarbonise the electricity network to zero, which is one reason a lot of communities around the country are somewhat frustrated right now, because a lot of the planning and the work being done on this will not make much difference to the projects being considered.
The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, mentioned something that I found very interesting. I had not picked this up, but I am glad she raised the fact that, in terms of the prioritising of connections, one of the criteria is now that they have to have planning consent. That is not what is happening right now, certainly not in the east of England. There is no doubt that there are current live planning applications—connections are being given, and indeed ASTI money has been granted by Ofgem. I raised this on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, suggesting that this sort of ASTI framework funding should not be available until planning consent has been given, because the underlying concern of a lot of communities around this country is that, for everything else, it does not matter what the planning process really does; the decision has already been made, in effect, by the Minister, by the actions of Ofgem or by the other organisations, such as NESO and others involved in this.
One reason I am grateful to the noble Baroness who chaired the committee so well is that I went on 4 March 2025 deliberately to question Nick Winser. The noble Baroness was gracious enough to let me ask a question, and it was about this transparency—this frustration that exists that we are almost going through the Emperor’s new clothes on some of these things.
I was struck by what the noble Baroness just said and I will be very interested to hear how that impacts on current planning applications. By the way, I do not expect the Minister to refer to this, but I will be attending various hearings in the next few days regarding Sea Link, and I encourage her to think carefully about transparency. I believe that Nick Winser talked about complete transparency being important for confidence, but when I asked the Government a while ago about the estimated cost of the Sea Link project, I was told it would probably be around £1.1 billion. When I asked that question again more recently, I was told we were not allowed to know the answer to that because of commercial considerations.
To come back to what the committee talked about, it is vital to get this openness and this publication. Actually, the very first recommendation that the committee made is about publishing key metrics on meeting the target every six months. That is why I was disappointed by the Government’s response, which talked about intending to publish statistics regularly. That is not the same. One thing that often happens with statistics—as I know as a Minister, frustratingly, but also as a Back Bencher trying to get information—is that quite often the statistics are from the previous calendar year and are published about 10 months later. You would probably not get the information for 2024-25 until sometime in March 2026, and so it goes on.
I think it does matter to recognise the amount of levies and carbon taxes and the amount of cost on consumer bills both for households but also for businesses. It is right and important, with these changes that the Government are continuing, from a process initiated by the previous Administration, that we can see more regularly how progress is happening and to hold to account both the Government and the different parts of the architecture that are critical in trying to make sure that we get on with aspects of this connection right around the country.
One thing about which I had a minor frustration was that I never really accepted the then National Grid’s assertion that it had to offer a connection to everybody, regardless. When it was asked about who those connections were, it said that it could not reveal that either, so we are in this forever black box situation. Again, transparency would help—it would help communities to understand what is happening in their area, especially when we see the connections now starting to involve much bigger substations. I appreciate that the National Infrastructure Commission seems to be in favour of this, but this is at the same time that there is no trust in whether a particular construction is needed, or whether it is just a case of lots of this infrastructure being dumped in certain parts of the country.
A lot is happening in East Suffolk. I have no doubt that the whole issue of energy projects is one of the reasons I lost my election last year and have ended up here, much to the chagrin of some people in this Chamber, I am sure, rather than perhaps the other. Nevertheless, it is still something that is deeply concerning to people, that lack of transparency, and I fear we are not getting any further with the new set-up.
As to why there is no confidence, some of it goes back about a decade to when a developer said that they would do a direct connection—a DC link—from its offshore wind farm right through to the substation at Bramford. At the time, with regard to the local council, I appreciate that the committee is suggesting that lack of resources may be one of the barriers, but that has not been my experience locally. My experience has been that the council has been very willing to work with developers to try to minimise the impact on local communities and come up with innovative solutions on how to do that. But by doing that, and expanding the tunnel that would be used for the trenches, all of a sudden, on a commercial basis, the developer decided to reduce the amount of electricity that it was going to generate in that way, and it was going to do it through AC, not DC. One key thing about the transmission of electricity is that it dissipates over time and distance and, as a consequence, if you have AC instead of DC, in a way you are underusing the substation, but you are generating a lot more infrastructure and having an impact on lots of agricultural fields, nature reserves and ancient woodlands right around the country. That lack of density, in effect, is problematic in terms of what we are trying to do on other aspects of government policy and improving our natural environment.
So it continues: by refusing to consider brownfield sites for connection and insisting on greenfield sites, we are seeing what local communities often perceive to be attacks on their green spaces and their pleasant natural environment. That, again, is frustrating. By the way, this has nothing to do with pylons. Not a single extra pylon would have been erected in East Suffolk in all this time, so I am not getting dragged down in that particular debate.
Nevertheless, one thing I think Ofgem should do in terms of prioritisation is be very clear and public about which connections it has given and which it is considering, and there should be healthy competition in getting what is a valuable resource. But, at the same time, what I would prefer to see from the Government and the various bodies involved, instead of creating many more links unnecessarily, is doing more to enhance, for example, the existing connections, from the Isle of Grain into Tilbury. There has already been some expansion of that; why not do more? We are talking about connecting two significant brownfield sites, not two areas where there are already significant environmental protections, although thanks to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill—it has not passed yet—all that will be, frankly, set aside and disregarded anyway. But that is not an ideal outcome given where we should have been.
On the recommendations in paragraph 5 of the report, the Government have basically said that the transmission networks already publish that. But actually it is the second half that really matters in order to hold the Government to account. The progress on the transmission network projects that NESO has identified as necessary is vital. The Government providing a clear steer on how Ofgem should balance the competing effects of energy bills is key. We need to continue to try to make sure that bills are affordable, rather than have some of the challenges that industry and householders face. I will not get into energy bills, as that is a completely separate debate and we have had some of that debate already when discussing things like the warm home discount.
On paragraph 18, I raised this on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, so I will not do so again. Paragraph 24 talks about the connections that are prioritised, and it would be useful to know which ones have been dropped. Who has already been dropped from this list, and when will Ofgem, NESO or indeed the Government publish that?
On the 10-year infrastructure strategy, it is good that the committee has focused on making sure we get the electricity to where it is needed. One of the main issues with a variety of developments affecting interconnectors is that a lot of this is focused on getting energy to London and parts of the south-east. But, candidly, significant other parts of the country desperately need electricity connections, and it feels to me that that is not being properly considered. But I am sure the Minister will explain how they are prioritising the different aspects of connections.
There is one aspect where it is also difficult to hold Ofgem and ESO to account: the application of its duty on the consideration of biodiversity. It is impossible to get a proper answer on that. I can see that I have reached 13 minutes, and I have come to the end, so all I will say is that I will continue to fight the fight for transparency and openness. It is what our communities in this country deserve, and it is what Parliament deserves too.
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, I declare my interests: I chair a battery storage company called Aldustria Ltd and I am a trustee of Regen, a not for profit that promotes renewable energy. I will concentrate on grid connections within this report, and I will not go into the other areas much.
I want to go through a bit of history. In the area of grid connections, the previous Government absolutely sleepwalked into a crisis—and Parliament as a whole did, as well. Parliamentarians became aware of it a bit before the Government did. In terms of Ofgem being driven by keeping costs low for consumers, as opposed to investment in the future, that really stayed there until ASTI—I had to look up again what it was: accelerated strategic transmission investment—came in in December 2022, not very long ago. Even then, it took time to implement.
Then we had the Energy Act 2023, which tried to solve a lot of those other things to do with connections, and wider things as well. That piece of legislation was introduced in July 2022 and did not come out at the other end—I was Front-Bench spokesperson at the time for the Lib Dems—until October 2023. It was seen as an important and urgent strategic bit of business, yet it took one and a quarter years to get through Parliament after a long pause in the middle.
The irony is, of course, that, although we had many years of Ofgem promoting low bills, as opposed to investment for the future, we still ended up with lousy grid connections, a grid that is not fit for purpose and the highest energy prices in Europe. So something is certainly wrong.
There is one thing I would like the Minister to explain to me, because nobody has ever managed to explain it to me. Why do we need to pay extra money to transmission networks for investing in their own business? I do not understand. If any other private sector business invests, it does not charge for that investment in terms of pricing. In fact, we expect it to take advantage of economies of scale, with rising demand, as we have with electricity, and efficiencies. Take something like EasyJet. If, with rising demand, it invests in new planes, does that mean we see on its website that it is going to raise prices by 10% for its new aeroplanes? Of course not. It is around efficiency and economies of scale: the price goes down, not up. If the Minister can explain that to me in five seconds, that would be great, because there is something fundamentally wrong here in the way that Ofgem works.
It is not just grid connections to generators. I remember very much one of the pieces of witness that we had. I asked, “Isn’t there a problem? Housebuilding in west London has come partly to a halt because of lack of connections”. The witness actually denied that, but I have spoken to the sector since, and if you google it or whatever, you will find that it is the case. This is an issue not just around generation but also in terms of housebuilding targets.
So grid reform is absolutely needed and is being done quickly at the moment. As our chair rightly said, we have moved on from first come, first served, with a hugely long list of projects, some of which have been identified as “zombie projects” that did not exist and that we want to take out. What we are moving to is those that are shovel-ready and conform with CP30. I did actually check what CP30 was. I was sure it was clean power 2030, but I googled it to make sure and it came up with C-3PO or whatever it was from “Star Wars”. Anyway, it was around the future. But that is to the side.
Anyway, we have changed that, and that is absolutely right. The difficulty has not been the fault of NESO at all: it was only established almost exactly a year ago, in October last year, and it immediately had, among its other responsibilities, re-queueing this huge tail in terms of grid connections. Quite frankly, it strained in that task, and I will come back later to a number of questions for the Minister to see how we can get round that.
There is no doubt that NESO has been working hard and wants to do this. There were problems over the portal that put back its programme by a couple of months, but the timetable has been extended and there is genuinely a lack of investor confidence in the way that that is now rolling out and a lot of uncertainty in terms of those timetables. So that lack of confidence is a crisis there at the moment, and that will affect the investment that makes it so important, as our chair said, to be able to reach those CP30 targets. So, at the moment, those delays in connections with regard to the reform process are leading to a slowdown in clean energy projects being developed.
I have some specific questions to the Minister about that, around the future of making it work. They are not detailed but are substrategic, so I will be very happy if he wants to come back later on. My questions are: how will the Government, together with Ofgem and NESO, give enough confidence to the developers’ projects that are due to connect in 2026-27, so that they can actually place firm orders with their supply chains and start building those projects out? That is the only way they can meet their connection deadlines, because, if you miss deadlines, you go back to start again, which means a loss of time and more uncertainty. It is absolutely right to put those gateways down there in terms of planning permission, your supply chain and land acquisition or whatever, but if you do not meet them, you go back to the beginning.
Will the Government ensure that developers have the opportunity to agree viable gate 2 milestones with networks pre offer to take account of the impact of delay on project timetables in the connections reform process? Lastly—this is key in terms of the future, exactly as our chair said, looking forward not just to the next couple of years but to 2030—when will the next gate 2 connections application window be opened? This is really important, so that there is a path for projects that do not meet gate 2 in this first window. We seriously risk developers having no development route and just walking away. So it is all around making that really important reform that is being made work—dare I say work at pace—but making sure that we know, for those that have not got to gateway 2 now, that they are able to do that for the future, so that we can achieve the net-zero grid that is so important.
Viscount Chandos (Lab)
My Lords, I am delighted to be able to speak in this debate and have been privileged to be a member of the Industry and Regulators Committee that produced the report. My noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton has introduced this afternoon’s debate with the same incisiveness and wisdom as she showed in chairing the committee and leading the consideration of this vitally important subject. I join her in thanking the committee team for their indefatigable work in the inquiry and those who gave generously of their time in providing both oral and written evidence.
I declare my interests as disclosed in the register, in particular as a shareholder in Greencoat UK Wind plc, and, since the publication of the report, a director of Digbeth Loc. Studios, a film and television studio in Birmingham whose operations require significant and increasing amounts of electricity.
As the committee considered at the turn of the year possible topics for the next inquiry, a theme emerged of the cost of energy and the implications for the competitiveness of UK business in particular, all in the context of what had been at that point a cross-party commitment to a fully decarbonised electricity system by 2035 at the latest. The Labour Government have advanced the target to 2030. We could identify on the one hand new and growing sources of electricity—wind, solar and a revived nuclear programme—and on the other hand, new or hugely increased users of electricity such as power-hungry, AI-focused data centres, which are so important for achieving faster economic growth.
The new users of electricity may account for only a proportion of future demand, albeit a large part of future growth, with domestic and traditional business still dominant. In contrast, however, renewable energy is essential to achieving the decarbonised target and, ultimately, net zero, and will represent the majority of future supply.
We realise that what linked, both physically and metaphorically, the new sources and both the old and new demand was the network infrastructure and that the changes in train presented immense challenges to the system. I believe that the report which has resulted is a powerful but fair analysis of these challenges— 1,000 kilometres of new onshore infrastructure and over 4,500 kilometres of offshore infrastructure needed with a price tag of at least £60 billion. This will need to be built over the next five years, as my noble friend Lady Taylor said, at four times the annual rate achieved in the previous 10 years.
Our witnesses were uniformly confident that these targets could be met but it was hard, without disrespect to the capable and committed people responsible for delivering this, not to hear echoes of an EFL League One football manager’s bravado when drawn to play a top Premier League club in the FA Cup. My noble friend is better placed than me to say what the odds are in those circumstances.
The committee identified a number of key changes which would help these targets to be met and made recommendations accordingly—reform of the connections queue, changes to the planning system which, as has already been said, is vital to other areas of investment and growth such as housing and transport infrastructure, and an increased role for the National Infrastructure Commission. The Government’s response would indicate that they have identified and/or accepted these points even if they are not immediately able to find the silver bullet which would ensure that the necessary changes are made.
As I have just said, the committee was generally impressed with the witnesses at the centre of delivering these targets; in particular, the National Energy System Operator, NESO, seemed to have hit the ground running. Without being churlish though, it would have been disappointing if that had not been the case given that it is based around ESO, the Electricity System Operator, acquired in September last year from National Grid Group for a reported £630 million. Although the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, referred to it as an organisation that had started last October, it had long roots.
Negotiations for this transaction had commenced under the previous Government but were completed only in the early months of the new Labour Government. I ask my noble friend the Minister: what was the basis of the valuation for the acquisition? Is the funding of NESO essentially the same as that which applied to ESO, a levy paid ultimately by consumers? What is the surplus expected to be in NESO’s first 12 months, which have now ended?
I will use my remaining time to probe the Government on what was generally seen as the single biggest policy issue for the electricity market: zonal pricing, to which my noble friend Lady Taylor has already spoken so cogently. The committee recognised the complexity of, and the issues raised by, zonal pricing but, as my noble friend said, concluded that, on balance, it should be introduced.
The scale of building and investment needed to meet the network requirement is massive and it is not just a matter of cost—with network costs being over 20% of prices ultimately paid—but more importantly the risk that the grid becomes the weak link in the chain. We could achieve all the targets for building new wind, solar and nuclear power plants, but if the network does not have the necessary capacity and connectivity, much of this investment—as is already the case with some wind farms in Scotland—may deliver poor returns economically and in service delivery.
Coal was bulky and heavy to transport and required road or rail infrastructure that made it totally logical, from the Victorian era onwards, for the steel industry, for instance, to be located close to the coal fields and mines. Electricity may be lighter than coal to transport, but it still requires increased network infrastructure that carries not just a high cost but imposes massive logistical challenges in building it to the necessary timetable. If zonal pricing could reduce even marginally the amount of additional infrastructure that is needed, it could have a disproportionate impact on the likelihood of the network having the capacity for the needs of the late 2020s and into the 2030s.
I was therefore disappointed that the Government announced in July that they would not introduce zonal pricing but rather have
“concluded that reforming the system while retaining a single national wholesale price is the right way to deliver a fair, affordable, secure, and efficient electricity system”.
As I have already said, I recognise that this is not an easy judgment to make. Professor Sir Dieter Helm, my go-to guru on energy regulation, published a penetrating and nuanced analysis soon after the publication of our report, which was sceptical about the practical effectiveness of zonal pricing. Could my noble friend the Minister give any more details of the reforms the Government have in mind to the existing wholesale price system to enhance the security and efficiency of the network, equivalent to what might have been achieved by zonal pricing?
I recognise the importance of stability and predictability in fostering investor confidence, which is critical to mobilising the levels of investment needed. I therefore reluctantly accept that zonal pricing should probably now be off the table. However, this places all the more responsibility on the Government to introduce effective reforms to the national pricing system instead.
Lord Liddle (Lab)
My Lords, I rise to speak briefly in this debate without having the benefit of being on the committee or without any of the great expertise that others have shown. However, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, on her committee’s work; it is a very granular analysis of the problems we face. I also hope the questions that my noble friend Lord Chandos asked of the Minister will be given a satisfactory answer. It seems to me that these issues are of fundamental importance to Britain’s future.
One of the reasons I wanted to listen to this debate was that it is of fundamental importance to whether we can achieve our climate change objectives, but it is also of fundamental importance if we are to be competitive in the industries of the future. That is a very vital concern. I was looking, for instance, at Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness. Item one on his list is electricity grids and the cost of energy. We are in a similar position to Europe in that it is absolutely fundamental to our future. That is point one.
I also reflect on the question of the electricity grid. Fifty years ago, I have to confess, I worked in the electricity industry. I was in the industrial relations department, literally trying to keep the lights on as there was always the risk of serious industrial action. Actually, there was not much risk when you had people like Les Cannon around, but it was a vital role. One of the things about the electricity industry in the 1970s was that it had been through the kind of radical transformation that it has to go through again now. When generation first came, it was all very localised. It was not really until the post-war era and nationalisation under Walter Citrine that the grid was put in place—one of the little remarked achievements of the post-war Labour Government—and then the whole thing had to be completely modernised in the 1960s and 1970s because of technological change that allowed these vast mainly coal-fired power stations to be built in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, which were transformative then of our electricity system. That meant the whole grid was designed on the basis of meeting the requirements of a coal-based electricity supply, and that now has to be changed completely to deal with what will be primarily a nuclear and renewables-based electricity supply, so it is a huge challenge.
In the 1970s—here I am going to sound very old-fashioned—the reason this great transformation occurred was because there was a body called the Central Electricity Generating Board, a dominant body, very dominant, which managed to drive this transformation through its important position and its powers. We went through privatisation in the 1980s. I thought at the time that privatisation, properly regulated, was not a bad idea, and there is no doubt that operating efficiencies were achieved, but the trouble with it was that it led to a business culture of sweating assets and not of building them. This culture is completely unsuited to the challenge we face now, which is of how we reconfigure our grid and our electricity system, and we have to do that in short order, as people have said—by 2030 or 2035.
It seems to me, as an outsider in this debate, that when we look at what is going on, the fundamental problem is that unlike the CEGB in the 1970s, there is no one clearly in charge. There are far too many people with fingers in the pie who have the ability to obstruct but not to make happen. What is particularly important is the triangle between the Government and Ed Miliband’s department on one hand, the regulator and the system operator. I congratulate the last Conservative Government: taking the system operator into public ownership was a very important move if we are going to carry out this job of modernising the grid properly. But it is in its infancy. Yes, there was an organisation before, but the organisation before was run in the commercial interests of the National Grid not the public interests of how this transformation should happen.
The fundamental problem is sorting out who is in charge and how we get drive and efficiency into the modernisation we face. At the moment, it seems to me that we have a target but we completely lack a plan. The plan is absolutely crucial, and it is very costly— £60 billion, as my noble friend Lord Chandos said. There was an interesting article in last week’s Economist about what is happening on the continent. In other countries, the amount of money being spent is vast. In France, the estimate is €100 billion. In the Netherlands and Germany, it is €200 billion. It is estimated by the EU that, within Europe, €800 billion will have to be spent by 2050 for the energy transformation and the grid that changes that go with it. So these are huge investments—huge things that have to be got right. The fundamental problem that our Government have to face up to is that we need a proper plan, and it needs a guiding mind.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I apologise for delaying the Committee for another four minutes, but my own Select Committee was cancelled at short notice at 4 pm, so I was able to come here and listen to the considerable wisdom on an issue with enormous implications for the future. In the four minutes, I have time to comment on only one factor—one omission, if I may call it that—in the otherwise excellent and very thorough report.
The omission relates to the transmission and grid system. We have all read in the newspapers about the long queues of would-be applicants to transform from fossil fuels to electricity, and maybe the intention of getting them reduced will be achieved. But there is one obstacle. Although we can get the electricity to switching stations on the coast—from the growth of sea pylons in great numbers, where most of our electricity will come from on fine days—we know that the problem is then the transmission: getting it from the switching stations to the city gates and the markets where it is needed. We know that the problem there is the pylons, which the noble Baroness, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and others mentioned. Obviously, this is a huge difficulty and problem. Why? It is expensive and there are all sorts of planning problems and delay in getting these pylons built, because there is a general hostility from environmentalists to this sort of thing.
Therefore, one needs to ask: are we on the right track at all in thinking about the pylon problem? Are there alternatives? Yes, there are: hydrogen tanks, tankers and other vehicles can of course transmit hydrogen just as they transmit petrol now. We do not need pylons to get petrol and diesel to every garage in the United Kingdom. People say, “That’s all very well, but it’s much too costly”. But I wonder. Think about the alternative cost: the £1 billion or more that we pay each year not to produce electricity, despite the increased demand for electricity and the shortage of it—an absurd situation. Think about the enormous delays that will result from trying to put up 1,000 kilometres of new pylons, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Chandos, and others. Think of the years of planning that lie ahead while every single pylon is disputed. Think that the likelihood is that hydrogen technology costs will come down and we will be able to transmit hydrogen by pipeline or tanker easily, and a great deal of these pylons will be completely redundant in five to 10 years’ time. Are we on the right track at all?
That is all I have to ask in my four minutes. I fear that we are not on the right track. I fear that the costs of alternatives—the electrolysis for transforming north Atlantic electricity, clean, to the vast new demands of the electric economy that lies ahead—have not been calculated or set against the enormous cost of trying to build 1,000 kilometres of new pylons, which is said to be £60 billion; I will believe it when I see it. This is really a great gap in the whole argument and strategy which NESO has not addressed properly. Previous Governments probably have not, and the present Government do not seem to be doing so. Therefore we have a case, as the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, said, for another report to look at the real facts of the overall transmission situation in the coming decades. That is all I have to add to an otherwise excellent document and much wisdom around on the enormous problems of trying to get adequate clean electricity 24/7, not intermittent, to our industry in the future. Unless we do, we will fall even further behind in competition in world markets.
Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)
My Lords, I am very grateful to have the opportunity to speak in the gap. I declare an interest as a member of Energy Local Totnes. I wanted to speak because of an electricity market regulatory change called P441, currently out for consultation, which would make local energy supply schemes considerably more viable across the UK, with many of the advantages that I believe the committee is seeking.
Currently, setting up local energy schemes involves navigating unclear regulations and exceptions, but P441 would create a standardised process, making it much easier for communities to buy and sell locally generated renewable electricity. It would also give licensed energy suppliers the confidence to support community schemes, knowing that the rules are clear and consistent. This really would be a very welcome change, which would also be much better at attracting investment because of the certainty.
Why are local energy schemes very important? I belong to one, and in the short time available to me I will give your Lordships some of the win-win wins—I counted at least eight of them. They reduce fuel poverty by selling energy affordably, at considerably lower prices than otherwise. They allow locally owned generators more control over pricing. They keep profits in the local economy, reduce reliance on fossil fuels and enhance local reliance by providing protection from fluctuating energy prices—that is particularly important when talking about fuel poverty. They balance local supply with demand, which helps the national grid reduce the need for costly network upgrades, which noble Lords have mentioned this afternoon—and, as was also mentioned this afternoon, less electricity is wasted through transmission losses, as the distance from the supplier to the customer is much shorter. So there are many wins, and I hope that the Government will encourage this change with P441. Can the Minister also say whether the Government are encouraging Ofgem to do all it can to support local energy schemes?
Earl Russell (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate, and I thank the members of the committee for the quality of their report. This is indeed a very important and timely work, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, for her very good introduction. As the noble Baroness stated herself, this is a very fast-moving field, and the world has moved quite a lot since the publication of the report itself. I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, put it very well in combining the important granular nature of the report with the fundamental importance of Britain’s future, related to our grid development in these areas.
Against this report, we have to understand the background of decarbonising our electricity system by 95% by 2030—clean power. This is a key foundation of our energy and climate commitments. In the report, the committee found this to be a significant challenge, but achievable, and it talked about a once-in-a-generation upgrade to our grid to make this happen. The committee really looked at this huge challenge before us and what can be done to make sure that we deliver on these targets.
I have said this before, but in energy terms I think this is the biggest energy change since the industrial revolution—and it all needs to be delivered in the next five years. This is a vast, co-ordinated and complex dance between systems, regulators, government and big infrastructure projects. It is all immensely complicated stuff, and I am very grateful that this report has been done. As the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, said, this is mobilising £60 billion into the network, 1,000 kilometres onshore and more than 4,500 kilometres offshore. It is a six-fold increase in wind development and a three-fold increase in solar. The grid is not just the backbone. I like to think of it as the central nervous system: if it is not working, the country does not work, and we do not go to work—we have no transport, and the country makes no money. So the grid is absolutely essential to what we do.
We have this massive scale, pace and challenge ahead of us. The committee was really concerned about that trajectory, whether the targets can be met, what the blockages are ahead and what more can be done between government, the regulators and investors to make sure that we can all work together. The one thing that is clear from this report today is that everybody wants us to be able to get towards these targets and recognises how fundamentally important they are to the energy transition.
I want to turn to planning. We have had the Planning and Infrastructure Bill and the Government have brought forward changes. The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, talked a lot about the need to bring communities with us through that transition, and I welcome that. There is more to do on that front; there is more to do in planning change terms. The report recommended hypothecating funds to planning officers and making sure that the granular nature of the planning system worked, so there is more to do on that. I tabled some amendments to the planning Bill in relation to the low-voltage grid, which is equally important. Small blockages in the system all add up and will cause considerable problems over time—so I think that there is a need for further planning reforms.
The committee also looked at the grid connection queues and the problems there. I recognise the work that the Government have done already to move to the system needed for 2030. That is welcome—but there is more to do around it, and the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, in particular, asked questions about post 2030. There are some questions for government about not getting too hung up on a hard target, because some of the real challenges that lie ahead for government and our grid transition actually sit in the 2030-35 timeframe. There is a need to get to clean power, and we welcome that —but there is a need to be not absolutely rigid and to look further afield to make sure that we are not taking decisions that fundamentally cause greater problems down the road, as we continue that transition post 2030 —because 2030 is the start, not the end. We need to get to 2050 and beyond. That is concern for me as well.
There were some concerns about the Government’s position on the role of Ofgem, the energy regulator, and the duties that it has to protect consumers and ensure affordability—and the need to balance that against ramping up investment in infrastructure. These tensions can have impacts, and there is a need for the Government to take political leadership in this field and move things forward.
Obviously, the committee came out in favour, on balance, of regional zonal pricing. Since the report was published in July, the Energy Secretary came out and took a decision not to support that as a way forward and to keep the national pricing strategy. Personally, I welcome that commitment. The trouble with zonal pricing was that, while it had upsides, it seemed to have equal downsides for every upside it presented. Fundamentally, the challenge was putting that much change into a system that was already under so much strain and needed so much investment. Ultimately, the worry with it was that it would fundamentally undermine investor confidence just at the period of transition.
I am not against that decision. The question for the Government now is: they ruled out zonal pricing in July, so how will they use price structures and mechanisms to help with the energy transition, outside zonal pricing? What comes next in terms of the reformed national pricing system? Are the Government still on track to report by the end of the year, as they said they want to do? Can the Minister say anything about what that will look like? We all need to move this stuff forward. Those are the kinds of questions I have around that. We need to provide investor certainty, to review network charges and to provide stronger locational signals. Is there still the opportunity to take up some bits of that work?
The committee also talked about the Government taking a clearer political strategy and guiding Ofgem in its work, making sure that there are clear political decisions and pathways and that they are not leaving too many of these issues to the regulator. That is an issue that I think is important, going forward.
The committee was concerned about the proliferation and number of new strategic plans. This is a complicated space. We have the strategic spatial energy plan and all sorts of other plans. Could the Minister say a word about the conflicts between them, when they are being delivered, how the Government will make sure they work together and co-ordinate across different bodies, and assure us that the proliferating plans will not get in the way of the key thing we want to do, which is delivering this change?
The committee also called for the Government to publish key matrices every six months, in terms of 80 critical transmission network projects identified by NESO. The Government in their response committed to publishing statistics on the clean power share, but not to give that real detail. Could I push the Minister and ask the Government to reconsider that? The committee argued quite strongly that that detail is fundamental and important. That level of scrutiny of this period of rapid change is really important. This is about Parliament and parliamentarians trying to work with and support the Government. It is about trying to co-operate and work together on these issues. So I call on the Government to consider that again. This transparency is really open and important in these matters.
Can I also ask the Minister about connections and connection queues? What work is NESO doing with AI and AI tools to help with that? I understand that there is some work around that. These really complicated problems could benefit more from AI and AI tools, and I understand that there is some use of them.
Finally, I will ask the Minister about the update to the energy code, which has not been mentioned to date but which was a key recommendation in the report. I know that work is going on with this and, again, it is a very complicated area. I am concerned that the date for updating the energy code is smack up against the 2030 deadline and I am worried about the Government’s ability to deliver this transition.
To conclude, I had a lot more I could have said. We really welcome this report. I think it is an important and fundamental look at where we are in this transition. A very complicated dance needs to happen between investment, government and the regulators and needs to happen at pace and at scale. The Government need to be a bit more open. There is a need to fill the policy vacuum left after zonal pricing has been ruled out. The Government need to bring forward ideas, be open and give clarity about the direction of travel—where they are going and what their thinking is—so that we as politicians and the general public know where we are going. I think this a timely and important report and I am very grateful to the members of the committee.
Lord Offord of Garvel (Con)
My Lords, I thank the members of the committee for taking part in today’s debate and pay tribute to the committee for its report. As noble Lords across the committee know, the Government’s unilateral clean power 2030 target is putting extreme pressure on the electricity system. Let us remind ourselves that it currently draws two-thirds from hydrocarbons and one-third from renewables. The objective within five years is to make that 95% renewables and 5% hydrocarbons. That is a very ambitious target and will require huge investment, as we have heard today, and will inevitably result in higher energy prices for consumers and businesses.
The Government admitted in a Written Statement published yesterday in relation to the network charging compensation scheme that they were requiring to put an uplift through because:
“Some of these businesses currently pay the highest industrial electricity prices in the G7, making it harder to stay competitive on the international stage”.
Those are the Government’s own words. That is the challenge we face and a source of the imperative for the cheap energy we urgently need to deliver policies that cut energy prices in the UK.
Cheap energy, as the Government rightly say, is essential to competitiveness and ultimately the key to growth. What households and businesses need from this Government is a commitment to bring down the cost of energy. Yet, despite that need, the sector has been clear that energy bills are likely to rise by 20% in the next four years. Typical household energy prices under the price cap are now £1,755 a year for the average dual-fuel consumer.
Turning to the committee’s report, it is right to highlight that the Government’s current approach will require a huge investment in our grid capacity. Quite simply, can the Minister please clarify what the Government’s forecast is of what these costs will be? How will this impact consumer bills? What impact will this investment have on the cost of doing business in the UK? Can the Minister please confirm what assessment the Government have made of other approaches which could deliver plainer, cheaper and more reliable energy where we need it, without it needing to be transported long distances across the country?
Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)
I thank noble Lords for their participation in this debate, which is obviously a very important one. We are dealing with issues here that are going to transform the way we deliver energy for this country. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for tabling a debate that recognises the urgency of our transformation of the GB electricity network. I thank noble Lords for their welcome contributions to the debate, which touches so many salient issues. I think it is fair to say that we are more or less in the same space. We have questions, we wonder how we will get to where we need to be, but, on the whole, we are more or less on the same path.
The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was on about the energy industry back in the 1970s. I grew up in the great northern coalfield and represented a constituency there. It was that coalfield which basically powered the industrial revolution. When I think back to the research I did when I was an MP, I remember that 3,500 miners were killed in accidents in my constituency over the decades. Thousands were injured, including thousands who got compensation for pneumoconiosis, for example. Although it was exciting in one way for the Industrial Revolution to drive growth, I think we can be really proud of the fact that we are going to achieve what we need to do, not just to decarbonise the grid in this country but to help save the planet as well, by moving away from that and looking at industries that are not going to bring in the problems in the human way we had to suffer back in those years.
The electricity grid we have today has suffered from decades of underinvestment. That legacy means that it is outdated, constrained and unable to meet the demands of a clean energy system. Because of this, upgrading and expanding the electricity network has never been more critical. Our current network, largely built in the 1960s, was not designed to handle the scale of home-grown, low-carbon energy generation we are now deploying. Upgrading our network infrastructure not only enables the Government’s clean energy superpower mission but brings forward significant opportunities for investment in our economy.
As outlined in the Government’s response to the committee’s recommendations, the clean power 2030 action plan sets a clear path towards delivering a modernised electricity system. These reforms will transform the GB electricity system, and actions by industry, government, Ofgem and the National Energy System Operator, or NESO, are already delivering results. Chief among these is the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, currently progressing through Parliament. The Bill aims to accelerate the delivery of clean energy projects by reforming planning processes. The reform of the grid connection process will address the long delays that projects currently face to connect and ensure that strategically important ready-to-go projects can connect quickly. This will enable clean power 2030 and put in place a process that is fit for purpose in the long term.
We are also going further and are making major improvements to better support strategically important demand-side connections to boost growth and unlock investment. We will launch a connections accelerator service later this year to prioritise support for projects that guarantee high-quality jobs and bring the greatest economic value. We plan to use new powers in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to create measures that will allow network companies to prioritise capacity for government-designated strategic demand projects. Through the National Energy System Operator, we are taking a strategic approach to planning the electricity network. The centralised strategic network plan, due in 2027, will build on the strategic spatial energy plan, expected in 2026, and guide the future siting of infra- structure, balancing energy needs with environmental and community considerations.
The transformation of our electricity network must, as colleagues have made clear, ensure that communities have a say. I assure noble Lords that this remains fundamental to the approach we are taking. The independent planning process will ensure that communities continue to have a say, through statutory consultations and often through additional voluntary consultations by network companies.
We recognise that the communities most affected must benefit directly from this nationally beneficial infrastructure. The Government have announced a scheme of bill discounts and published guidance for local community funds which will be received by communities and individuals living near new transmission network infrastructure. Delivering energy bill savings is a priority for this Government and the actions to transform our electricity network are a major contributor to ensuring that the cost of living is brought down. Delivering an expanded and transformed electricity network for 2030 will prevent an escalation in the constraints caused when grid capacity is insufficient to transport renewable generation. In the longer term, the decarbonised energy system will deliver lower energy costs to consumers, as we remove ourselves from the risk of the volatile price of fossil fuels. If gas prices today were at pre-crisis levels, bills for families would be £200 a year lower than they are at the moment.
I now want to answer some of the questions I was asked. If I do not answer them all, I will make sure that we scour Hansard and get back to noble Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said that if I could answer his question in five seconds, that would be great. I am afraid that I am not going to be able to do that, but if I do not answer the questions, we will get back to noble Lords with the answers in writing. I shall just go through the questions noble Lords asked, one by one.
To respond to some of the points made in the debate, starting with those raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, network infrastructure is not very expensive but brings a lot of value. Network infrastructure costs have historically been 12% of the average bill. To pay for this current transformation, network costs are currently 13% of the bill. Reducing delays in construction and reforming connections could bring forward £90 billion of wider investment over the next 10 years and avoid between £4 billion and £5 billion of constrained costs in 2030. Investment in networks and the generation it connects could amount to £200 billion by 2030.
On zonal pricing, first, there is a fairness principal. We looked hard at whether a zonal system could be introduced without passing the impact on to consumers. The conclusion was that it could be possible to protect domestic consumers, although it would be very difficult, but some businesses would be left exposed to unfair energy prices. Secondly, we looked at affordability. The transition into zonal pricing would have created at least seven years of uncertainty, putting a risk premium on new investment that could have caused bills to rise in the short term. The Government recognise the pressures facing local planning authorities and are investing £46 million in 2025-26 to strengthen their capacity and capability to deliver planning reform.
The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, raised the strategic spatial energy plan and its publication date. The plan is expected in 2026 and will be published independent of government by the National Energy Systems Operator. On the point raised by the noble Baroness about the wider network, the Government do not plan to develop the electricity network; this is undertaken by network companies based on the strategic planning of the National Energy Systems Operator. The Government set the rules for a robust and independent planning process, and all projects are required to progress through a thorough consultation which communities can participate in.
The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, also raised a point about projects dropped in the process. Those that are not initially offered a confirmed connection date will be able to reapply when they are ready and may benefit from capacity freed up through these reforms. Viable generation projects above the 2030 capacity ranges may still be able to connect in 2030 if there is spare capacity after pre-2030 projects have been assessed. If no capacity is available before 2030, these projects will be offered connection dates in the 2031 to 2035 period. If a viable project extends the 2035 capacity range, they will receive an indicative offer with opportunities to join the queue in future through twice yearly application windows where gaps emerge.
The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, made a point about grid connections, gate 2 connection processes, and asked specific questions about providing confidence to projects to enable them to engage with the supply chain. I will write to him in detail on the issues he raised.
On the wider point about cost, the vast majority of the bill is for the wholesale cost of energy. Network companies are closely regulated to ensure that their rate of return delivers value for money to bill payers. The scale and pace of this transformation is unprecedented in terms of investment.
To the noble Viscount, Lord Chandos, I add my appreciation for the work of the National Energy Systems Operator. On his questions about zonal pricing, as I said earlier in response to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, the Government looked closely at zonal pricing and felt there were principles around fairness and affordability that made us decide to not go down that route.
Reforming the national market will combine the collaboration of appropriate planning and pricing to support the building of new energy sources in the best locations. The power grid can grow to provide the energy we need. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, made an insightful point about the history of the electrification of the UK. The network was last transformed in the 1960s and has been underinvested in since privatisation. Now, as new generation sources are increasingly far from centres of demand, the network is being expanded and upgraded to meet our changing generation profile and the anticipated increase in electricity demand. We are changing our entire energy system to benefit the whole country: some change will be inevitable.
The last energy system, dominated by coal, changed certain parts of the country and communities enormously in ways still felt today. In this transition, we are working with communities in recognising the impact on network infrastructure through community benefits and bill discount funds. Across the entire transition, the department’s clean energy jobs plan outlined efforts to double the number of jobs in clean energy by 2030 from 400,000 to 800,000 jobs. The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, draws an interesting line between the Central Electricity Board and what we are now asking of NESO. We once again have a strong, central, single-minded and independently operated system, as the noble Lord mentioned.
The National Energy System Operator in its new role, following our acquisition of it from National Grid plc, will be and already is an indispensable asset, in our drive not only to ensure the planning, operation and rollout of the network but to be critical, as seen through the complex work of connections reform, to the whole clean power 2030 target, ensuring value for bill payers. This can be done only though the establishment of an independent expert system operator, which, as my noble friend Lord Chandos noted, has already made a significant impact in the short number of months that it has had its new, wide-ranging brief. We will write with further details of the specifications of its acquisitions.
The noble Lord, Lord Howell, made a point about pylons. System design is and will remain based on raw carbon-generated electricity. Hydrogen may well have a role in the wider energy transmission. However, the demands of the economy require a clean, efficient and fast network for electricity transmission to ensure that homes and businesses and therefore growth have the power that they need at all times. It is clear that electricity is the system that can enable this. Not all projects being built on the network are pylons; many are upgrades to existing infrastructure, while several enormous projects will run offshore.
The noble Baroness, Lady Miller, raises an important point on local energy. The Government recognise that local energy will be of great importance to this work. Great British Energy is already looking at how it can be more closely supportive of local schemes, including the recent work to install solar panels on the estates of schools and hospitals. We will look to take forward its local energy schemes.
The noble Earl, Lord Russell, raised planning—grid connections and the need for forward looking—which the Government are doing in partnership with the National Energy System Operator and Ofgem. On his views on zonal pricing, I welcome his support for the decision and the reformed national pricing system, which will look to strike the right balance for the country, with the delivery plan on the reformed national pricing due before the new year. The noble Earl also asked about AI tools as well as the energy code in this space, and I shall write to him on those issues.
The noble Lord, Lord Offord, pointed out the assessment of other approaches driving net-zero ambition. I would point to the cost of not doing this. We need to get off wholesale prices and volatile fossil fuels to protect consumers, but also future generations. This transformed grid and energy system will let us connect and transport our own homegrown clean energy and get us off the rollercoaster of global gas prices, create good jobs, support economic growth and bring down bills, tackling the climate crisis.
The Government are determined to increase the share of renewables on the system so that the electricity price is set by cheaper clean power sources, rather than gas. Every wind turbine that we switch on and solar panel that we deploy helps to push gas off as the price setter. Government support, such as the contracts for difference scheme, has been highly successful in driving investment and renewable electricity, and our clean power 2030 mission is focusing on accelerating the transition to a renewable power system. This will help to reduce reliance on gas and protect consumers from volatile fossil fuel prices.
The Government are determined to increase the share of renewables on the system, so that the electricity price is set by cheaper clean power sources rather than by gas. Every wind turbine we switch on is well worth it to help to keep down bills. Government support, such as the contracts for difference scheme, has also been very successful.
In conclusion, this Government are committed to the biggest transformation of our electricity infrastructure in a generation. We must confront the tough and responsible decisions that need to be taken without delay. While the challenges are significant, we are already meeting them. We can secure clean power, protect households from price shocks and harness these opportunities to deliver growth. I wish to thank committee members for their thorough and dedicated attention to this most critical matter and reiterate the Government’s dedication to transforming this country’s electricity network.
Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)
My Lords, I start by thanking everyone for their contributions, and for the fact that the report has had a generally very good reception. The debate has been quite wide-ranging, and we have gone into very granular detail on some occasions, but we have not lost sight of the big picture, which is extremely important. The electricity grid is of fundamental importance to so much of what the Government want to achieve in future, and to so much of what this country actually needs.
As the Minister said, there have been decades of underinvestment, and we need to give urgent attention to this, partly for the resilience of what we have at the moment, because we know we could be vulnerable to outages. We need to meet our net-zero target, and we know that the growth agenda is very much dependent on getting this right, so far as the grid and energy supply is concerned. The grid, the connections and the investment that is needed really have to go right before we can meet all the objectives of resilience, net zero and growth. Part of that, as we have touched on today, is giving confidence to the industry and investors that they can have clarity and stability in the guidance that is coming out from government. That is one reason why we pressed for the Government to be clear about the guidance that they are giving to Ofgem.
I think we are all agreed that the direction of travel is the correct one. I know that the Minister welcomed much that was in our report, apart from zonal pricing. I understand why the Government are reluctant to have change upon change, because there are many moving factors here, all at work at the same time. But we will have to look forward to what Ministers are going to say on pricing and reforming the system, because that is going to be quite important. Mention was made of the Statement yesterday, and I think it is important that we get a comprehensive approach, rather than one where the Government come along every so often and bail out industries that have particular problems with energy. I know that my noble friend Lady Anderson very much appreciates what was done for the Potteries, but I do not think we can go from one lurch of bailing people out to another: we need a comprehensive change.
We have talked about big changes, but actually there have been some small changes that have been very significant, such as having deemed consent when a substation wants to increase capacity. There are many minor things like that, which could be done to help the situation. In fact, we are saying that all these things—connections, planning, skills—are important, but we have to maintain the pace of this change and we have to make sure that we keep industry consulted and on board to have everybody working in the same direction and at the necessary speed. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions and commend the report.
Elon Musk
(1 day, 6 hours ago)
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Lord Dubs
To ask His Majesty’s Government how they intend to respond to the comments made by Elon Musk during his speech to a demonstration in London on Saturday 13 September.
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
Freedom of speech is a vital democratic right, but it is not without its limits. Elon Musk’s remarks, particularly those which appeared to suggest that the public resort to violence, were wholly inappropriate. We will always defend free expression but never tolerate language that incites disorder.
Lord Dubs (Lab)
My Lords, while I fully support my noble friend’s comments about freedom of expression, sometimes people go a bit too far. Is it not a fact that Elon Musk has posted that civil war is inevitable in this country and that the USA should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical Government?
Lord Dubs (Lab)
I wondered how that would go down. What action can we take about the use of social media that abuses freedom of expression? Perhaps we should declare Elon Musk persona non grata if he ever wanted to come to this country.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend; personally, I just ignore Elon Musk. We had an election, and we had 400-plus Labour Members of Parliament elected. I stand here because the people of Great Britain have chosen a Labour Government. We have a duty to deliver what we can. The people of Great Britain, and not some billionaire foreigner, will choose the next Government in perhaps three and a half or four years’ time, so I suggest that he buys a book on the British constitution out of his money, reads it, understands how we work and minds his own business.
Baroness Gohir (CB)
My Lords, I declare that I am CEO of Muslim Women’s Network, which has just set up the Muslim Safety Net helpline. What are the Government doing to protect the safety of Muslim women, who are very vulnerable to hate crime? So far, they have announced protection for mosques, which is welcome, but what about the safety of Muslim women? Why do the Government not care about the safety of Muslim women?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Baroness. The Government care about the safety of all women, and that is why we are putting in place a strategy to tackle violence against women and girls over the next 10 years. That strategy will be produced very shortly. I know that the noble Baroness has made representations to me and others about what it should contain. It is important that we defend people’s right to live their life in peace without interference, and I include interference in this case from Elon Musk, who has no mandate in this country and no interest in this country’s future, and who should, quite frankly, stay in the States and count his cash.
Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)
My Lords, I am no lawyer, but I am told that calling the left “the party of murder” and saying, “Violence is coming” and
“You either fight back or you die”
is not enough to prosecute this odious man, but we do not have to do business with him, do we? Ed Davey says that we should rule out any further contracts with Tesla and stop Musk being granted a licence to supply energy to British homes. Will the Government at least agree with me and not make him even richer at the expense of the people whom he is maligning?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
The Government can look at any time at contract issues, but I would not wish to equate Mr Musk and his comments, which I also find reprehensible, with doing business—that is an important point to make. We have relations with the American Government and American business, but I think he overstepped the mark and this House probably thinks he overstepped the mark. Perhaps he should reflect and look at what we are, which is, in this Parliament, an active democracy representing the people, challenging each other on fair and open decisions, criticising when necessary, but not inciting the mob to violence.
Lord Ranger (Con)
My Lords, in the run-up to 13 September, numerous messages were sent around on WhatsApp groups to people in the Asian community warning them not to go into London on the day of the march. I felt desperately sad seeing those messages. It reminded me of days in the 1980s when communities would not go out at night, and I would not be allowed out in the evenings, because we were worried. That all came back on that day. I admire the businesses of Elon Musk but not what he did on that day, aligning himself to the far-right racist platform of an individual he was sharing the platform with. Will the Government look at what can be done on an individual basis to say to Elon Musk that this was not the right thing to do, not just in itself but in the damage done to the community cohesion of this country—which is not the Britain that we are?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
Absolutely. The Britain I know is tolerant, understands different religions and different cultures, respects and celebrates those different cultures, and supports a multicultural society. There were people on that demonstration who do not share that value or that objective. That is not about people wanting to raise flags or express their patriotism. True patriotism is about celebrating this United Kingdom. Elon Musk’s remarks were wrong. The people who stepped over the line in that demonstration and injured police officers were wrong. The incitement to that, which I think Mr Musk was on the border of doing, is absolutely wrong. However, ultimately, it is for the police independently to make a judgment on any action taken against him in the event that he visits this country.
Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)
My Lords, would not a period of silence from Mr Musk be most welcome, particularly when he seeks to give an opinion on our domestic affairs? Why give him the dignity of a response?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I would certainly welcome much silence from Mr Musk, but, again, I would defend his right to have his opinion; I just do not agree with it. It is not for somebody in his position to ally himself with individuals who are trying to destroy much of the fabric of British society by their comments, nor is it appropriate for him to express his views via some new-fangled machinery down the line to the United Kingdom. We are a democracy; we know what we are doing. Members opposite disagree with us, but all people in this society have a chance to judge the Government, and they voted for the Government less than 15 or 16 months ago.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
Could the Minister arrange for a copy of this part of Hansard to be sent to Elon Musk?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I fear that I will be a star of Twitter, or X, before the evening is finished; I will probably be retweeted to thousands of people who will take a different view from me. I stand here not because I am me but because I am a representative of an elected Government who have won a clear majority and who ultimately will have to defend their record to the same people who elected them.
Lord Sahota (Lab)
My Lords, for the last month or so, members of the Sikh community in the West Midlands have been experiencing deeply distressing incidents. Two Sikh girls were reportedly victims of racially motivated sexual assault, and two Sikh taxi drivers were violently attacked at Wolverhampton railway station. Understandably, many Sikh women are now fearful of going about their daily lives, and the community as a whole is living in fear. What assurance can the Minister give to the Sikh community in the West Midlands that their safety and security are a priority for this Government? Can he outline what specific steps are being taken to protect them and bring the perpetrators of these hate crimes to justice?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend for his question. As with the noble Baroness’s question on Muslim women earlier, it is absolutely important that people are not attacked for a characteristic that they cannot change. Part of the problem with the approach of Mr Musk is that he plays to people who wish to generate activity against special-characteristic individuals—who have a view politically or who have characteristics such as being Muslim or being from the Sikh community. My noble friend will know that the Policing Minister is meeting Sikh MPs this afternoon to learn about the challenges they are facing and to provide reassurance and will, no doubt, report back to my noble friend as well.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, we have just had 10 minutes of people on the Government Benches saying why they disagree with Elon Musk. Do not basic fairness and reciprocity imply that he has an equivalent right to say what he thinks about this Government, including that free speech is in retreat in this country, which is a view shared by a great many people in the United Kingdom?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
Let me find the actual comment, if I may. Does the noble Lord then agree with the following comment from Elon Musk, which he portrayed down the television line to the rally?
“You’re in a fundamental situation here. Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die”.
That might be free speech, but I regard it as borderline incitement to violence. I do not think it is the part of Elon Musk or anybody else to incite violence in America or, indeed, in the United Kingdom. I will defend having that free speech, but I hope that the noble Lord recognises that free speech brings responsibilities and Elon Musk did not have that responsibility on that day.
Energy Market Reforms
(1 day, 6 hours ago)
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Earl Russell
To ask His Majesty’s Government what further consideration they have given to the case for energy market reforms following their decision not to implement zonal pricing.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Baroness Hayman of Ullock) (Lab)
My Lords, the review of electricity markets arrangements has concluded. This Government have decided to retain a national electricity market pricing regime and have established a programme called reformed national pricing. The purpose of the new programme is to deliver a cohesive package of reforms to improve the efficiency of our future power system. We will publish further detail on the reformed national pricing later this year, which will give market participants and investors clarity on our approach.
Earl Russell (LD)
We still have some of the highest energy prices in Europe. Does the Minister agree with me that reducing the costs of energy for everyone has to be an absolute priority? What progress is being made on producing a clear programme to redistribute energy levies, and will the Government examine in detail the Greenpeace policy proposals to remove gas plants into a regulated asset base, which it is claimed could save £5.1 billion a year by 2028?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
Delivering lower bills and a secure energy supply for families and businesses is absolutely at the heart of what we are trying to achieve through these reforms, particularly with moving towards renewables—that homegrown renewable energy sprint, as we are calling it—in order to get where we can as quickly as we can. The quicker we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, the more quickly we can reduce bills and do more about getting off the gas grid, which I think is at the heart of the noble Earl’s second question. Of course, the Government are always happy to look at contributions from different groups and NGOs, but the important thing is that we focus on that transition to renewable energies to bring those bills down.
Lord Naseby (Con)
On energy market reforms, should His Majesty’s Government not take advantage of the news that the North Sea oil reserves are now considerably higher than anticipated, and of a better quality and cheaper than imports of gas and oil, and therefore help to bring down energy prices?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
As I have just said, the Government’s focus to bring down energy prices is moving away from reliance on fossil fuels, and I am sure the noble Lord is aware that oil is a fossil fuel. Our focus is on moving to a more renewable energy market, to take away that reliance and bring down energy bills through that route.
Baroness Winterton of Doncaster (Lab)
My Lords, I hope my noble friend the Minister can assure me that the Government are still very focused on helping with the development of small modular nuclear reactors and that she will ensure that they are built in this country —for example, in places such as Sheffield Forgemasters.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I thank my noble friend for the question. Nuclear energy is part of the Government’s strategy in order to have sufficient energy for this country and to move away from gas power stations, for example. Personally, I am keen on small modular reactors: they are very important as part of our nuclear energy mix. I know that colleagues of mine in Cumbria have been pressing that we should have them there, as well as in Sheffield.
Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)
My Lords, I refer to my interest as honorary president of National Energy Action. The warm home discount—for those households in greatest fuel poverty—has remained at £300 for the last few years. What plans do the Government have to increase that figure so that the poorest, most fuel-impoverished households will receive more money off their bills?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
Clearly, it is absolutely critical that we support families who struggle to pay their electricity bills. We do not want people to be cold in the winter. I am not aware of any plans to increase that payment at the moment; I will get back to the noble Baroness if I am wrong. It is important to bring down bills but also to work with energy companies on their support for vulnerable customers, because there is a role for energy companies to play in that aspect.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a director of Peers for the Planet. In response to the Government’s Carbon Budget and Growth Delivery Plan published last week, Nigel Topping, the chair of the Government’s statutory Climate Change Committee, said:
“Our number one recommendation remains to make electricity cheaper. This means taking policy costs off electricity bills”.
Does the Minister agree?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
As I have said, one of our key priorities is to reduce bills for consumers, particularly for vulnerable customers. We will look at all aspects of how best to do that.
Lord Sikka (Lab)
My Lords, energy companies made £30 billion profit last year, which is over £500 per household. This fuels inflation and poverty. Some 128,000 people die in fuel poverty each year. There is an urgent need to end profiteering by excluding gas-generated electricity from Ofgem’s marginal pricing formula. Can the Minister explain why, after 35 years, Ofgem’s pricing formula has not been reformed?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
My noble friend asks about marginal pricing and refers to gas, because gas and electricity prices have been coupled together for many years. The market currently operates on the principle of marginal pricing, and the cost of electricity often tracks the cost of gas because gas generation frequently sets the wholesale price. It is a complex area. There are good reasons why the electricity market operates on that basis. Comparable countries tend to operate in this way as well. Over time, we need to rely less on gas, which means that electricity prices will become increasingly detached from the price of gas and be more frequently set by other generation, such as renewables. We see that as the way to bring prices down to support vulnerable people and to enable them to pay their bills. That is why our focus is on increasing renewable energy.
Lord Swire (Con)
Increasing the capacity of the grid —particularly bringing more offshore power onshore—will see a dramatic escalation in the number of overhead power lines to distribute the power, as well as more onshore substations. Given the huge profits made by some of the energy companies, what are the Government doing to mitigate the visual impact of this increase in energy distribution? Can these energy companies not be invited to contribute towards a fund that will see, where possible, the burial of overhead power lines?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
There are two aspects to this. There is the National Grid, and in Scotland there is ScottishPower. We also have the district network operators, so we have different levels of pylons. It is not quite as straightforward as having a simple pot. The important thing is that we build the renewable energy that we need. We also need to look at battery storage. Not all electricity generation needs to be connected up through power lines. The last figures I saw on burying power lines showed it to be about 11 times more expensive. It depends where they are—through a national park, for example—and what the current situation is. It is important that we have the renewable energy connection, and we want to bring down prices, but we must build the connections in the right place. Connections are not just built in a straight line. Electricity companies spend a long time ensuring that the route chosen is the best one: they talk to people. This is part of creating the renewable energy future that we need.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, does my noble friend the Minister agree that, alongside decarbonisation, one way to reduce prices for many people would be to encourage them to use flexible electricity? In other words, through battery storage and other modern techniques, consumers can be encouraged to use electricity at a time of abundance and thereby reduce their bills. The Government set up a task force this summer. Does my noble friend the Minister believe that it can spearhead reform in this area?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I just mentioned battery storage, so that is a very appropriate question from my noble friend. As I said, over the summer we announced our decision not to introduce zonal pricing and, instead, to implement this ambitious package of reforms to improve the effectiveness of our current national pricing model. We will publish more detail later this year—including on the role of flexible assets such as storage and consumer-led flexibility in addressing constraints, because flexibility will be a critical part of lowering costs and achieving our clean power ambitions. We recently published the Clean Flexibility Roadmap, which contains a comprehensive, actionable plan for unlocking the kind of greater flexibility to which my noble friend refers.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, the decision not to implement zonal pricing will mean the continuation of payments to turn off wind farms when they produce excess power, which are projected to reach £8 billion by 2030. Given the scale of this, and following on from what the noble Baroness, Lady Winterton, asked, do His Majesty’s Government agree that they should focus their efforts on securing a baseload of energy by investing in nuclear power in order to offset the strain placed on wind farms?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
We need both. We need renewable energy—I have talked about including wind farms and solar, for example—but that baseload of nuclear power is also important. That is why we are also investing in nuclear and making commitments to nuclear power. It is about finding a balance and getting both, because we need to make sure that we have sustainable, secure energy for the future.
Official Development Assistance
Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale
To ask His Majesty’s Government when they intend to announce the Official Development Assistance programme allocations for 2026–27.
Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)
My Lords, noting my registration in the Register of Lords’ Interests, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
My Lords, the Government will publish the multiyear official development assistance programme allocations for 2026-27 and 2028-29 in the coming months. These allocations will be informed by consultation and impact assessments, and will provide greater predictability for delivery partners as we transition to spending 0.3% of GNI on ODA by 2027. The UK remains committed to international development and is modernising its approach in order to deliver greater impact, value for money and transparency.
Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for her Answer and her engagement on this difficult set of decisions over recent months. There are those who are already suggesting that the drastic cuts announced earlier this year should be supplemented by further cuts in the Chancellor’s Budget, which will be announced at the end of this month. Can the Minister provide any reassurance that this will not, in fact, be the case and that, although we will still have a challenge, we will at least be working within the budget that was announced previously? Do the Minister and the Government recognise that those who are most affected by conflict, violence and instability are those who suffer from the least development and the worst circumstances? In the new, reduced budget, will there be priority for conflict-affected and fragile states, a focus on those states, and a specific budget for conflict prevention and peace- building, which can help us ensure that peace leads to development?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I completely agree with my noble friend about the impact of conflict on populations. We see this in Gaza, Yemen, Sudan and Myanmar. He is absolutely right to draw our attention to that. We focus a great deal on our work in fragile states and speak with our friends in the World Bank to keep them engaged in fragile contexts to make sure that they—who have far more money than we will ever have through an ODA programme—invest in these countries, as that really matters. However, I am going to disappoint my noble friend, in that I will not comment on the forthcoming Budget. I do not know what is in it; I am not expecting any further decisions to reduce our development assistance, but I do not think it would be wise for me to speculate at this stage.
Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)
My Lords, we all know that women and girls are disproportionately affected by conflict. There are, I think, about 116 conflicts raging around the world. The UK is a penholder for the women, peace and security agenda at the UN Security Council. We talk about leading the world on this agenda. Can the Minister reassure the House that we will continue to support women in conflict and not cut support to them at this time?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
It is vital, particularly at the moment, when many of our ideas and values regarding women are being challenged internationally, but we are determined that our work to support women will continue. We want to see this reflected through everything we do, and we are working on the detail of how we responsibly mainstream our work on gender throughout our programming. That is part of the story, but the other thing we need to do is to use our voice and influence internationally to make it clear that our position on these issues remains constant, even though others may change.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)
My Lords, given the impact of cuts in aid and the advance of Russia and China as funders in developing countries, will the Government seek an urgent initiative to promote public and private debt relief to ease the burden in those countries? Will they also do more aid matching to engage the British public, and work with the private sector to encourage development-led partnerships between the public and private sectors?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The private sector has an enormous role to play, and we have a responsibility to enable that to happen in a far larger way than it has in the past. I am leading an emerging markets and developing economies task force with the City of London; we have big players around the table, including the ratings agencies, HSBC and Aviva. We are seeing real success in breaking down the barriers to get that investment into developing economies.
The noble Lord is right to raise the issue of debt. Some countries spend far more on debt repayment than they do on health and education public services. That is not sustainable and we need a solution. Various options are available, and we support all of them to find which are most appropriate for the different nature of debt, to which the noble Lord alluded, in 2025.
Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, when the noble Baroness publishes the ODA allocations in the coming months, will she tell us how much of that money, instead of being spent to help the poorest people in the world, is in fact being used to fund tax cuts in Mauritius under the Chagos surrender deal?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I think the Chamber speaks for me on that. Our development assistance is all about supporting the poorest people in the world and empowering them to enable them to develop and support themselves, alongside our life-saving humanitarian assistance.
Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, talked about supporting nations and communities in conflict. I hope that the Minister will also focus on challenging areas, such as access to education for women and girls, particularly in the most challenging parts of the world—for example, Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have to continue to support those women because the men who govern Afghanistan, in particular, do their best to stop girls getting access to education.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The noble Lord is right that in Afghanistan in particular—but not only Afghanistan—there are real problems in accessing education for girls. We will continue to support work on that in those places. More widely on education, especially for girls, the best thing we can do is support countries to strengthen their own education system so that they are able to educate their children and that girls get the protection that access to education provides. We look not only at access but at quality and standards so that, when a girl has completed her education, she has a good standard of literacy and is able to move on, support herself, and contribute to her community and country in the way that so many women want.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, the previous Government established women mediator networks; I gave evidence recently to the IDC on this. In agreeing with my noble friend Lady Hodgson, I offer a suggestion in a practical and positive way. We really need to empower those women mediator networks because, as the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, who raised this Question, said, avoiding conflict at its beginning is crucial. When women are involved, conflicts are resolved quicker and peace lasts longer. Can we please make sure that those mediator networks are working to their fullest capacity?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for raising that point and in a constructive way, as he always does on these occasions, and for the experience which he brings. The initiative he describes has a lot of merit and I will look into it. He is absolutely right to point to the pivotal role of women in these situations.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester
My Lords, while we are on the theme of supporting women, as I travel around I find that one of the greatest impairments to young girls completing their education is that they are forced into pregnancy—sometimes by their families—at a very young age, pre leaving school. What can His Majesty’s Government do to help prevent young girls being made pregnant, usually by older men and in very difficult circumstances?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
We know that the single most significant protective factor against that is education and being in school. We work with countries to try to enable that. Separately, I think that we are now the largest contributor to the UNFPA, which distributes contraceptive devices and products. Those do not always reach the people that the right reverend Prelate talks about, of course, so the work that we do on education is incredibly significant when it comes to preventing what none of us wants to see: very young girls starting their families sometimes years before they would have finished their education.
Baroness Blower (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend very much for her warm words about education, which I am sure all of us in this Chamber would echo and welcome. Can she also please bear in mind the absolute centrality and importance of education when the replenishment conferences roll around next year for the Global Campaign for Education and Education Cannot Wait?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I think my noble friend means the Global Partnership for Education. They are both incredibly effective and we have to think how we best support our work on education. I think that the best thing we can do is work with other Governments, strengthening systems and enabling them to take the lead themselves. That is the most sustainable approach. Education Cannot Wait works in disaster situations, where a more standardised approach to education is just not feasible. That is very different and it is vital that that work continues.
Artificial Intelligence: Safeguarding
(1 day, 6 hours ago)
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Baroness Berger
To ask His Majesty’s Government, following recent reports by Open AI that many people have exhibited signs of suicidal ideation or other mental health emergencies while messaging a generative artificial intelligence chatbot, whether they have plans to safeguard such individuals.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Merron) (Lab)
My Lords, safeguarding people experiencing suicidal ideation or a mental health crisis is a priority. We recognise the growing use of generative AI chatbots and the potential risks that they can pose, particularly when people seek support during moments of acute distress. Whether content is created by AI or humans, the Online Safety Act places robust duties on all in-scope services, including those deploying chatbots, to prevent users encountering illegal suicide and self-harm content.
Baroness Berger (Lab)
My Lords, ChatGPT is giving British teens dangerous advice on suicide, eating disorders and substance abuse. A report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that, within two minutes, the AI platform would advise a 13 year-old how to safely cut themselves; within 40 minutes, it would list the required pills for an overdose; and, after 72 minutes, it would generate suicide notes. Can my noble friend confirm that Ofcom will treat ChatGPT and other chatbots as search engines under the Online Safety Act, and assure the House that the regulator has both the powers and the will to enforce the protection of children code when it comes to generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
My noble friend describes a disturbing situation. The independent regulator, Ofcom, has made it quite clear that if an AI service searches the live internet and returns results, it will be regulated under the Online Safety Act as a search service. Ofcom can take robust enforcement action, including issuing fines of up to £18 million or 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is higher.
Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of Team Domenica. The people who most need safeguarding from these AI chatbots are those with learning disabilities. In Brighton and Hove, we work closely with the police, who train our candidates how to be safe online. Will the Minister consider special training for police and social workers to protect this highly vulnerable and suggestible cohort?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I understand the need for training, as the noble Baroness rightly outlines, but I would emphasise that AI chatbots are in scope of the Act, as I mentioned just now to my noble friend. What matters is the fact that they actually search the live internet. The point the noble Baroness raises is very important, and it is also about literacy in terms of using the internet, equipping individuals to try to stay safe, and safeguarding those who are more vulnerable, as she describes; training is certainly part of that.
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, I have consulted ChatGPT on this. It calls me “dear Ruth”, and it says that when people write to it about suicide, it responds with empathy and compassion. It does not encourage suicide, and it sends a guide to human support. I do not want to make light of this or condemn it outright. On the contrary, there may be something to be said, certainly at a light level, for unhappy people consulting ChatGPT. I do not want to discourage or limit freedom of speech any further than it is already limited. There may be some help for people in ChatGPT.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The noble Baroness makes a helpful challenge about how to regard AI services. Generative AI can indeed offer opportunities to enhance mental health support, and the National Health Service is looking at how we can, particularly through the NHS app, assist and support people. But such technologies must not replace trained professionals, including in crisis situations. It is about getting the right support, at the right place, at the right time—that is a delicate balance, but we should use AI for its great benefits.
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, following on from the previous question and drawing on international best practice, will the Government look at what they can do to mandate that all general-purpose AI providers implement a prominent, context-sensitive hard stop and clear immediate signposting to UK mental health services when a user’s input suggests a high-risk mental health keyword or suicidal intent?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The noble Lord makes a very useful suggestion, and I will certainly raise that with my ministerial colleague at DSIT. I note that companies—admittedly, they are doing this when under pressure—are looking at introducing, for example, age assurance functionalities to ensure that users get the right experience for their age. But we should not be leaving that to chance, and we should not be leaving that to the fact that this is arising following legal challenge. I certainly look forward to looking into the point the noble Lord makes.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, is there an analogy with drugs here—a potent technology which has great and positive uses in healthcare, but that can also be abused? Therefore, it must be properly regulated. Some uses must not be allowed without prior approval; some should be banned.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
My noble friend is right that this can be used for good or for ill. Of course, there are other comparisons to draw. My noble friend has not said this, but I want to make sure we keep away from the idea that AI services are escaping regulation. Many AI chatbots are certainly in scope of the Act. I also take the view that AI can actually assist us greatly in supporting those at risk and in improving health. We seek to harness that as we move from analogue to digital, as per our 10-year plan.
Lord Kamall (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, for bringing up this issue and for making noble Lords aware of it. With evidence that people with mental health issues are increasingly turning to AI chatbots rather than to health providers, and rather than simply relying on the stick of the Online Safety Act, can the Minister explain what conversations her department, perhaps in conjunction with DSIT, is having with AI companies and with UKAI, the trade body, so they can come together to find a solution for safeguarding? As the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, and the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, have said, perhaps they could suggest how to deal with individuals in distress who go to these chatbots, to make sure they are signposted to appropriate services, rather than offered content that encourages them to take their own life.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I certainly agree that this is the way we need to go, and discussions happen regularly with companies, as the noble Lord says. It is probably also worth saying that we have already seen some early signs of improvement in terms of protection for users from online harms, and over 6,000 services are implementing what we would regard as highly effective age assurance, which brings protection to millions of children. Of course, DSIT is monitoring and evaluating the Online Safety Act. Where evidence shows that further intervention is needed to protect children, we will not hesitate to act.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, digital mental health technologies with clinical purposes are classified by MHRA as medical devices. Therefore, what action can the Government take, working with MHRA and Ofcom, to ensure that these chatbots actually promote suicide prevention policies and do not act as suicide promotion sites?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The first thing is to ensure the application of the Online Safety Act, and we look to Ofcom in that regard. We will increase access to evidence-based digital interventions, to help patients access treatment in a variety of ways but also potentially to reduce unnecessary GP appointments and A&E attendances, as well as assisting people who are waiting for treatment to wait well.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, is there not a wider lesson here that many young people are turning to ChatGPT instead of calling their GP for health advice? Have the Government reviewed how they communicate different health information, particularly to the younger generation? Are they talking to the younger generation through the channels that they are using?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
Sadly, I cannot say I am young myself, so I cannot testify to this, but the answer to that is yes, the department does that. I refer to the point that the noble Baroness has emphasised: over a third of five to seven year-olds are using social media in 2025, and that proportion rises as young children get older. We ignore this at our peril. I assure the noble Baroness that the Online Safety Act is providing support, as are the digital interventions that we are providing through the NHS, in particular, the improved NHS app.
Space Industry (Indemnities) Bill
Baroness Anelay of St Johns (Con)
My Lords, I understand that no amendments have been set down to this Bill and that no noble Lord has indicated a wish to move a manuscript amendment or to speak in Committee. Unless, therefore, any noble Lord objects, I beg to move that the order of commitment be discharged.
Sudan: Protection of Civilians
Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, the massacre at the El Fasher hospital and the surrounding city was deeply shocking. I know that the British embassy in Khartoum is temporarily closed, but can the Minister confirm what consular support, if any, the department can provide in Sudan? Can she confirm whether any British nationals have been affected in any of these attacks?
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
We are not aware that any British nationals have been affected in these attacks.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, Tom Fletcher, the head of UN OCHA, told the United Nations Security Council that there was indifference and resignation among the UN Security Council members. As the UK is the penholder for this crisis, we must take our share of the responsibility. Some 90% of children in Sudan are out of education, and 24 million people—40% of the population—lack sufficient food. We have been horrified by the scenes, most recently in El Fasher, that are in brazen defiance of Security Council Resolution 2736, passed in 2024, for the protection of civilians. In July, I asked the Minister what steps were being made by the UK for enforcing that resolution. She said she wondered what the point is of having these resolutions if they are not enforced. That resolution gave the Security Council authority for enforcement measures. What tangible steps is the UK, as penholder, taking to mobilise the protection of civilians, which is authorised in the UN charter and, specifically, in this resolution?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I stand by what I said. These resolutions and statements are helpful in many ways, but, unless they change things on the ground, I believe that we are failing. I wonder sometimes where the liberal outrage is for Sudan that we see for other places. There are many reasons why that might be the case, but a lack of attention and focus from this Government at the UN or anywhere else is not one of them. I led an event at the UN General Assembly just last month. We have been able to get the fact-finding mission off the ground and we are spending £120 million in ODA. On Saturday, I spoke to the Chadian Government about ensuring that the crossings remain open for refugees. We will continue to work with our partners and allies to get the focus on this conflict, where it really needs to be.
Lord Hussain (LD)
My Lords, I am one of those parliamentarians who had the chance of visiting Sudan and El Fasher some nine years ago as part of the parliamentary group led by the late Lord Sheikh. One of the things which inspired me to go there and find out more was that the information that we were getting in the Chamber in those days was that Omar Bashir’s air force was regularly killing so many people every week in that region. Once we got to Khartoum, we made a special request to go to El Fasher, in Darfur, and find out exactly what was going on. We spoke to the UN mission in Darfur, and what was surprising was that the information that we received there did not tally with the information that we were getting here. We raised it with our high commissioner there at the time and with the Government there. When we came back, the visiting group wrote a big report and submitted it to the Foreign Office, asking where the disparity in the information was coming from. With that backdrop, all I am asking today is whether we are making sure that the information we are getting is correct.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
That is a very good question. Information is very difficult to obtain. There are few, if any, journalists in Sudan now, and the information that we do get is difficult to verify. The noble Lord is absolutely right to raise that. What we do have is the first-hand accounts of those who have managed to escape, and their testimonies are harrowing to hear. As the truth emerges, I think the world will be horrified at what it is. We are hearing reports already, which we have confidence in, of what has happened in El Fasher, particularly at the hospital, and these are by far the most disturbing accounts that I have ever had to consider.
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, it is very welcome that we are discussing Sudan in this Chamber. However, I have to say, following the reference to Tom Fletcher, that he is hardly a reliable source. He is the UN official who said that 14,000 babies were going to die of famine in Gaza within days, and he had to retract that. One cannot help but contrast the constructive and calm atmosphere to genocide, as I suppose it is, in Sudan with the hysteria on the streets when it comes to Gaza and Israel. There are no marching students, there are no protests in universities, and there is no hot-tempered exchange in either Chamber. We need to be even-handed. The casualties and dispossessed people in Sudan greatly outnumber those of Gaza.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I am slightly surprised to hear the noble Baroness pronounce genocide, when she knows, and has supported our position, that we do not do that. That is for a competent court to do. Tom Fletcher is an outstanding leader of OCHA. He clarified what he said, as he needed to, on the occasion that she alludes to. He did the right thing, and I think that speaks well of him. The way that he is leading his organisation and drawing attention to what is happening in Sudan, and putting the resources at his disposal in the right place, speak very highly of him. He has our complete support.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)
My Lords, following my noble friend’s question, after the massacre in Rwanda the United Nations adopted the responsibility to protect resolution. It does not seem to have had any meaningful impact. I understand the Minister’s position, but the question is this: what on earth is the practical measure that can happen? People are desperate and trapped—we do not know how many tens of thousands of people—hoping that somebody is going to come and relieve them, but there is no sign of international action. What can we do to get forces actually on the ground to ease the siege and release the suffering before it becomes a total disaster?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
The politics at the UN have evolved in an unhelpful way, I think, since the genocide in Rwanda and the initiatives that followed. I do not think that that is where we will see what the noble Lord wants, which is troops on the ground keeping the peace. We do not have peace. We need everybody who has any kind of influence over either warring party to get those leaders in a room and get them to negotiate. We support all current efforts being taken to bring that about, not least through the United States and the Qataris, but they have so far been unsuccessful. Given what has happened in recent days, the prospects for that seem dimmer, not brighter, but we keep going. All I can say is that this Government will get behind any initiatives designed to bring about a ceasefire.
Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Lab)
We all know that part of the problem in Sudan is that what is going on is being funded by outside actors who have their own skin in the game and their own political and economic motivations. Can the Minister assure me that we are using our position to put pressure on those who are funding this outrageous war on the people of Sudan by these generals, and that we are doing everything possible to diminish that funding?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
It is the people of Sudan who are paying the price for this. I can assure the noble Baroness that we use every lever we can to put pressure where it is needed. Anybody who has any influence over either side has a duty and responsibility to use it to bring about a negotiated solution.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
I watch the news every day. Sudan is almost never on the news, particularly yesterday and the day before, despite what is happening in El Fasher. Would it do any use to try to get better publicity in this country?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
It very much would. This conflict needs to be much higher up the agenda, both here and internationally. There are several problems with bringing that about, one of which is the absence of sufficient numbers of journalists who can do their job. It would be enormously helpful if they could. I believe that there were some reports on Sky this morning, although I have not seen them yet. I absolutely agree that this issue has not had the profile that it needs and that we should try to get it at the forefront of the agenda.
Infected Blood Compensation Scheme
(1 day, 6 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Finn (Con)
My Lords, the report of the Infected Blood Inquiry described this tragedy as
“the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS”.
Noble Lords across the House and Members in the other place have spoken time and again of the unimaginable suffering endured by those affected. There can be no doubt that this scandal represents a profound and repeated failure by the state, medical professionals and national institutions.
We should never lose sight of the fact that what we call the scandal was, in truth, the infliction, collectively, of grievous harm upon thousands of people by the state. It is now our solemn duty to ensure that such mistakes are never repeated, and that justice is delivered swiftly, fairly and fully to all who were affected. In that spirit, I thank the Minister for her continued time and engagement across the House.
I pay tribute to the work of Sir Brian Langstaff, the chair of the Infected Blood Inquiry. Earlier this year, that inquiry warned that there has been
“a repetition of the mistakes of the past”,
and that people have been “harmed yet further” since the establishment of the compensation scheme. Sir Brian concluded that the number of people compensated to date is “profoundly unsatisfactory” and has called for faster and fairer delivery of redress. The campaign group Tainted Blood estimates that at least 100 people have died while waiting for compensation since the inquiry’s final report last year, and Sir Brian has warned:
“Delay creates an injustice all of its own”.
We welcome the measures announced to implement some of Sir Brian’s recommendations, such as the HIV eligibility start dates and bereaved partner support scheme payments. The Minister confirmed that, as of 21 October, 2,476 people have received an offer of compensation and over £1.35 billion has been paid. However, as the BBC has reported, as many as 140,000 bereaved parents, children and siblings of victims may also be able to claim compensation, and the Government have set aside £11.8 billion to pay compensation to victims.
There is evidently still a great deal of work to be done to ensure that the Infected Blood Compensation Authority—IBCA—can scale up quickly and make payments to affected people, who will clearly be far larger in number for IBCA to deal with.
In recent weeks, further concerns have emerged that delays in paying compensation risk undermining one of the core principles of the scheme: how it is, or rather is not, taxed. Under the present arrangements, compensation received by a victim can be passed to their children free from inheritance tax. But for the thousands who have died before receiving payment, those sums will now pass through their estates to bereaved relatives, many of whom are themselves elderly. If they, too, die before receiving the funds, their families could face handing back almost 40% of that compensation to the state in inheritance tax.
A statement from the Association of Lifetime Lawyers says
“it is an outrage that a technical flaw will allow the Government to claw back up to 40 per cent of the compensation that was specifically intended to provide some redress”.
The Government have said that they are committed to making the system as fair and compassionate as possible and will continue to engage with victims and their families. I therefore urge the Minister to assure the House that the Government are aware of this problem and that they are looking into possible solutions.
As was noted in the other place, £140 million has now been spent on this inquiry after six years, and that figure will be greater once the accounts for this year have been released. The Minister in the other place said that he thinks we are now in an “exponential phase” where the scale of payments being made through IBCA is increasing. However, the concern is that we are stuck in this test-and-learn phase of delivery.
The mechanism for scaling up payments has been too slow and the reliance on repeated rounds of inquiries and tranches of recommendations has prevented swift action and compensation being delivered. It is right that we proceed with care and consideration, but we must not lose sight of the pressing need to deliver this process swiftly. The Government must strike a balance between acting responsibly and acting quickly. My right honourable friend John Glen made the point that we now need to
“focus on the delivery of IBCA, rather than have more iterations of recommendations”.—[Official Report, Commons, 30/10/25; col. 520.]
He is absolutely right. I therefore ask the Minister to ensure that the scaling-up process proceeds with the urgency that this situation so clearly demands.
Before I conclude my remarks, I have some further questions for the Minister. First, can the Minister confirm the Government’s current timetable for making full compensation payments to victims and families yet to receive them and whether that timetable remains consistent with Sir Brian Langstaff’s call for faster and fairer redress?
Secondly, what steps are IBCA and the Government taking to identify those individuals who are potentially recipients of compensation under the scheme and who may also be sick or elderly and are, as such, deserving of prioritisation in the processing of their claims?
Thirdly, will the Government commit to taking, as a matter of urgency, immediate steps to ensure that all infected blood compensation payments, whether made directly to victims or through estates, are entirely exempt from inheritance tax, regardless of the circumstances or timing of payment? In that vein, can the Minister confirm whether the Treasury has undertaken any assessment of the number of families likely to be affected by this tax anomaly and of the potential sums at stake if it is not corrected?
Fourthly, what action is the Minister taking with IBCA to ensure that the pace of payments, which has seen some welcome progress, continues to accelerate and is not jeopardised by changes to rules and processes? Can she confirm that IBCA has the right capability to scale up and that the staff are receiving the right training to deliver?
Fifthly and finally, can the Minister confirm when the recommendations from the proposed changes to the infected blood compensation scheme consultation will be implemented? I am aware that the consultation period ends in January, so when can we expect the practical implementation of these recommendations to be forthcoming?
The victims and their families have already been failed profoundly by the state. It is now our duty and our responsibility to make sure that there is no further injustice. Addressing the questions we have raised around delays, taxation, and the scalability of the system is imperative. I hope that the Minister can assure us that the Government are taking immediate steps to resolve these issues.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, I thank all the infected and affected victims who have been in touch with me and other noble Lords in the last few weeks, not least since the consultation started and the independent review of the workings of IBCA was published. They are living the consequences of the scandal that the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, outlined at the beginning of her contribution, and the problem is that any delays or problems in the scheme retraumatise and revictimise them. Although I am grateful that the Government have been tackling some of the issues, there are still many outstanding; and while the numbers of those registering claims and receiving offers have begun to improve since we last met, there remain real concerns about the slowness of the deceased claims.
The phrase used is “to start by December 2025”, but that is a somewhat woolly timescale; it should not just be about starting. When is it expected that the claims process will be up and running at pace—a favourite phase of the Cabinet Office? Also, understanding that one has to use, test and learn in each different part of the compensation process, can the Minister say when things will be speeded up? It may be too early to ask if there is an end date in sight, but even an end year in sight for deceased claims would be very welcome.
Victims and groups have referred IBCA and the processes to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee in the House of Commons, so will both IBCA and the Cabinet Office co-operate fully with any requests for evidence that that Committee might seek?
I want to thank the Government for increasing transparency. We have over many years in your Lordships’ House been concerned about some of the secrecy about arrangements. A lot of this goes back 50 years, to when doctors were not very clear about their own arrangements and there certainly was no paperwork. But it is good that the names of the expert group and the minutes of its meetings are now published, and I hope there will continue to be more transparency about the arrangements.
I have a specific query about the arrangements for the assessment of severe mental health continuous treatment. Apparently, the Government are insisting on six months of continuous treatment as the benchmark, to justify the supplementary routes for mental health, but the NHS offers continuous treatment for only 20-week periods because there just are not enough counsellors and psychiatrists available to go round. As a result, there are inevitably gaps in treatment in order that other people can also be treated. To the victims, this feels like a barrier that none of them can get past. I wonder if the Minister could look at that problem.
There are concerns about the processing of deceased claims. I see that there is a proposal to have the first claim started. The victims continue to be very concerned about the Treasury and HMRC’s stance on inheritance tax, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, outlined. The Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners and the Association of Lifetime Lawyers have written a letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, copied to the Paymaster-General, to point out that in their discussions with HMRC over the additional report on compensation, which Sir Brian Langstaff published earlier this year, they remain particularly concerned about this payment. The issue is that the Government have confirmed that compensation payments should be free from income tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax, but, unfortunately, because of the way IHT operates, this principle is not being upheld consistently.
Here, there are three points. Where the infected or affected persons are alive when compensation is paid, they get a tax credit to ensure the sums are not later taxed in their estate. But where the victims or their loved ones have sadly died before receiving compensation, the payments flow through their estates without the benefits of such a credit. Their beneficiaries can therefore face IHT charges—in some cases at 40%—on compensation specifically designed to provide redress for a heinous act by many Governments over many years.
This so-called secondary transfer problem is particularly acute where compensation first passes to a surviving spouse or civil partner and then on to children or other relatives. In such cases, significant proportions of compensation are lost to tax. Throughout the inquiry, the last Government, and indeed this Government, made it clear that past benefits would not be called back out of settlement money. Surely the same must be true for the Treasury and HMRC. It would be iniquitous for an infected person to die, their settlement passing to their widow, who dies, say, within a month, but then anything passed on to their children is severely taxed. What is different about infected blood to a general principle on IHT is that entire families are badly affected by the experience of their loved one. This is not just in medical terms; we have to remember that they were also shunned in their communities, particularly those who had AIDS, losing homes and jobs because of ill health. It would be awful to punish them through that taxation.
Will the Minister agree to a meeting with Treasury to discuss this issue? It is not a good look for Treasury to give billions with one hand and then claw back with the other. I thank the Minister for the Statement and hope she will continue to keep your Lordships’ House informed of the progress and issues in the weeks to come, including the regulations that we will look at very shortly.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
My Lords, I am, as ever, very grateful to the noble Baronesses for the thoughtful and productive points raised on this issue. It is very easy for Members of your Lordships’ House to get caught up in the politics of many issues, but on the issue of infected blood this has genuinely been a cross-party and cross-House approach, and I hope we will continue to adopt that theme. At the heart of everything that we are trying to do is to support the victims of one of the most heinous experiences the state has ever undertaken. We need to fix it, not only for them but also, as a Member of your Lordships’ House reminded us last time, to ensure that wider society can have faith that the state can be a force for good. I truly believe that it can.
I truly believe that, since I last updated the House in July, significant progress has been made. This demonstrates that we are committed to moving forward swiftly, and with the community at the front and centre of what we are doing. In other contexts, the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, and I have interesting discussions about the concept of test and learn. But truly, if we think about what we are trying to do, it is to compensate many thousands of people with up to £11.8 billion—although that is not a target or a goal, but the amount allocated currently. We are trying to get money out the door as quickly as possible to the people who need it. Test and learn has been an appropriate way to do that, to make sure that taxpayers’ money gets out to the people who need it as quickly as possible and at the appropriate speed.
I would like to respond to the points raised by the noble Baronesses. As ever, if I have missed something—and I and pretty sure I will have—I will write. First, both noble Baronesses raised the issue of inheritance tax, which was obviously a theme of discussions in the other place. It may be helpful to clarify exactly where we are. Anyone in direct receipt of compensation from IBCA or who is a beneficiary of an estate of a deceased infected person does not need to pay inheritance tax. Inheritance tax relief is applied, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said, to the estate of the person who received the compensation, whether they received it as an infected person or an affected person. Under HMRC regulations, the inheritance tax on that person’s estate is reduced so that the amount of compensation received is effectively free of any inheritance tax when it passes to the estate beneficiaries.
However, once the compensation has passed to the beneficiaries, it is treated the same for inheritance tax purposes as any other money or property they own; the relief does not apply again—for example, when the beneficiaries themselves die. Where compensation is paid to a person who has been affected or infected and that person then dies, the inheritance tax which would otherwise be payable in respect of their estate is relieved. It does not matter who the beneficiary of that estate is, the inheritance tax relief applies. However, once the money is received by that beneficiary, inheritance tax applies as normal. To put it as simply as possible, the relief will apply to the estate of the person who is being directly compensated, whether that person is infected, affected, living or, sadly, passed away.
Having said that, I appreciate the strength of feeling in your Lordships’ House, and having reflected on Hansard, we are listening. I will seek to arrange the meeting with Treasury officials—I am about to make myself very popular with the Treasury—to discuss this issue. We will see if my noble friend Lord Livermore is still speaking to me by the end of the day. There is also the Budget coming, so we may have to wait a little bit, but I will endeavour to answer noble Lords.
On the consultation and timing, the consultation will run for 12 weeks, to 26 January. We will publish a response to the consultation on GOV.UK within 12 weeks of its closing. Regulations to make changes to the scheme as a result of the consultation will be brought forward next year.
This is a genuine consultation, not a tick-box exercise. Many recommendations have been made by our technical experts that offer us a range of options within the tariff-based system that we will seek to apply. We should always listen to those people who are affected, but we especially need to make sure that we get this right for the infected blood community. This is truly about making sure that we get the answers needed.
Both noble Baronesses raised points about the effectiveness of IBCA. Noble Lords may be aware that on Thursday last week we published a review by Sir Tyrone Urch that we had commissioned in August, reviewing the effectiveness of IBCA to make sure that it was able to take us forward to the next stages as quickly as possible. He has made a series of recommendations, which we published only last week, and now we are looking, with IBCA, to see who is appropriate to take them forward—noble Lords will be aware that they focus on three issues: stability, resources and digital systems—to make sure that we have the opportunity to move forward.
A matter of weeks ago, I visited IBCA to make sure that I was confident in its ability to take steps forward. That option is available to all Members of your Lordships’ House, and for those who are interested I highly recommend taking a trip to Newcastle to meet IBCA. It was an extraordinary experience, on which I am sure I will reflect more during these questions.
I would like to reassure noble Lords about the ability of the staff at IBCA to move forward. IBCA now employs 329 dedicated claim managers who support people with their claims from start to finish. All claim managers are fully trained and complete a three-week training programme, which includes working with a clinical psychologist to undertake trauma-informed training to ensure that claim managers work compassionately with the community. They are extraordinary people; when I met one of them, he said: “Other than the National Lottery, I get to make someone a millionaire every day by working at IBCA”. By the time he has ensured that the payment is in their bank account, he knows the family well. If any part of this can be joyful, that part is.
On delivery, all registered infected have been contacted to claim by October; for the unregistered infected, the first claims begin in November; and affected and infected estates will begin by the end of the year. I appreciate that the noble Baroness is concerned about when we will pay, and for the overwhelming majority the answer is by the end of 2027.
I have an answer, although time is short, about the issue of severe psychological harm and the six months of support. I will write to noble Baroness, but I assure her that this is about not counselling but psychiatric treatment. A day as an in-patient qualifies you, not six months, but there is a severity, and currently part of the consultation is about how we will pay that. I will reflect on everything else that has been said.
Not only was I overwhelmed by the expertise and professionalism of the people I met when I visited IBCA earlier this year but I want to give special mention to IBCA’s three user consultants, as they are called, who are members of the infected blood community themselves. Jason Evans, Clair Walton and Susan Harris advise IBCA on how its processes and plans can be focused on the needs of those who will be applying for compensation. Given their personal experiences and how easy it would have been for them to walk away, the fact that they are helping us to fix it is extraordinary, and I put on record my huge admiration for them. I will reflect on any points that I have missed and write to the noble Baronesses.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for having met me, and to the noble Baroness, Lady Campbell of Surbiton, with whom I discussed the Statement yesterday.
The Minister has spoken about claim managers now being trained and directly employed. I wonder if she has evidence that trust has increased and of how the claim managers are managing when there is difficulty accessing medical records, particularly if the microfiched records cannot be found easily or if there are gaps in the whole medical history.
A separate question, but equally important, is how claim managers and others are able to provide advice to recipients who may wish to be protected from it being known that they have compensation because they need advice on how to manage the payments they receive. Sadly, they may be fearful of pressures put on them, either within their own families or within the community, when it is known that they have received a large sum of money in compensation, because there is sometimes inadequate understanding of what the compensation has actually been for.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I put on record my thanks to the noble Baronesses, Lady Finlay and—I think I can call her a noble friend, even though she is not on my Benches—Lady Campbell, who is much missed; I am pleased that she will be returning to us in the new year. As ever, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, raises very important points. I think trust has increased, but that is difficult to tell in an environment where misinformation is rife; making sure that people have access to genuine information is truly one of the most challenging parts of this. We have discussed in your Lordships’ House many times the ability of IBCA to communicate and the need to make sure that it is providing relevant information.
That said, the claim managers have played an incredibly important role. We are seeing that when claims are finished—obviously this is a small community, relatively speaking—people are asking the claim managers who have just finished with them if they will be the claim manager for their friends, or for other members of the community, by name. This suggests that trust in the claim managers, at least, is clear, which is an important part of this.
The noble Baroness makes two incredibly important points. One is about access to medical records. Our claim managers are not investigators but, where there is clearly paperwork missing, they are working with the recipients to help them find the paperwork; so the onus is not just on the members of the infected blood community—there is someone helping them get the paperwork. We still have challenges in making sure that we can access some of the medical records. Noble Lords will appreciate that, as we move forward away from registered infected cases and towards estates and other areas, that may well be challenging, but we are working on what new technologies we can use to harness some of that material.
As regards advice to recipients who want to be protected, we are offering paid financial advice to make sure that it is easily accessed. We have to appreciate that these are very vulnerable people who have had horrendous experiences and could be targeted again, so making sure that we can work to protect them will be an incredibly important part of what we do going forward.
Baroness Thornton (Lab)
My Lords, I feel that I am a veteran of this issue, like many other Members of your Lordships’ House. Indeed, I was a Health Minister in 2009 and 2010, and I think that might have been the first time I had a huge row with civil servants because they would not let me say sorry. That is something that featured through many Administrations, with great shame. I was on the Opposition Benches when we came to agreeing the amendments, and thus finally agreed the scheme that we see before us today. I congratulate my Government on finding the funding to be as generous as possible in this compensation scheme.
I want to ask my noble friend the Minister about transparency, how that has been built into what happens next and, indeed, the wider lessons that need to be learned from the way in which the scheme has been constructed, as well as other issues that might arise in the future and that will need this kind of attention.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I thank my noble friend for her work in getting us to this point. We put on record our thanks to her, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, as the leading negotiators making sure we got to this point. My noble friend was not allowed to say sorry, but I can say sorry to those people who have been affected by this. I get to do that because of the fights that she had. For that, I am grateful; I do not have to have so many fights with my civil servants.
With regard to transparency, noble Lords will appreciate that we are talking about a cohort of people who have been affected by infected blood and who have no trust. Rightly, there is no reservoir of good will. We have to be as transparent and open as we possibly can to make sure that they know what is happening, why it is happening, at what speed and in what process. While the speed may be a challenge, we have to make sure that it is in place.
One thing that I have not said yet but wanted to put on record is that, as of 1 October, staff at IBCA are now directly employed and are no longer seconded civil servants. They are now public servants who work for IBCA. I think that helps lead to transparency of and trust in IBCA. In addition to the fact that we publish everything—the reviews are making sure that we are able to do that, including transparent publication in relation to the technical meeting group—everything we are doing is trying to rebuild trust with that community.
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, I listened to the Minister carefully with regard to inheritance tax. I am sure that she will agree that for those who are affected by this scandal, it will be generational rather than just stop at the end of the life of the person who was infected. Let me give an example of the generational issues: a child of somebody who was infected has been affected, and that may pass down to their children in terms of them not having a full education or not being able to work fully in light of the issue they were dealing with in respect of their parents. What would the Minister say to citizens and individuals who have been affected, where it goes to their children’s children, and they may have to pay inheritance tax? What can the Government do in terms of speaking to the Treasury to ensure generational fairness as well as fairness for those who have been infected when it comes to inheritance tax?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I truly appreciate the strength of feeling in your Lordships’ House about this issue. I have said as much as I can without getting myself into even more trouble, but what I will say is that it is a fair point. Noble Lords will be aware that I also talk about issues pertaining to Northern Ireland and legacy, intergenerational trauma and making sure that we have the right support structures in place and the right answers for people so that they can perhaps turn the page—I do not know if they can ever shut the book—on what happened to them and move forward. While I appreciate noble Lords and I have probably already got myself in trouble with my colleagues in the Treasury, I have heard and will continue to listen to noble Lords’ contributions on this issue.
Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill
Baroness Chapman of Darlington
That the Bill be now read a second time.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
My Lords, the Bill that we are to discuss today is vital for the security of our nation. It enables the ratification and entry into force of the treaty between the UK and Mauritius concerning the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia, and thus protects the operation of an essential UK military base in the Indian Ocean. The consequences of not ratifying this treaty should not be underestimated. The inevitable effect would be to expose the UK to an unacceptable level of risk and legal uncertainty, which could deny us key military and security capabilities, dramatically reducing the effectiveness of our Armed Forces and security services. A binding judgment against the UK from an international court or tribunal would undermine our ability to operate globally to protect UK influence and counter the threats we face in an increasingly dangerous world, and it would put at risk security at home.
I understand that the treaty has divided opinion. We have had good debates in both this House and the other place on its substance, and I, of course, welcome this scrutiny. Since the Government signed the treaty, there have been Statements and debates across both Houses, hundreds of Questions raised and answered, and the completion of several committee inquiries by learned colleagues.
The necessity of the Diego Garcia treaty and of this Bill has been amply demonstrated. It has been tested in detail by the International Agreements Committee and the International Relations and Defence Committee. Both agreed that protection of the strategic value of Diego Garcia—a vital national asset—was necessary. The IAC clearly set out the path to significant risks to the base if the treaty were not ratified.
The Diego Garcia treaty has the support of our international allies. The United States has been engaged throughout the negotiations and supports it, as do the rest of our Five Eyes partners; Japan, South Korea and India support it as well. The UN, the Commonwealth and the African Union all welcomed it. Our overseas territories family supports it. The list goes on.
I welcome the opportunity to test this further today. The treaty is an important matter that the Government considered with great care. We bore the full weight of responsibility for not only the security of the British people but the integrity of the UK’s position on the global stage, and for respect for the experiences of those who had lived on the islands.
This treaty is critical to our national security. The base holds a range of vital capabilities, some of which are highly secret. I know that those with experience in this House will understand the military advantage of being able to deploy forces rapidly across the Middle East, east Africa and south Asia, and will appreciate the political and security importance of operating such a prized asset jointly with our closest partner, the United States.
The deal preserves this vital security footprint. With it, we will retain full operational control over Diego Garcia, with robust provisions to keep adversaries out. These include: unrestricted access to and use of the base for the UK and the US; a buffer zone around Diego Garcia; a UK veto to ensure that no development or construction on the outer islands threatens base operations; and a ban on the presence of any foreign security forces. The protections were designed, tested and endorsed at the highest level of the US political and security establishment.
The Government acted to protect this vital asset because it faced an existential threat. This was well understood by the previous Government, which is why they started negotiations more than three years ago—negotiations that they entered in good faith, despite what we heard in the other place, and continued for 11 rounds, including detailed text-based negotiations in the weeks and months before the general election.
It was under the previous Government that Mauritius secured its string of legal and political victories against the UK. Noble Lords will be aware of the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion in 2019 and the loss of votes at the UN General Assembly. This was followed in 2021 by a ruling by a special chamber of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea on a maritime delimitation dispute between Mauritius and the Maldives. The special chamber, in a decision that was binding on the parties to the dispute, ruled that Mauritius’s sovereignty was inferred from the ICJ’s determinations. This gave a clear indication of how this tribunal—and, quite possibly, other international courts and tribunals—would approach the ICJ’s advisory opinion and the sovereignty dispute between the UK and Mauritius.
I urge noble Lords to reflect on the sound conclusions of the International Agreements Committee and the International Relations and Defence Committee. The learned members of both committees took evidence from eminent legal scholars, including a former member of the ICJ. The IAC concluded that, if the treaty is not ratified,
“Mauritius is likely to resume its campaign against the UK through international courts”
and stated that it heard evidence that
“any international court looking at this issue would be unlikely to find in favour of the UK”,
putting the base at risk.
The Government have been clear about the legal position. Had a long-term deal not been reached, it was highly likely that wide-ranging litigation would have been brought quickly against the UK. There were several potential routes for this, which included further arbitral proceedings against the UK under Annex VII of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. A judgment from such a tribunal would be legally binding on the UK. The United Kingdom’s long-standing legal view has been that we would not have a realistic prospect of successfully defending our legal position on sovereignty in such litigation. Even if we had chosen to ignore legally binding judgments against the UK, their legal effect on third countries and international organisations would have given rise to real impacts on the operation of the base and the delivery of all its national security functions. We have all heard the counter- positions—that the Government are bowing to an opinion that is merely advisory and that there was no viable route to a binding judgment—but I am afraid those simply do not reflect the reality of this situation.
It is clear that securing a deal was essential. The agreement that the Government have signed protects the base for generations and is firmly in the national interest. The Government did not secure the base at any cost; we negotiated a deal that is good value for money for the British people. The full financial details were published alongside the treaty on the day of signature. The average cost per year in today’s money is £101 million, and the net present value of payments under the treaty is £3.4 billion. These figures have been verified by the Government Actuary’s Department. These figures draw on long-established methodology, used under this Government and previous Governments, to account for long-term projects. We have all heard, and I suspect we will hear again today, the Opposition claim that the cost is higher. This is grossly misleading. Accounting norms and processes set out in the Green Book are there for a reason: so we can understand the true value of things. Let us debate those values with transparency, not exaggeration or manipulation for political point-scoring.
I suspect that some in this House will have heard concerns regarding undue influence on Mauritius from hostile forces. The Opposition were quite vocal on the subject in the other place—although, interestingly, we heard barely a peep before 4 July last year, when they were in negotiations. The treaty is the only way to ensure the base continues to operate as it has done, with all the protections that I listed earlier, including threats from our adversaries; whereas, had Mauritius secured a binding judgment against the UK, there would have been nothing to stop it leasing different islands to different countries, dramatically undermining the utility of this prized military asset.
As with any government policy, it is crucial that we discuss the people who are at the heart of it. I know there is a deep strength of feeling, genuinely held, in this House and the other place about Chagossians. Let me be clear: this Government deeply regret the way the Chagossians were removed from the islands. We are committed to building a relationship with the Chagossian community that is built on respect and acknowledgement of the wrongs of the past. The negotiations on the treaty were necessarily state-to-state between Mauritius and the UK, and it is true that our priority was to secure the base, but that does not mean that the interests of the Chagossian community were set aside. Indeed, the treaty has the support of many in the Chagossian community. Olivier Bancoult, chair of the Chagos Refugee Group, which is the largest Chagossian group, has said
“we remain convinced that this agreement provides the only way forward”,
and in a recent communiqué urged all Members of the UK Parliament to support the Bill.
The treaty provides that Mauritius may develop a programme of resettlement on the Chagos Archipelago, other than Diego Garcia, and noble Lords will also be aware of the £40 million trust fund for Mauritius to use in support of Chagossians. I know many in this House are interested in the operation of these commitments. My noble friend Lord Collins noted in this place that, ahead of ratification, the Government would make a ministerial Statement in both Houses providing a factual update on eligibility for resettlement and the modalities of the trust fund.
I know that many noble Lords are also interested in the environmental consequences of the treaty. It is crucial that one of the world’s most pristine marine environments is protected, and this Government and Mauritius are committed to that. Mauritian Prime Minister Ramgoolam has publicly stated his commitment to the marine protected area and confirmed it directly to the former Environment Secretary at the UN Ocean Conference in June.
Just yesterday, the Mauritian Government announced plans for the establishment of the Chagos Archipelago marine protected area. This will be based on the robust International Union for the Conservation of Nature categories for marine protected areas. Critically, it makes it clear that there will be no commercial fishing across the entire 640,000 square kilometre area. The Great Chagos Bank will be given one of the highest levels of protection, with the rest of the MPA categorised as a highly protected conservation zone. There will be limited provision for controlled levels of artisanal fishing in confined zones intended for resettlement to allow for sustenance of the Chagossian community, while maintaining the commitment to nature conservation. This development should assuage the concerns we have heard in this House and the other place about Mauritian commitments to environmental protections.
Despite this progress, and the passage of the Bill in the other place, there are still those here who want to relitigate the debate that we had in July. There are Motions intended to probe and amend at Committee and Report. They are welcome, but Motions that are designed to wreck are not about the welfare of a community; they are a cynical tactic of delay and disruption. The Opposition Front Bench has tried blocking ratification, yet seems unable to accept the will of this House. I am disappointed, but unsurprised, that we all now look likely to have to witness an unedifying spectacle of it having another go.
Noble Lords will notice that we are not considering a committal Motion to commit the Bill to Committee today. As noble Lords know, it is extremely unusual to table a Motion to seek to divide the House to delay the passage of government legislation passed by the House of Commons. It is even more unusual for the Opposition to press such a Motion to a vote on the Floor of the House, as they have indicated they would. We know that His Majesty’s Opposition take their responsibilities seriously. They have said on multiple occasions to my noble friend the Leader of the House of Lords that their motivation is to properly challenge and scrutinise government legislation. That is their job; it is not to block legislation or stop the Government getting their programme through.
Let me share the truth of this matter. The amendment to the committal Motion favoured by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, is, in effect, a fatal Motion. I will explain why: it makes committal conditional on consultation. It is not credible to undertake meaningful consultation in the 30-day period set out in the Motion. It would therefore risk progress towards ratification becoming bogged down in litigation. The Front Bench opposite should know that; I would be surprised if they do not.
The Motion would wreck the Bill and mean a delay not of 30 days but of months, maybe years. In these circumstances, the Bill and the treaty that it is intended to implement could not move ahead. This is both reckless and deeply cynical. It is reckless because it threatens the continued operation of the base on Diego Garcia and, with that, the national security of the British people. It is cynical because the Opposition now seek to use, for their own ends, a community they systematically disregarded when in government. We all know their record: the decision not to consult Chagossians when meaningful consultation was possible at the start of negotiations; the decision in 2016 not to permit any resettlement by Chagossians across the archipelago; and the dramatic failure to spend 96% of the £40 million commitment to support Chagossians.
It is worth contrasting that record with the record of this Government. We are financing a new trust fund for Mauritius to use in support of the Chagossian community. We are working with Mauritius to start a new programme of visits for Chagossians to the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia. The treaty we have entered allows Mauritius to develop a programme of resettlement on the islands other than Diego Garcia. This Government are also increasing our support to Chagossians living in the UK through new and existing projects. These are initiatives that actually deliver for Chagossians; they are not empty promises or hollow words.
The Bill is relatively short. It preserves the current laws of the British Indian Ocean Territory as laws that will continue to apply to Diego Garcia once the treaty is in force, allowing for the base’s continued, effective operation with minimal disruption. The Bill also grants a new power to make the domestic legal changes needed to implement the treaty and to manage responsibly the base’s future operation.
There will be no change to the British nationality status that any Chagossian currently holds, whether it is a British citizenship or a British Overseas Territory citizenship, and current pathways for Chagossians to acquire British citizenship are also maintained. Most of the provisions in the Bill will commence only when the treaty enters into force. I trust that we will have a lively and thorough debate on this subject matter, and I look forward to debating the Bill’s contents. I beg to move.
Lord Callanan (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill, and I will come to some of her points shortly. This is now the second opportunity that we have had to debate the UK-Mauritius agreement concerning the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia, but it is of course the first time that your Lordships’ House has been asked to approve the agreement in law.
When we debated the Motion to approve the treaty under the CRaG process, I lamented the fact that the other place was denied the opportunity to have a substantive debate on the treaty at that point. If the Government are so confident in their arguments, why did they deny the other House the opportunity to debate this properly? As I said then, the Government played fast and loose with the conventions on treaty approval, despite promises that had been given by their own Ministers when the CRaG process was first introduced. The Government were elected on the back of pledges to put public service and integrity first; refusing to adhere to the conventions in this case hardly lived up to those promises.
That said, as a responsible Official Opposition—and recognising the primacy of the other place, which approved the Bill at Third Reading—we will not seek to deny the Bill a Second Reading today. We already know that the other place did not have the opportunity to debate the treaty when it was laid before the House, and the Bill subsequently received minimal scrutiny. In fact, Committee and Third Reading were both taken on the same day, and a total of just 17 hours of debate were allocated to a Bill that fundamentally changes our strategic security role in the Indian Ocean and puts £35 billion-worth of taxpayers’ money in the hands of politicians thousands of miles away from the UK.
Not only was there no mention of the Bill in the Labour manifesto; there was a specific promise to protect our overseas territories. For the election, the Minister’s party’s manifesto said:
“Defending our security also means protecting the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies … Labour will always defend their sovereignty and right to self-determination”.
It seems that tax is not the only manifesto commitment being binned today.
Crucially, the views of the Chagossian people have not been heard. We feel it is only right that the Government should be required to consult the Chagossian community on the implementation of this treaty, including on the establishment of the Chagossian trust fund, which the Minister discussed. The UK taxpayer will fund it, but the Mauritian Government will have sole responsibility to distribute it however they see fit.
That is why I tabled the amendment to the original committal Motion that would have required the Government to consult the Chagossian community over a period of 30 days. If the Minister is concerned that 30 days is not long enough, I note that we talked about making it longer, but we did not do so because we wanted the Government to have the opportunity to get their Bill through this Session. If I had set the Motion at three months, the Minister would have told us that there is no time to have a Committee debate before the end of this Session because the Opposition are trying to deny them the Bill. We deliberately selected a short period so that the Minister could not argue that we were trying to wreck the Bill—that was not our intention. It was a measured, reasonable approach which we felt would have made up completely for the Government’s failure to consult the Chagossians to date and would help us in our work to give the Bill the proper scrutiny it deserves, informed by the outcome of that consultation. It was not a wrecking amendment, and the Minister knows that in her heart of hearts. Without that additional consultation—
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
If the noble Lord was so concerned to do this, first, why did he not consult earlier? Secondly, he can achieve his aims—which would not be wrecking but would be perfectly legitimate —by amendment to the Bill, delaying implementation, perhaps. Those things are standard. He could make his case, or perhaps even win his vote, and achieve his aims, should they be genuine and not a wrecking amendment.
Lord Callanan (Con)
This treaty is due to last 100 years. How is it a wrecking amendment to take 30 days to consult the people who will be affected by it? The Minister is talking nonsense, and she knows it.
Without that additional consultation of the Chagossian people, we fear that the Bill, which received so little scrutiny in the other place, will go on to become law without the affected Chagossians having their views heard, as they rightly should. I know that a number of them have turned up to the Public Gallery to hear this debate today.
I hope that the Government’s decision to withdraw the committal Motion at the last moment is an indication that they are listening to us and want to think about this more deeply. It is clear to us that we need that consultation, so I call upon the Minister to bring it forward as part of the committal Motion when the Government eventually bring it back to the House. As I said, the Government intend this treaty to last 100 years; surely, we can take one month to consult the people most affected by it.
To call the Bill a surrender Bill is an understatement. This is a strategic capitulation that will see us give away sovereign territory that has been British for two centuries. To add insult to injury, taxpayers are paying tens of billions to Mauritius for the privilege of doing so. We know the important, strategic role that the British Indian Ocean Territory has played internationally as a staging post for forward operations in both the Indian Ocean and the Middle East. Handing over sovereignty, even with a lease agreement in respect of Diego Garcia military base, puts, in our view, that strategic role in jeopardy.
In particular, the requirement in the agreement that Mauritius must be informed of armed attacks on third states directly emanating from the base on Diego Garcia is an astounding failure of diplomacy. Could the Government tell us how this would actually work in practice, in a rapidly changing armed conflict? Has the US, which actually runs this base, agreed to do that? How would it work in practice? How would we inform them in an emergency situation, with proper notice to enable us to take strategic action, as required?
My noble friend Lady Goldie will expand on some of the security implications of this agreement, but we are clear that it is a capitulation that weakens our influence on the international stage. It is a surrender orchestrated by international lawyers and implemented by a Prime Minister who is either unwilling or unable to stand up for the UK national interest.
The Bill does not just relate to the UK’s affairs in the Indian Ocean; the sheer cost of the treaty with Mauritius makes the Bill a domestic issue, too. By pressing ahead with this legislation, the Government are facilitating an agreement that will see the UK pay almost £35 billion to Mauritius. I notice that the Minister spent quite a bit of her time disagreeing with those figures, yet only one hour ago, when I asked her how much of the ODA budget is being dedicated to this agreement, she got a cheap laugh, and avoided the question once again, as she has now done four times. However, she knows, as I know, that some of that ODA budget is being used to fund this agreement. If she wishes to be so transparent and disagree with our figures, why does she not tell us how much of it is going to be spent from the ODA budget? She can stand up and do it now, if she wishes.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
All of our ODA spending is published. It is probably one of the most transparent bits of government funding. I will send the noble Lord the website address so he can have a look and satisfy himself on this point.
Lord Callanan (Con)
I am grateful for that; that is a concession, of sorts. I have only asked her the question four times during Questions so far. Now that she is willing to be more transparent, that is progress, at least.
Against that backdrop, hard-working Britons will be furious that Ministers have somehow found £35 billion to send 6,000 miles away when we face such financial challenges here at home. The fact is that the treaty facilitated by the Bill will fund tax cuts for Mauritius while taxes are being hiked here at home. We put this deal on hold when we were in Government, when it was in its infancy. We saw its flaws, and we paused it. Alas, Ministers no longer have the clarity of mind needed to deliver for the British people and are—
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I am sorry, but that is factually incorrect and I would like to give the noble Lord the opportunity to correct it. It was paused, but when the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, was appointed Foreign Secretary, he restarted those negotiations.
Lord Callanan (Con)
I am happy to tell the Minister that I have spoken to the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, about that. He agreed that it was paused, which I think she has just confirmed.
Alas, Ministers no longer have the clarity of mind needed to deliver for the British people and, as so often with this Government, they have allowed themselves to be taken in by their international lawyer friends and donors. This all begs the question: why? Why did Ministers feel the need to pursue this agreement that puts Britain’s interests last? Why have the Government seen fit to saddle taxpayers with an additional financial burden, at a time when we are all being softened up for massive tax rises from the Chancellor of the Exchequer?
Ministers have told us, as the noble Baroness did again today, that this agreement is a legal necessity, but, as we heard from my noble friend Lord Wolfson of Tredegar when we debated the Motion to approve the treaty—I commend his speech to noble Lords who have not had the chance to see it yet—there is a range of views among very senior lawyers on this matter. The Government cannot hide behind legal advice, unless they want to publish it for us all to see. This was a political decision for which Ministers must take the political responsibility.
The almost single-minded obsession with international law has blinded the Government to the real threat from a country that itself pays absolutely no heed whatever to that same international law. We know that China has said that it wants to deepen its strategic partnership with Mauritius. As recently as 15 May this year, China’s ambassador to Mauritius said that the People’s Republic of China wanted to strengthen ties with Mauritius, noting the country’s “strategic advantages”, and expressed a commitment to elevating the bilateral strategic partnership. The Chinese ambassador to Mauritius is on the record as offering, unsurprisingly, massive congratulations on the deal and stating that China fully supports Mauritius’s attempt to “safeguard national sovereignty”. It is a shame that China does not show that same regard to the national sovereignty of other nations.
That is who the Government have appeased with this agreement. When the Government took office, they claimed that they would protect our national security. Can the Minister please explain how ceding national sovereignty to a country that is known to be deepening its ties with a nation that we know to be a threat to the UK will help them achieve that manifesto commitment?
As the Official Opposition, we will seek to amend the Bill in your Lordships’ House to ensure that the Chagossian community is properly consulted and that the agreement facilitated by the Bill does not put the desires of international lawyers before the interests of the British people, who have paid the taxes which are now to be transferred with careless abandon to Mauritius.
Speaking of the rights of the Chagossians, I find myself on this occasion in the unusual position of agreeing with noble Lords to my left when I say that the Government have not handled this well. In the other place, the Liberal Democrat spokesman, Dr Al Pinkerton, said that,
“this Bill fails the Chagossian people”.—[Official Report, Commons, 20/10/25; col. 756.].”
On this, we agree. Ministers have failed to properly consult the Chagossians to the point that the community is now furious with this Government, as we have all seen from our email inboxes.
However, there was another way. In the other place, the shadow Foreign Secretary, Dame Priti Patel, tabled a presentation Bill which included specific requirements
“to consult and engage with British Chagossians in relation to any proposed changes to the sovereignty and constitutional arrangements of the British Indian Ocean Territory”.
That is what should happen. The Chagossian community should be heard and not ignored.
In conclusion, the questions at the core of all our debates will remain these. Is this treaty a good deal for Britain? Does the Bill put us in the service of the British people? I do not think that it does—
Lord Callanan (Con)
We will set out our reasons in detail, if the Bill ever returns to your Lordships’ House. I give way to the noble Lord.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
I have listened carefully to all the noble Lord’s contributions. I fear that he has missed something out, and I want to help him. First, can he explain briefly whether international law advice which was given to the previous Administration over the status of British sovereignty, and which has not changed for this Administration, has changed? Secondly, why did James Cleverly, on 3 November 2022, make a Statement to Parliament that that Government had decided to begin negotiations on the exercise of sovereignty over the BIOT Chagos Archipelago? If everything that he said was a point of principle, why did the previous Government accept that negotiations had to start on ceding sovereignty?
Lord Callanan (Con)
I am always suspicious when the Liberal Democrats say that they want to be helpful. We have debated all these points at length.
Lord Callanan (Con)
Noble Lords should listen to the answer.
It is a matter of public record that discussions took place. I have spoken to both James Cleverly and to my noble friend Lord Cameron about this, and we are very clear that no agreement was possible along the terms that had been outlined. That is why the negotiations were paused and why we did not reach any agreement at the time. That is why we believe the process is flawed and why we will oppose the Bill.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, I have been advised that it is not obligatory for me to declare an interest in this matter but, on the basis that it is better to be safe than sorry, I will do so. During a period in 1979, I was the head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office department responsible for the British Indian Ocean Territory.
The Bill to which we are giving a Second Reading—and I hope that is what we are doing—is by no means the first time the House has debated the UK-Mauritius treaty on the Chagos Islands. Ratification under the CRaG procedure took place on 30 June on the basis of a report from your Lordships’ International Agreements Committee, on which I have the honour to serve but not to represent. The House was divided by the Opposition on that occasion but the report was endorsed by a majority, and the CRaG process was thus completed in the sense recommended by the committee. Today’s Bill is simply needed to bring our domestic legislation into line with that decision. I hope that that can now be done speedily and without further controversy. It is with some regret that I hear signs that that may not happen.
The legal testimony the International Agreements Committee was given before it reached its conclusion that the agreement should be ratified was not unanimous, but the committee’s view was that the most compelling evidence was that of Sir Christopher Greenwood, a former British judge of the International Court of Justice. His view was that if the UK were not to ratify the agreement, Mauritius could be expected to pursue actively the matter through international courts and, in the light of the opinion handed down by the International Court of Justice, to win such cases with damaging consequences for our security interests in the base at Diego Garcia and for those of our closest security ally, the United States. In addition, Sir Christopher pointed out that it was not correct to assert that the UK agreement with Mauritius amounted to the seceding of sovereignty since the International Court of Justice opinion already established that that step had been taken when the UK granted independence to Mauritius. That view was accepted by the international community.
It is relevant too to recall that Governments of both main parties have frequently stood at the Dispatch Box and stated, without ambiguity, that the British Government upheld the rules-based international order. It cannot seriously be disputed that a finding of the International Court of Justice, whether advisory or mandatory, is an integral part of that rules-based order. To suggest now that the International Court of Justice opinion could be ignored or set aside would surely be incompatible with those statements of policy so frequently repeated. At a time when the rules-based order is under such widespread attack, that course could hardly be in our national interest. Nor can we afford to ignore the fact that the 99-year lease on the base at Diego Garcia, with the possibility of extension, is sufficient to meet the security requirements of our closest ally, the United States, which is backing the agreement. To put those interests at risk by frustrating their implementation would seem to be an act of singular folly.
All this is to ignore the fact—as has been made clear in the debate already—that the previous Government held 11 rounds of negotiations on a similar basis to what has now been concluded in a negotiated agreement. If last year’s election had had a different result, can it be seriously doubted that the present Opposition would have been defending an agreement similar to the one that this House cleared on 30 June? None of these considerations invalidates the judgment that successive British Governments behaved in a lamentable way towards the Chagossian inhabitants of the islands, many of whom are now British citizens. The provisions agreed to mitigate these past failings are part of the Bill before us today, and rightly so. They are not, however, a reason to reject the agreement, or to delay it. To do that would in reality bring no satisfaction or benefit to anyone—quite the contrary.
Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of Friends of the British Overseas Territories, and as an adviser. It is with great sadness that I rise to speak to the Bill. Earlier today I spent some time with my friends from the Chagos Islands, and they have often felt ignored by many Governments of different hues but never have they felt as badly treated as by this Government. They have taken court cases to deal with their lack of agency with this Government, as they were left with no other option; indeed, there is a case still before the courts today.
Even at this late stage, if the Government do deign to consult with the Chagos community living here in the UK, it will be a start, at least, to listening to their needs and aspirations, as opposed to them being told what is happening to their homeland through government statements. I was shocked when I was told today by Chagossians living here in the UK—who are British citizens—that, despite repeated requests to meet their Members of Parliament in person, they have been told there is no time. I think that is absolutely wrong, and I hope the Minister will agree that it is wrong. It is anti-democratic, and if we are going to support a government policy, the Government must at least have the wherewithal to meet those affected by that government policy and defend it to them.
Chagossians, I am very pleased to say, have come along today to hear the debate. They are accompanied by colleagues from other overseas territories, because they too are concerned about what is happening. No doubt, as we have already heard, the Bill is all to do with national security and therefore should not be challenged. I was told as much in this House when I had the temerity to ask about the details of the trust fund being set up in Mauritius with British taxpayers’ money.
I contend that treating people with dignity and addressing their needs does not mean you are challenging national security needs. The two issues can and should exist together, and it saddens me greatly that this Government have chosen a different course. In January 2015, a report commissioned on behalf of the British Indian Ocean Territory—BIOT—and carried out by KPMG undertook a feasibility study for the resettlement of BIOT. Unlike our present Government, that study took the views of a range of stakeholders, including the Chagossian communities in Mauritius, the Seychelles, Manchester, Crawley and London. The study looked in depth at the environmental issues as well. This public document concluded:
“There are no fundamental legal obstacles that would prevent a resettlement of BIOT to go ahead”.
That was in 2015.
The Government of the day decided not to proceed with resettlement because of costs, but, crucially, the costs identified in the report for resettlement at that time are nowhere near the costs associated with this deal. How have the Government arrived at a place where we are now handing BIOT to Mauritius and paying for the privilege? By the way, we have already paid Mauritius, because in 1965, when it agreed to BIOT being created, we paid it £3 million, so this is us paying again for the privilege.
The Government have also told us that they had no option but to conduct and conclude. We have heard a lot about these 11 rounds of negotiations, but none was ever concluded. As someone who has experienced many negotiations throughout the years, the deal is not done until the deal is done. That is the critical issue here. We have already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, that there is a lack of clarity on the basis for proceeding with this deal, so it is imperative that the legal opinion is shared to bring transparency to what is very murky water. We are also advised by the Government that investment by the US has paused after the advisory judgment due to the lack of certainty. Surely such certainty could have been provided in another way. We could have asserted sovereignty over our territory instead of colluding in handing it away. That surely would have brought certainty for our American allies as well.
The Government also claim that we have to do this deal to protect the joint US-UK exclusive access to the electromagnetic spectrum on Diego Garcia, but the International Telecommunication Union, which supervises global communications technology, has no enforcement mechanisms to either terminate or interrupt our satellite operations on the Chagos Islands. I thank Policy Exchange for its work in this area; in particular, its publication The Chagos Debacle, A Critique of the British Government’s Shifting Rationales. Former NATO commander and Royal Navy Rear Admiral Chris Parry said recently that handing away the Chagos Islands is
“the biggest strategic mistake I have seen in my lifetime”.
Moving to the specifics in the Bill, or rather the lack of specifics, there is very little detail. We are told that there will be secondary legislation and there will be ministerial Statements to deal with a lot of the issues. That means that there will be less scrutiny. It is a matter of record that the Chagossian people were forcibly removed from their homes in the late 1960s. The Government are now telling us that by doing so, they do not have the right to self-determination. I find this very skewed thinking. You remove the Chagos Islanders from their homes by force and now they do not have self-determination. I think it is morally wrong.
At the very least what should be happening is a referendum of those of Chagossian heritage here in the UK, because despite what previous Mauritian Administrations have had to say, the Chagos people are a distinct people on the basis of ethnicity and religion and should be afforded the respect they deserve, not forced into a country that they have no affinity with and which is 1,300 miles away. Let me be clear. Even if Mauritius was the closest country, geography is not political destiny, especially when you have a distinct people, and I want to make that clear for a whole variety of reasons. KPMG, on behalf of BIOT, consulted in a meaningful way with the citizens back in 2014-15, and the Government should do so again. This is an historic decision we are making here and we need to listen to what the Chagossians have to say.
The Bill has nothing to say about the welfare of British Chagossians. Not one clause is drafted to deal with their needs. There is nothing in the Bill about the £40 million which has been sent to set up a trust fund in Mauritius for Chagossians who live there, but we have been told that British Chagossians will not benefit from that trust fund. Many Chagossians have left Mauritius in the past few months as they choose to be British and not live under the authority of Mauritius. Of course, those Chagossians who choose to remain in Mauritius are content with what is happening and are supporters of the Mauritian regime. That is why we should not be surprised that there are statements coming out of Mauritius in support of this deal.
As regards visiting the atoll, that, we understand, will be at the discretion of the Mauritian Government, who denied the very existence of the Chagos people until very recently, telling them that they were Mauritian instead. Having listened to many Chagossians talk about their identity, I can tell the House that the last thing they are is Mauritian.
Finally, there is nothing in this Bill about the very fragile and internationally important ecostructure of the many little islands and their marine area. I recognise that the Minister referenced the environment in her opening speech, and I am pleased to hear that there has been some movement in relation to that. I know that very many are concerned about the stewardship of the environment in the future, given that we are giving away all this to the Mauritian Government without any sanctions if the ecosystem is damaged.
I hope that the Government will take the opportunity to consult the Chagossian people. They deserve to be listened to, even at this late stage.
Lord Lilley (Con)
My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the powerful speech by my noble friend Lady Foster of Aghadrumsee. I am tempted just to say “ditto” and sit down, but that is not the practice in this place, so I will focus on some aspects that differ from the focus that she gave. The importance she attached to the Chagossians enables me to be a bit briefer than I would otherwise have been.
I want to return to a powerful assertion that was made the first time this House considered a Statement on this subject, which was diluted a bit today in the defence put forward by the noble Minister. The original Statement by the Defence Secretary said
“without this deal—within weeks we could face losing legal rulings, and within just a few years the base would become inoperable”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/5/25; col. 1284.]
What is the likelihood of us facing a legally binding ruling? If so, I ask the Minister, from which court is it likely to come?
First, as even the Foreign Office recognises, the opinion of the International Court of Justice was purely advisory, not binding. Secondly, it was based on UN General Assembly resolutions. Such resolutions are not legally binding, especially as they have not been endorsed by the Security Council. Thirdly, when the UK signed up to the International Court of Justice, our declaration specifically said that the Government of the UK excluded the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice on
“any dispute with the government of any other country which is or has been a Member of the Commonwealth”,
as is Mauritius. Hence, the opinion of the ICJ was triply non-binding, and no future ruling of the ICJ on this dispute could be binding on us.
Ministers never mention these facts; either they are unaware of them, or they do not want us to know. Instead, they segue on to discussing the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, as the noble Baroness did today, since that also has a tribunal. However, Article 298 of that treaty provides that states may “at any time” exclude “disputes concerning military activities”. Therefore, it is hard to see how the UNCLOS tribunal could reach a binding ruling which would impede our use of the base, still less do so in ways that the Defence Minister originally spelled out when he said:
“Rulings against us would mean we could not prevent hostile nations from setting up installations … on the outer islands … we could not guarantee the safe berth of our subs, patrol the waters around the base, control the airspace directly above or protect the integrity of our communications systems”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/5/25; col. 1284.]
All that seems impossible to come from a tribunal which excludes, or where we can exclude, military matters.
These are not the only issues which the Government refuse to address. They never mention—even the Explanatory Memorandum on the agreement ignores it—the Pelindaba treaty, to which Mauritius is a signatory. It is signed by all countries counted as in the African region—and Mauritius is one—making Africa a nuclear-free zone. The treaty allows no reservations, at the time or subsequently, so it will apply to Diego Garcia, and it cannot be overridden by our treaty unless Mauritius resiles from the Pelindaba treaty. Do the Americans accept that that will mean that no nuclear weapons-carrying vessels or planes can use the base?
The agreement with Mauritius purportedly relates to completing the decolonisation of Mauritius. There are two relevant principles that have a bearing on the process of decolonisation. The first is the right to self-determination, and the second is the principle of territorial integrity. This agreement elevates the principle of territorial integrity above that of the right to self-determination.
It is bizarre that boundaries laid, and former administrative arrangements imposed on an area, by the colonial power should be treated as so sacrosanct, whereas the rights of the people who were displaced—many of whom would like to return or have the right to return—are to be ignored. It is even more bizarre given, as my noble friend Lord Callanan pointed out, the promise in the Labour Party manifesto that it would support the sovereignty, integrity and right to self-determination of peoples in the British Overseas Territories. I wait in the summing up to hear how the Government reconcile their promise made to the British people, and to the peoples of those territories, with what they are doing today.
Why are the Government ploughing ahead? Of course, they refer to the fact that negotiations began under the previous Government, although they were paused by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron. At the time they were paused, I found myself discussing this with a Foreign Office official, who I heard mention the agreement. I said, “Isn’t it good that these negotiations have been paused?” He obviously did not approve of the negotiations. He said, “Oh, it’ll make no difference; they’ll continue. It is the settled policy of the Foreign Office, whichever Government are in power, that we shall continue with this process to give away the sovereignty of them”.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
All the legal considerations that the noble Lord has outlined to the House, including those in the latter part of his remarks, pre-date November 2022, when the previous Government started negotiations to cede sovereignty. They took all his remarks into consideration, so why did they start negotiations to cede sovereignty?
Lord Lilley (Con)
The noble Lord is making a party-political point, as the Lib Dems always do. I am accepting that both parties are allowing themselves to be driven by the settled policy of the Foreign Office. We have to recognise that.
Lord Lilley (Con)
Whenever it started, the settled policy of the Foreign Office will probably continue for another 22 years. Anyone who has been a Minister knows that every department has a settled policy that continues unless Ministers come along and determine to overthrow it.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
Earlier in 2022, the then Government’s view was that there would be no change to the sovereignty of Chagos. That was a Statement given to Parliament in early 2022. The policy changed under Liz Truss as Prime Minister and James Cleverly as Foreign Secretary to start negotiations to cede sovereignty. If there had been a settled will, it had been the one before the Government changed policy. It was the noble Lord’s Government who changed the policy.
Lord Lilley (Con)
Of course it was, but they allowed it to be changed from pressure from the Foreign Office. We can go into the archaeology of when this surfaced in the form of government policy and when it was internal, but I have no doubt that it was. Whenever I have spoken to Foreign Office officials, they have acknowledged that we are not bound by rulings of the court, nor are we likely to be, and nor are we bound by the obligations of any treaty, but they argue that Britain must none the less abide by even non-binding advisory opinions, since if we do not, how can we tell other countries that they must abide by international law? That is precisely the argument that was forwarded just now by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay.
It is touching that our diplomats believe that countries that might otherwise flout international obligations and rulings will change their ways and become law-abiding if they see us obeying rulings that we do not have to abide by and being purer than pure. I believe that the policy of the Foreign Office, and, above all, the policy of elected officials in charge of the Foreign Office, should be to pursue British interests and not to set about setting examples to other countries and virtue signalling. That is what this is doing, and it is weak for that reason. I hope that the House will in the weeks to come persuade the Government to abandon it.
Lord Thurlow (CB)
My Lords, in my comments today I wish to give your Lordships a short break from the tangle of treaties and policies and who did what in diplomatic circles. In my contribution, I shall talk about the protection of the ocean surrounding the Chagos Archipelago. In doing so, I thank the Library and others for their assistance. I was encouraged by the Minister’s opening comments regarding the environment.
By way of background, a marine protection area was established around Chagos following a determined and successful campaign by the British charity Blue Marine and others, which persuaded the then Labour Administration to designate an MPA in the closing weeks of the Brown Administration. They created what was then the largest no-take fishing zone in the world—an extraordinary achievement. Blue Marine, together with other NGOs, seeks to protect and restore ocean health worldwide by securing MPAs like this. It has successfully established protection over some 4.3 million square kilometres of ocean—an outstanding achievement—and the Chagos MPA is a significant part of that success. It works.
For those unfamiliar with MPAs, they are precisely that: the designation protects the marine area from overfishing and destructive fishing techniques, and they work to restore marine habitats and support coastal communities with sustainable fishing practices. These large-scale marine reserves enjoy the critical mass to allow the restoration of vital marine ecosystems. They enjoy international acceptance and, critically, they need policing to enforce that protection.
The present arrangement enables the UK to police the Chagos MPA against illegal fishing activity, but what of future protection? The Chagos agreement that we are discussing today refers to a “separate written instrument” that will outline how the management of the MPA and its policing will be managed. Why the simple matter of managing the Chagos MPA cannot be dealt with in the Bill, I fail to understand. Reference to a separate written instrument sounds like a response from an instalment of “Yes, Minister”—a slow process of obfuscation and delay until following the next election, when it all falls apart. I hope not. Will the Minister please explain more of the detail relating to the separate written instrument in her closing remarks? For many, the lack of clarity about how policing and management will be paid for is a worry.
The agreement that we are discussing refers to an annual payment of £35 million, £40 million or £45 million per annum over 20 years, to be gifted as development capital to Mauritius. How much of that will be allocated to managing the marine protected area? Where is the detail? Are we really committing hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money over 20 years to an agreement with little detail?
The Bill transfers sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius while retaining control over Diego Garcia for 99 years. This dual authority could complicate the enforcement of the environmental protections. While Mauritius has pledged to maintain the MPA—and yesterday’s news is welcome—economic pressures, such as fishing licences and development deals, could lead to relaxed regulations. Experts warn that even slight deregulation could unravel decades of ecological resilience.
We must protect our oceans, just as we seek to protect the rest of our planet from the climate crisis. We are more familiar with the land-based effects of the crisis: the destruction of the rainforest, the growing red list of endangered species and the melting ice. Above all, there is an interdependence between the health of oceans and survival on land. Protecting the health of these oceans seems to me to enjoy fewer column inches in the media, notwithstanding the remarkable television series narrated by Sir David Attenborough, which has been eye-opening and persuasive.
It is worth pointing out that the Chagos Islands are some 2,000 kilometres away from Mauritius. Its maritime enforcement assets include two small planes, which cannot reach Chagos, and two ocean-going vessels. Can we really expect it to invest the sums of money and resources that are required to administer protection and to maintain and enhance this vital MPA? There must be serious doubts about this and about the effectiveness of our agreement with Mauritius, which includes hands-on involvement in the management of this MPA.
With the current awareness of the climate crisis, I do not think that it is appropriate to leave the details of administering this ocean area to a separate written instrument. The agreement risks leaving Mauritius with an overwhelming conservation burden. It is worth noting that the International Agreements Committee of this House considers it vital that an appropriate portion of the annual grant funding be allocated specifically to supporting the marine protected area.
I look forward to the Minister’s responses to these concerns. I would specifically like an indication of how much of the proposed annual payments will be directed towards policing the Chagos MPA.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a friend of the British Overseas Territories. Can I say how delighted I am to hear the excellent speech from the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, because I, too, shall focus on MPAs at the end of my remarks?
We have to ask ourselves how we are now in the position of giving away a vital British Overseas Territory to a nation that has no legitimate claim to it—and paying it a fortune in the process. It simply comes down to the traditional role of our Foreign Office: always selling out British interests as we kowtow to hostile foreign states such as China while abandoning our friends and allies. Of course, the Foreign Office has a long history of this.
Last week, the Telegraph contained an obituary for Vice Admiral Sir Jonathan Tod, who flew more than 2,000 hours in 25 types of aircraft and commanded the aircraft carrier “Illustrious”. His talent was soon recognised and, in 1980, he was promoted early to captain and sent to the Cabinet Office. There, he headed the assessments team in analysing intelligence from central and South America.
In July 1981, Tod told the Joint Intelligence Committee that, if the Argentines were to conclude that there was no peaceful solution to the Malvinas question, they would be capable of mounting an invasion swiftly and with little warning. The Foreign Office absolutely rubbished that as scaremongering and the intelligence watch on the Argentines was scaled down, giving Argentina the signal that we did not care about the Falkland Islands. However, Tod stuck to his guns. In the October, he warned that the threats emanating from Argentina were not disinformation. Six months later, Argentina invaded; the rest is history.
Then we have Gibraltar. Again, the FCO tried to sell it out to Spain, with secret negotiations on shared sovereignty in 2001 and 2002. There was no reason for sharing sovereignty with Spain apart from the FCO wanting to kowtow to a foreign EU Government. Once the plan was in the open, of course, the Gibraltar Government organised a poll. Some 98.97% voted against the UK Government’s plan and wanted to stay with the UK—another FCO plan scuppered.
Now I come on to the Chagos Islands. These islands have been British since the end of the Napoleonic wars, long before Mauritius existed as an independent country. Nobody had ever lived in Mauritius until the Dutch brought in slaves, and then the French took over. No Mauritians ever landed on the Chagos Islands, some 2,000 kilometres away, to inhabit or claim them. Thus, Mauritius has never owned or controlled the islands; the Mauritian sovereignty claim is totally bogus and nothing more than a rewriting of history. France and the UK administered the Chagos Islands and Mauritius from Mauritius, but they were never owned by Mauritius.
Its false claim was strengthened by the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, the judicial arm of the thoroughly discredited United Nations in its usual anti-colonialism stance. I do not mean to offend noble Lords, but I say discredited because there has never been any UN condemnation of the genocide being perpetuated by Russia in Ukraine, nor in China with the Uyghurs, nor in Myanmar. When we come to the current genocide in new Sudan, which was debated about an hour ago in this Chamber, while US officials have explicitly declared that the RSF and associated militias have committed genocide, the UN as an organisation has generally used terms such as “risk of genocide” or “genocide could be occurring”. It is typical UN cop-out speech. The UN cannot denounce genocide, but it can denounce UK ownership of the Chagos Islands as colonialism. The ICJ’s so-called ruling was merely an advisory opinion from a political court, which in 2017 was involved in a grubby episode to remove the Security Council nominee judge who was British, the renowned Sir Christopher Greenwood, stack the court with more Asia-Pacific judges and reduce western influence.
If it is the Government’s case that we have to obey the ICJ in this case, will we have to obey it when it gives an advisory opinion on giving the Falklands to Argentina or on giving Gibraltar to Spain? The previous Government, of course, were negotiating and negotiating, but they had no intention to sell out. It is one thing starting negotiations but another to conclude them in a bare three months as Mr Lammy did.
We first need to look at why Labour did it. I think we need to look at the past behaviour of the Prime Minister. Before entering politics, Sir Keir Starmer was invited to a high-profile legal conference in 2013 hosted by the Mauritius Bar Association at the InterContinental hotel on the intriguingly named Balaclava beach. It was a gathering of international lawyers. While there, Sir Keir delivered a keynote speech. More notably, he used the visit as an opportunity to engage in discussions on the Chagos issue with Mauritian legal and political figures. He met the then Prime Minister, Navin Ramgoolam, who is now leading Mauritius’s negotiations over the islands and is back as Prime Minister. Ramgoolam later recalled their 2013 meeting as a moment of shared values and mutual understanding. Another prominent Mauritian lawyer and friend of Sir Keir Starmer, Satyajit Boolell, has stated that he “cleared things up” for him regarding the Chagos issue.
Thus, we have our new Prime Minister already keen to sell out to Mauritius, and then came along the new Foreign Secretary, David Lammy MP, not known to be the sharpest knife in the drawer and ripe for the FCO to con him into a sell-out. I can imagine what the FCO said to him at their first meeting: “Welcome, Minister. You have a unique opportunity to settle a long-running issue, which the last Government failed to do. We have an International Court of Justice ruling, and we must hand back the Chagos Islands to their rightful owner, Mauritius. You can get the credit where the last Government failed. They started negotiations, but they were unable to conclude them. Naturally, we will have to pay them a small amount to keep our lease on the military base at Diego Garcia, and that will keep the Americans happy. It is a win-win for you, Minister. We avoid condemnation from the UN, the Americans are content, and you will get the credit for a diplomatic success”. I challenge anyone to say that that description of what happened is not reasonably accurate in all probability.
The previous Government had started negotiations in November 2022 and were nowhere near an agreement after 11 rounds of negotiations by the general election in 2024. That is 18 months of negotiations, including six months led by my very able noble friend Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton. I have to hand it to Mr Lammy: he was a mere three months into the job and a new Foreign Secretary with no experience whatever, and yet he concluded the deal in a mere three months. No wonder the deal is so diabolically bad for the UK and the Chagossians.
We have surrendered a UK strategic asset to China, which is already talking to Mauritius about doing deals there. Which country will fund development in the Chagos Islands? It will be China, of course—possibly India too, but certainly China. If Mauritius wishes to exploit the archipelago economically, it will need to establish infrastructure on the islands, and the most likely investor for that is China. China will most likely build a huge military base on one of the other 70 islands, some of which have very shallow water around them. We have seen how China has illegally built massive military bases on sandbanks in the South China Sea. It would be a piece of cake to do likewise on one of the Chagos Islands.
I leave it to others to try to get to the bottom of the cost: £5 billion, £9 billion, £18 billion or £35 billion. Even £1 million is an outrageous sum to give to a foreign power with no rights whatever to the islands, along with our giving away our own territory.
I conclude on the environmental crime that we will soon see there when the marine protected area is destroyed, as it surely will be. Mauritius ranks very low globally in overall ecosystem vitality and biodiversity protection metrics, with fish stocks showing a decline. The Chagos Islands boast some of the world’s most pristine coral reefs and marine biodiversity, making their preservation critical not only for ecological reasons but for future scientific research on climate change adaptation and marine conservation.
In 2010, the UK Government established an MPA of approximately 640,000 square kilometres around the islands. This no-take zone is one of the world’s largest marine reserves and protects the Chagos Archipelago’s coral reefs, deep-sea habitats and wildlife. However, China’s distant ocean fishing fleet is ravaging and destroying our oceans, invading the Galápagos MPA. It is a constant battle to keep it out of our gigantic Pitcairn Islands MPA, the second largest in the world at 841,000 square kilometres. So when China does a deal with the Mauritius Government, now mired in corruption scandals, the MPA will be the first target for Chinese exploitation and destruction as China fishes it dry and destroys the coral reefs with bottom trawling. Four of the top 10 MPAs in the world are UK overseas territories, and we will have destroyed one of them.
I ask the Government: is there nothing you will not sell out in this grubby deal—the Chagossian people, our defence and security, the costs to our economy, the perception that we may sell out other overseas territories and now even our pristine marine environment? I pray that this appallingly bad Bill can be amended or stopped before it does more damage to our country.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, I think we all agree that what a Labour Government did 60 years ago in displacing the Chagossians was disgraceful and that there has been a tangled web of deception ever since under Governments of all parties. The Chagossians have been treated with shameful contempt and disdain. This treaty, and hence this Bill, while not perfect, open the way to some sort of justice after 60 years; that is a good advance.
This is a remarkable week of anniversaries concerning Chagos. Yesterday marked no fewer than three of them: 3 November was the 25th anniversary of the High Court judgment in 2000 allowing the Chagossians to return to the outer islands. In Mauritius, 3 November is Chagossian National Day when the Prime Minister lays a wreath at the Chagos monument on the port side in Port Louis, accompanied by the chairman of the Chagos Refugees Group, Olivier Bancoult. As my noble friend Lord Purvis noted, 3 November was also the third anniversary of the UK announcement to Parliament in 2022 by the then Conservative Foreign Secretary that constructive negotiations on sovereignty, the protection of the base, the Chagossians and the marine protected area would begin with Mauritius, with a view to reaching agreement in early 2023.
We can now add a fourth notable 3 November event: the creation by Mauritius, announced yesterday, of the Chagos MPA, as the Minister noted. To cap it all, 8 November, Saturday, is the 60th anniversary—a sad one—of the detachment of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius and the creation of BIOT by Order in Council in 1965 with, of course, the beginning of the disgraceful expulsion of Chagossians from their home.
I have supported the Chagossians for several decades and declare my long-standing membership of the Chagos All-Party Parliamentary Group, founded 20 years ago, which has shaped my desire for a resolution of this long-open wound.
The noble Lord, Lord Callanan, has used a lot of extravagant terms at different times to deplore this treaty, calling it variously in the last few months a “strategic capitulation”, a “surrender”, “obscene” and “dangerous”. He did not disappoint today—he was very entertaining—but the Opposition are being utterly disingenuous, dishonest and hypocritical, as this treaty is pretty much what they would have concluded in the two years from the launch of negotiations in autumn 2022 to their loss of power in July 2024.
My noble friend Lord Purvis has said in his interventions today and when we debated the treaty in June:
“The treaty is a consequence of now completing the previous Conservative Government’s policy. Some who agreed with it then disagree with it now, but that does not change the fact that the Conservatives made a major policy choice to cede sovereignty and to do it under the context of the International Court of Justice decisions”.—[Official Report, 30/6/25; col. 475.]
After hearing Sir Christopher Greenwood, a former judge of the International Court of Justice, our International Agreements Committee concluded that the future of the base on Diego Garcia would be at greater risk in the likely event of a future binding legal judgment in favour of Mauritius. Sir Christopher recognised that the ICJ opinion was advisory and not binding, but that it is
“a very authoritative guide to the legal position. In reality, it would be very difficult for any state just to ignore an almost unanimous opinion of the international court”.
Liberal Democrats want to be assured that the UK would not permit the United States to breach international law at Diego Garcia, as the then UK Government did in colluding in the use of the base for extraordinary rendition after 9/11. As my colleague in the other place, James MacCleary, said in a debate in May:
“Having now confirmed this deal on a shared UK-US asset, how confident is the Secretary of State that Diego Garcia will not be used by this White House to advance foreign policy objectives that we deem contrary to our principles and interests?”—[Official Report, Commons, 22/5/25; col. 1289.]
I would welcome an answer to that from the Minister today, if she is able to provide one.
The treaty does not bring Mauritius closer to China; rather, it strengthens Mauritius’s relationship with the West. Mauritius has not joined China’s belt and road initiative and has no intention of doing so. A long-term agreement between the UK and Mauritius reinforces not only UK but Commonwealth ties, especially with India, which is a close ally of Mauritius. Mauritius also has close ties with the EU, France and Australia. The treaty strengthens NATO’s position and potential operations in the Indian Ocean, and India recently participated in military exercises with the US out of Diego Garcia. The Bill and treaty will bring BIOT to an end, allow Chagossians to return to their native outer islands under Mauritian sovereignty and provide for visits to Diego Garcia. I realise that the treaty does not provide for a right to self-determination, but the House needs to recognise that the majority of Chagossians none the less support it.
The Chagos Refugees Group is the largest and longest-standing group of its kind. It is led by Olivier Bancoult, whom I have met several times, including earlier this year. The CRG, the members of which are all dual citizens of the UK and Mauritius, has campaigned for the rights of Chagossians to return, including through pursuing litigation in our Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights and other international courts. The CRG believes that the UK-Mauritius treaty is the only way Chagossians will be able to return for visits and resettlement. In a statement made three weeks ago, Olivier Bancoult said on behalf of the group:
“For the last 55 years since our exile began we have implored the UK government to permit us to resettle in our homeland. After repeated rejection of our demands we remain convinced that this agreement provides the only way forward, in which our compatriots will be allowed to restore the ancestral connection to our islands … Unless, therefore, the Agreement is approved and implemented our exile will continue with no hope of restoring our fundamental human right to return”.
He added:
“This resolution has come about after comprehensive consultation of Chagossians worldwide”.
However, he warned that,
“if Mauritius will not fulfil its responsibilities to us of course we will raise our voices”.
In fact, not only has Olivier Bancoult been consulted over 30 times by the Mauritian Government but Stephen Doughty, the UK Minister responsible, has met Chagossians throughout the process and briefed them ahead of the agreement. There was also mention earlier, I think, of a government-commissioned study conducted by KPMG in 2015, which involved considerable consultation with the Chagossians.
Sir Christopher Greenwood, in his evidence to the International Agreements Committee, said:
“Britain’s standing to argue that Mauritius should be required to resettle Chagossians on the other islands, frankly, is somewhat undermined by the fact that the United Kingdom has consistently refused any suggestion of resettlement on the other islands. That is a position that the UK Government have reaffirmed relatively recently”.
He cited a reply by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, in 2022, to a Written Question from the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, in which the noble Lord confirmed that, in November 2016, which was also under a Conservative Government,
“the UK Government announced that resettlement of Chagossians could not be supported on the grounds of feasibility, defence and security interests, and cost to the British taxpayer. There remains no right of abode in BIOT”.
That was the position under the Conservative Government—no resettlement in the Chagos Islands. It is an improvement on the situation under previous Governments that resettlement is now to be possible, even if not assured.
It is true that the provision in the treaty on resettlement is permissive, saying that Mauritius is free to arrange for resettlement on all the islands except Diego Garcia, rather than obligatory. As my noble friends here and friends in the other place have consistently argued, more clarity is needed about the implementation of the agreement and the impact on Chagossians, including on funding from the trust fund and on resettlement. It would be good to hear more detail from the Minister today.
Finally, other provisions of the treaty or Bill which merit a mention are citizenship and environmental matters. While the Bill removes the ability of people to acquire British Overseas Territories citizenship on the basis of connection to BIOT, it preserves a route to full British citizenship for Chagossian descendants. The treaty includes provisions for the UK to support Mauritius in establishing and managing marine protected areas. We have noted that, yesterday, Mauritius created one called CAMPA: the Chagos Archipelago MPA. The treaty commits the parties to co-operate on environmental protection, maritime security and illegal fishing. My friend in the other place, Dr Al Pinkerton, understandably put forward the need for accountability, with an annual report on progress on the MPAs so that environmental protection does not fade from view. My last request would be to hear from the Minister a commitment to such regular reporting on environmental protection.
Lord Morrow (DUP)
My Lords, the people of Northern Ireland have a particular interest in the Chagos islands, because the United Kingdom took on responsibility for the islands and, crucially, a duty of care for the Chagossian people in 1814, when the UK was represented by one of the most successful Foreign Secretaries, Viscount Castlereagh. He went on to play a pivotal role in laying the foundation for peace in Europe for nearly 100 years through the Congress of Vienna the following year, the success of which stands in sharp contrast to the shortcomings of Versailles, 160 years later. His family home, Mount Stewart, in Northern Ireland, is now owned by the National Trust and contains the state chairs from the Congress of Vienna, which were donated to Castlereagh after the conclusion of the congress, in recognition of the crucial contribution that he made to proceedings.
In my comments today, I want to reflect on the serious human rights failures attending the Bill before us and the treaty to which it relates. The argument for the Bill and treaty is that, on 8 November 1965, the UK Government, with the consent of the Mauritian Council of Ministers, removed the Chagos Islands and made them into a separate colony, the British Indian Overseas Territory, in order to meet the American request for a military base on the islands. This means that Mauritius gained independence in 1968 without the Chagos Islands
The argument is that this was contrary to UN Resolution 1514 on decolonisation, because it involved the colonial power, the UK, changing the territorial integrity of the colony before decolonisation. In this context it is said that, notwithstanding that the Mauritian Council of Ministers consented to the separation of the Chagos Islands in 1965, this decision was not valid because the United Kingdom acted contrary to international law in seeking this separation, and therefore since 1968, the decolonisation of Mauritius has been only partially secured and will not be fully secured until the islands are returned to Mauritius. This argument, however, depends on abstracting a concern for the territorial integrity of the 1965 colony, frozen in time, apart from all other considerations of international law.
The distance from the island of Mauritius to the Chagos Islands is a huge 1,339 miles—the distance from here to north Africa. Not surprisingly, the people are of a different ethnic group and religion. Thus, in international law regarding decolonisation, rather than self-determination being subject to territorial integrity, territorial integrity is very much subject to self-determination.
In the second instance, turning to the events of 1968 to 1973, the delivery of self-determination was undermined from 1968 because, after creating the British Indian Ocean Territory, the UK Government embarked on one of the most shameful episodes in our history, as has already been mentioned in your Lordships’ House today. We would like to think that the events of 1968 to 1973 took place in an earlier age—between 1768 and 1773, or perhaps between 1868 and 1873—but they did not. They happened within my lifetime and those of many noble Lords, and involved the forced removal of the Chagossian people not just from their homes but from their islands.
In this context, the Government’s argument is that we can somehow forget about the self-determination of the people of the islands and just revert to the pre-8 November 1965 territorial integrity, and so effectively reassert the validity of what happened between 1968 and 1973. Rather than alleviating our national shame and moral responsibility, the Government’s decision to use the fact that we forcibly removed the Chagossians from their homeland as an excuse for denying them self-determination makes our moral failure much worse. It involves our acting as if the Chagossians do not exist.
The Government might seek to argue that their position is not that the Chagossians do not exist but that they are properly conceived of as Mauritians for two reasons. First, because pre-8 November 1965 they lived in the colony of Mauritius, the boundaries of which the Government are seeking to restore; and secondly, because some Chagossians live in Mauritius.
This argument, however, is completely unsustainable. First, most Chagossians do not live in Mauritius and those who do have been leaving in large numbers. Secondly, those who remain in Mauritius are there only because they were forcibly removed to Mauritius, not because they wanted to go there. We need to give some thought to that. Thirdly, the relationship between the Chagossians and Mauritians is such that it is plainly very difficult, if not impossible, for Chagossians to place themselves in the identity of Mauritian, because the Mauritians played a crucial role in facilitating what amounted to an existential attack on the Chagossians: their forced removal from the Chagos Islands in agreeing they would be moved to the island of Mauritius, 1,339 miles away.
The 1965 decision of the Mauritian Council of Ministers was not valid because it took place while Mauritius was a UK colony. How much more valid is any attempt to pretend that the decision of the Republic of Mauritius in 2025 can be regarded as a valid decision on the part of the Chagossians, who, unlike the Mauritian Council of Ministers in 1965, were not consulted?
Going forward, two things are absolutely clear. First, having taken advice, it would be perfectly possible to facilitate a robust and secure referendum of the Chagossians, who live principally in the UK, the Seychelles and Mauritius, to find out whether they self-determine that their islands—which, from this Saturday, will have been functionally separate from what has become the Republic of Mauritius for 60 years—should rejoin Mauritius or not. This is critically important because the informal referendum, facilitated by a BIOT citizens group which has engaged around 40% of Chagossians, has demonstrated that over 99% of them do not wish their islands to be given to the Mauritians. Secondly, according to the crucial KPMG report already mentioned in your Lordships’ House today, the resettlement of the Chagos Islands would be significantly cheaper than leasing just one of the islands, Diego Garcia, from Mauritius.
It was unconscionable that we should have taken the people of the Chagos Islands from their own lands, but now the UK Government’s Mauritius treaty and Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill are about to make things much worse. First, the Bill—the concluded passage of which facilitates the coming into force of the Mauritius treaty—seeks to give the Chagossians’ lands to what many of them regard as a foreign country, without their consent and without even requiring the Mauritians to resettle the Chagos Islands with the Chagossians. Secondly, the Government propose paying the Republic of Mauritius—which many Chagossians regard not only as a foreign country but a foreign country that has a history of discriminating against Chagossians—an extravagant amount of money for the use of just one island when that would pay for the resettlement of the Chagossians in their islands right now. Thirdly, the Government then hoist themselves by their own petard by engaging directly with the Chagossians, as distinct from the Mauritians, through Article 11 of the treaty, but then make no attempt to facilitate their self-determination.
There is more we would all like to say, but if the Government decide to proceed they will unwittingly make provision for an even more disturbing TV drama than “Mr Bates vs The Post Office”. I urge them to think about that. The British public expect more from their Government in 2025. I strongly advise them to step back from the brink.
Lord De Mauley (Con)
My Lords, the International Relations and Defence Committee, which I have the honour to chair, decided, on the announcement of the deal with Mauritius, to have a look at the proposed handover of sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory. As a result, the committee raised a number of issues. In view of the fact that we are a cross-party committee, we did not get into an argument about the Government’s detailed reasons for doing the deal. We simply observed that the decision to proceed was ultimately political. That statement itself acknowledges the fact that several members of the committee, including me, were very doubtful about the Government’s stated legal and other reasons. My noble friend Lord Lilley eloquently set out the basis for some of those doubts.
Our witnesses were unanimous in their view that Diego Garcia holds a pivotal strategic role for the United Kingdom and the United States, and that it is critical for broader western security strategy in the Indo-Pacific—on that much at least, we can agree with the Government. The Government argue that the deal secures Diego Garcia as a UK base. As an article from RUSI issued since our inquiry points out, however, the base was already secure prior to the ceding of sovereignty. We heard arguments that I find persuasive that the deal could, in fact, make the base less secure in absolute terms. I will come to some of those in a moment.
The committee focused on four key areas: the future of defence and security arrangements on Diego Garcia; the rights of the Chagossian people; the environmental protection of the archipelago; and the costs arising from the agreement.
As regards defence and security, witnesses alerted us to a number of potential risks. Most of these revolved around increased vulnerability to Chinese political warfare tactics. Our attention was drawn to the fact that there remains a risk, particularly in the context of expanding Chinese influence on the African continent, that the base may need to be used in a way that is perceived as contentious in Africa—for example, arising from the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty—and could cause diplomatic difficulties, to say the least, for the UK in the future.
As regards the long term, we heard evidence that the Government’s confidence in the strength of the UK’s right of first refusal to an extension after 99 years was unconvincing. This was because, among other things, it lacks the mechanism for enforcement and would be difficult to assert in practice. This is a significant potential source of future vulnerability that the Government must address now as part of their long-term strategic planning.
Being in Hong Kong at the time of its handover to the Chinese in 1997—and look what a success that has been—brought home to me that 99 years today is little more than a single lifespan. We noted that the agreement has introduced a risk that Mauritius—as the sovereign power, if the treaty is ratified—could object to a specific military operation from Diego Garcia, due to differing views on whether it meets the requirements of international humanitarian law. While the Government were categorical that this would not limit UK-US freedom of action, we were warned that such objections could lead to lawfare and create diplomatic difficulties for the UK, bringing the risk that they affect military operations.
I turn to the rights of Chagossians. We met a cross- section of members of the community in UK and Mauritius. While we acknowledge that their views cannot be representative of the entire community, those we met expressed unanimous dissatisfaction with the consultation processes conducted by both the UK and Mauritian Governments. Concerns revolved principally around, first, the vague language relating to resettlement and, secondly, the inadequacy of arrangements to ensure that Chagossians benefit from the financial package being given to Mauritius by the UK. It is notable that under Article 10 of the agreement, the UK is required to give preference to suitably qualified Mauritian nationals, to the maximum extent practical when employing contractors, but no reference is made to prioritising employment for those of Chagossian heritage.
To date, the Government have not provided a clear or convincing rationale for excluding Chagossians from employment on Diego Garcia. The lack of attention to the interests of Chagossians is even more stark in the context of the financial package. Concerns were raised to us about the £40 million trust fund that the UK will set up under Article 11 of the agreement, dedicated to the Chagossian community, with Mauritius establishing the fund under its financial regulations, in consultation with the UK.
A key theme during our discussion with the Chagossians was the lack of clarity on how the trust fund would be managed, with participants highlighting the Mauritian Government’s poor record in supporting their community. For example, in 2016 the UK provided £40 million to the Mauritian authorities to improve Chagossian lives, yet only £1.3 million was disbursed, and even those funds came with restrictive conditions. Given this, it is surprising that the Government have surrendered the right to manage this fund to Mauritius, when the UK is itself well equipped to manage funds on behalf of others.
The Government have committed to providing a factual update to Parliament on the modalities of the trust fund, and on eligibility for resettlement. I ask the Minister when that update will be forthcoming. Alongside the trust fund, a £45 million annual development grant will be provided by the UK for a period of 25 years, to support development projects aimed at improving the economic welfare of Mauritius and its citizens. Why has a proportion of the grant, at least, not been earmarked for the benefit of Chagossians? I find it extraordinary that it was a Labour Government, in the 1960s, who evicted the population of the Chagos Islands callously from their island homes, and it is a Labour Government, in 2025, who have so blatantly failed to give adequate attention to the rights of the Chagossians.
I turn to the environmental implications. The committee heard the archipelago described by a credible environmental expert as
“the most important reef wilderness on the planet”.
Concern arises partly because there is uncertainty about the future of the marine protected area established around the BIOT in 2010 by the UK, as the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, said, given that it has not been recognised by Mauritius. We were told in particular that the Mauritian Government’s track record in marine governance is poor. Furthermore, assuming that Mauritius acts in good faith in the matter of the environment, its enforcement capabilities are currently limited, as again the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, said, to just two ocean-going vessels and two aircraft that are incapable of reaching Chagos directly.
I turn finally to the cost of the agreement. For each of the first three years, the UK will pay Mauritius £165 million. It will then pay £120 million per year for the following 10 years. Thereafter, it will continue to pay the equivalent of £120 million annually, increasing in line with inflation. In addition, the UK will fund the £40 million trust fund and the £45 million annual development grant that I referred to earlier. The Government calculate the total cost of all this at approximately £3.4 billion. However, critics have questioned the methodology used and argued that the total cost of the agreement could be very considerably greater.
Attempting to justify the cost of the agreement, the Minister asserted to us that the payments to Mauritius compare favourably with payments made by others for overseas bases. For example, he indicated that France had recently arranged an €85 million per year deal with Djibouti on its basing arrangements for a military base 15 times smaller than Diego Garcia. We noted, however, that the Government’s emphasis on the size of the Djibouti base draws a false equivalence between size and cost; it therefore calls into doubt any such comparison. We called on the Government to provide the committee with further information on how the overall leasing costs for Diego Garcia were determined and how these may affect the allocations in the defence budget. No such data has yet been produced.
As I hope I have outlined, the Government still have some very serious questions to answer on the future defence and security arrangements, the rights of the Chagossians, the environmental protection of the archipelago, and the costs arising from the arrangement.
Lord Beamish (Lab)
My Lords, as a former Defence Minister and current chair of the ISC, I recognise the vital importance of the base on Diego Garcia. It is significant because of its strategic location. It has been vital in combating some of the most serious threats against us and our allies, including from terrorism and hostile states. It has a unique capability of collecting data, which has been used to counter terrorism both abroad and at home. It has made our security, not only ours but that of our allies, greater. It is also a strategically vital logistics hub and protects some strategic shipping lanes. On national security, we usually have consensus across the House, both here and in the other place. Therefore, I am saddened and disappointed that the Official Opposition are using this as a political football on such a vital interest, not just to us but to our allies.
There have been four main issues put forward against the Bill. One is the legal issue around sovereignty; the second is cost; the third is the threat from China; and the fourth is the way in which the Chagossian people have been treated. In opening, my noble friend Lady Chapman outlined the issues around the legal uncertainty surrounding the Diego Garcia base. The excellent report of the International Agreements Committee— I congratulate Members who were involved in it—covers those in good detail but, like all legal questions, there are different opinions. Clearly, the committee took evidence from different opinions in its work and Professor Richard Ekins KC was of the opinion that the ICJ opinion was not legally binding.
As has already been said by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, Sir Christopher Greenwood said that he could envisage at least two possible routes to make that agreement binding. Clearly, there is a division; there is uncertainty, and that is what the Bill is about, as was said by the Minister in opening the debate, and that is why the last Government entered into negotiations on this.
On the issue around sovereignty, what I find difficult is this. James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary at the time, said on 3 November, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, that negotiations would begin
“on the exercise of sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory”
and that it was the Government’s
“intention to secure an agreement on the basis of international law”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/11/22; col. 27WS.]
The then Government were clear about discussing sovereignty, as the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, said. The rhetoric from the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, is that this is the sovereignty surrender Bill; I challenge the Conservative party to say what has changed in that time, when it was quite clear that the last Government were going to discuss the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands.
The noble Lords, Lord Lilley and Lord Blencathra, said that it was all those nasty people at the Foreign Office who have basically bamboozled Ministers of both Governments, but I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that the Conservatives would have come to a similar conclusion: if they had been returned to office, this Bill would have been put forward.
Secondly, on the issue around costs, the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, did the usual trick of adding up all this money to get to £35 billion to give the impression that this money will be paid out tomorrow, when it will be over 100 years. This investment underpins the already huge investment that not only we have put into the Diego Garcia base but, more importantly, the Americans, and will continue to do for years to come. The committee report mentioned Djibouti, as did the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, and possible issues around size, but this is not an unusual arrangement. However, the joint agreement gives certainty to ourselves and our American allies to invest in the future of that vital capability.
Thirdly, on China, there is a lot of hyperbole spoken on this issue—and not just on this Bill. A lot of ill- informed comment is often portrayed as fact. I urge noble Lords to look at our ISC report of 2023 on China. Yes, China is a threat. Is it a threat to Diego Garcia now? Yes, it is. Will it be in the future? Yes, it will be. But the Bill does nothing to make that more likely. On the issue of China, who is Mauritius’s main interlocutor? It is India. Our Five Eyes partners have all agreed this and think it is a good way forward. It has been suggested that Mauritius will have a veto over military operations; no, it will not, if we look at the Bill—it will have the same rights as the Republic of Cyprus in terms of the sovereign base areas. If military action takes place, people will be informed afterwards. That is not giving it a veto. The idea that China will somehow get close to our very valuable assets there is not the case, because for the first time the outer islands, which are vulnerable, will be secured; that is something we should welcome. It also underpins the strategy of working with our Pacific partners to ensure that we face down China in that part of the world.
Fourthly, on the Chagossian people, I think everyone agrees that the way they have been treated over decades has been completely shameful. This agreement makes a movement forward—as my noble friend said, the funding coming forward allows some limited resettlement —but I urge those Chagossians listening not to be fooled by the Conservative Front Bench. I spent 23 years in the House of Commons, and the only person who consistently raised this issue was the Member for Islington North, Jeremy Corbyn. I never heard a single Member on the Conservative Benches, so it is clearly political opportunism to say now that, somehow, they care about the Chagossian people; they do not at all. I would be very wary about that being put forward.
This is an important Bill. The agreement has the support of our Five Eyes partners and of regional players. Please, if we are talking about national security, this is too vitally important to be kicked around, as it is being, as a political football. We need this Bill. It gives a secure future for our continued occupation of Diego Garcia and, more importantly, the facilities that it brings to keep us all safe.
Lord Bellingham (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Beamish. He deployed a lot of knowledge and insight, and I have great respect for him. He mentioned the former leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, who has been consistent in his interest in this subject; I would also add Andrew Rosindell, who, from the day I joined Parliament, has been consistent in his challenging of Governments of all colours and standing up for the Chagossians.
My noble friend Lord Callanan mentioned his amendment, and the Minister was pretty impolite about that amendment. If the Government were serious about challenging our amendment, why did they not put it to a vote? Incidentally, where are the Labour Peers this evening? If they did not like our amendment, they could have voted it down and allowed the Bill to be committed to a Committee of the whole House. Surely, that would have been the sensible thing to have done.
In 2010, I was appointed Minister for the Overseas Territories. Some 31 years on from when the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, was the director of the overseas territories directorate, I was taking a great interest in this subject; whether that makes him very old or me very young, I do not know, but we both care passionately about this subject. I remember at the time looking at the whole issue of the Chagossian people, and we agreed at the time, in 2010, to set up a feasibility study, which then eventually reported in 2014. It is a great shame that the then Government, which, I think, was in transition from David Cameron to Theresa May, did not pick up the recommendations of that feasibility study, take action and look at different schemes to allow the Chagossians to return.
The Chagossians have been treated quite appallingly. There is no doubt about that. Under a Labour Government, decisions were made that were egregious, on a par probably with the Highland clearances and the appalling evictions during the famine in Ireland. These people were forcibly removed from their territory, from their land, and we should be ashamed—my Government as well, over successive decades, but all Governments.
There has been talk about consultation with the Chagossians, involvement with them and engaging with them, but I agree 100% with the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, and the noble Lord, Lord Morrow: we should have a referendum of the Chagossian people. If it is possible to have a referendum for the position of chancellor of the University of Oxford and poll all the alumni around the world, surely it would be perfectly feasible and possible to have a referendum of Chagossians, who are living in this country, in Mauritius and in the Seychelles, with some in different parts of Europe. I believe very strongly that we should do that. One of the observations I have come away with, having had many conversations with Chagossians, is that they are a very proud group of people. What is extraordinary, beyond belief, is that they are still incredibly loyal to the Crown. We do not deserve that. We owe them a duty.
On the deal itself, we have heard many different legal opinions. We heard my noble friend Lord Lilley, who I thought made an excellent speech in which he dealt with this subject, so I will not go over that ground again. I do know Sir Christopher Greenwood extremely well—we were immediate contemporaries, reading law at Cambridge and then at the Inns of Court—and I respect his opinions enormously. During my time as the Minister for the UN, I used to go and visit him at the Permanent Court of Arbitration, where he was our resident judge. He has not once said that these decisions—there is more than one decision—and potential decisions could be totally binding. Other legal experts have said that they are always going to be advisory.
We are where we are. I personally think that the Truss Government, who did not last very long, were quite wrong to launch these negotiations, but the negotiations were launched. Eleven rounds of negotiations took place. A number of Labour Peers who are not here today have said that after 11 rounds we were bound to reach a decision, and it was only a matter of time when the new Government came in that they would decide this. Well, I have spoken to James Cleverly and the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, and they had red lines beyond which they were not prepared to go under any circumstances.
I will not go into them all, but there were two key red lines. The first was a properly managed MPA, preferably with joint sovereignty, and the other, more important red line was negotiating with Mauritius for a sovereign base area, and I think Mauritius would have agreed this. A sovereign base area is very different from a lease; it is a sovereign base in perpetuity. The noble Lord, Lord Beamish, made the point about us being obliged to notify Cyprus that the two Cyprus sovereign bases are our sovereign territory. In this case we have no obligation to do that; this will be not our sovereign territory but Mauritius’s, and we will be in a very different position as a lessee.
If one looks back at the Cyprus negotiations under a Tory Government in 1960, Cyprus was a country fighting for its independence after a very bloody, unpleasant conflict between the British occupying forces and EOKA. After painful negotiations, we got to the stage at which Cyprus was going to reach its independence, but we stood firm and insisted on those two sovereign base areas. The Cypriot Government were not happy, but I suggest to your Lordships that they had a much stronger bargaining position than the Mauritian Government had over the Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia. In fact, if we had negotiated a 99-year lease on those sovereign base areas in 1960, we would now be looking at 34 years to go.
If one looks at Hong Kong, would it not have been better if the Government in 1897 had secured a sovereign grant of the New Territories? Obviously, we had outright sovereignty on Hong Kong and Kowloon, but it was decided after the war that it was not feasible to maintain sovereignty over Hong Kong and Kowloon without the New Territories. If the Government then had insisted on an outright grant of sovereignty, which may well have been quite possible—I have read all the debates at the time—we would have been in a very different position. If one looks at what happened with Hong Kong, there was enormous pressure on leases and discussion, debate and uncertainty running up to 1997, and that started about 30 years out. I suggest to the Minister that, probably in about 70 years, those discussions will start taking place about the future of Diego Garcia. We may well get a very warm reception from the Mauritian Government in terms of extending the lease by those 40 years, but we may not. A lot of things can change.
The bottom line is that we have lost control. If this treaty goes through, we will have completely lost control of the future of that base. Yes, it will be secure in the short term, subject to all sorts of caveats that have been mentioned. That is why I am very disappointed and sad that that red line was crossed. I do not think that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, would have allowed that red line to be crossed. Furthermore, had he tried to cross it, he would never have got it through the House of Commons anyway.
On the marine protection area, one of the first things I dealt with when I became Overseas Territories Minister was to look at the biodiversity within the territories—92% of our total biodiversity is in the OTs, of which 20% is in the Chagos Archipelago. It may well be that the commitments of Navin Ramgoolam—whom I know well—will be honoured by future Governments. His Excellency is an honourable, decent man, but he could be replaced by someone completely different. As the noble Lords, Lord Thurlow and Lord Blencathra, have pointed out, the agreements that have been made around the MPA could easily be rescinded or changed, and that MPA, which is one of the jewels in the crown of the overseas territories, could be put at very severe risk indeed.
I will not go into details about the costs, except to say that I think the Minister was wrong in her figures. If one includes the 40 years at £101 million, that comes to £14 billion, not the £3 billion that she mentioned. This decision by the Government not to commit has given us a pause to reflect on what we do now. I urge the House to remember that we have a duty to consult the Chagossian people and improve the Bill, and we absolutely must do that.
Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bellingham, and particularly his very thoughtful speech today. I say at the outset that I support the Bill as a necessary consequence of the Chagos Islands agreement, which I also support.
I will not deal with the future of the Chagossians or environmental issues today, important though they both are. I will focus on security, but I think that both the British and Mauritian Governments will need to work hard to meet the justified demands of the Chagossian people.
I will not go over all the ground covered by the Minister in her opening speech, but I want to emphasise the importance of the base on Diego Garcia for our security and, more generally, for western security. A simple look at the map shows why it matters so much for our security, and for western security, in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and why security of the base in the years ahead is so important.
For that reason, I continue to think—and, as I have said before in this House, I thought at the time—that it was absolutely right for the previous Government to start intensive negotiations with Mauritius, with the aim of ensuring
“the continued effective operation of the joint UK/US military base on Diego Garcia”;—[Official Report, Commons, 3/11/22; col. 27WS.]
that it was absolutely right for the then Foreign Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, to decide, after examining the issue, to continue with the negotiations; and that it is absolutely right for the present Government to conclude them.
As I understand it—and I have listened carefully to the Minister—the agreement will provide us and the United States with the certainty we both need over the future of the military base on Diego Garcia for 99 years, plus another 40 years if we exercise our rights under the treaty. It does not surprise me that our Five Eyes partners—the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—have welcomed the deal, recognising its importance for their and our security, nor that India, South Korea and the African Union have welcomed it too.
It would, of course, have been nice to have secured the deal without the cost. Some £101 million a year in today’s money is not cheap, and it would build a lot of hospitals. But surely the question is whether paying 0.2% of the defence budget is a price worth paying for the security it brings. I believe that it is.
Finally, it is worth considering the implications of our not agreeing a deal, of continuing with a contested relationship with Mauritius, the UN and the ICJ, and of ditching an agreement that we have reached with, and that has the support of, our Five Eyes partners. I know it is always risky to peer into the future, particularly given today’s uncertain world, but we can be pretty certain that the ICJ and UN General Assembly resolutions condemning us would continue. It is likely that they will be legally binding on us in the future. Could we just ignore that? Yes, we could, but in doing so, in these circumstances, we would be flouting international law. I believe—and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, is listening—that the United Kingdom should be supporting and respecting international law, not flouting it. That has been, and should remain, our tradition, whether under a Conservative or a Labour Government.
May I also say to the noble Lords, Lord Lilley and Lord Blencathra—
Lord Lilley (Con)
The noble Lord said that we should pursue international law. Does he accept that we have, under the International Court of Justice, an opt-out for disputes between ourselves and Commonwealth countries—or was he going to mention that anyway?
Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB)
I was not going to mention that; I was making the simple point that respect for international law has been, and should remain, an extremely important part of British foreign policy.
I say this to the noble Lords, Lord Lilley and Lord Blencathra. When I was in the Foreign Office, serving under the late Lord Carrington and Lord Hurd, I was not conscious that there was a Foreign Office policy and not a government foreign policy. I have to say, I did not have the privilege of serving under the noble Lord, Lord Cameron.
The agreement with Mauritius and the treaty we are now considering respect international law, protect British and western security, have the support of our Five Eyes partners, India and others, and, in my view, unquestionably deserve our support.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
My Lords, there is pretty stiff competition for the accolade “worst Bill of this Session”, but this Bill is right up there in contention.
The Chagos Islands are linked to Mauritius only by virtue of the fact that they were both once administered as part of one colony. There is no historical, geographical or cultural basis for Mauritius claiming ownership. I have no idea why, in 1965, the Labour Government decided to pay Mauritius £3 million for agreeing to detach the Chagos Islands, but that is what they did. That £3 million is something like £70 million in today’s money. Labour has form on chucking taxpayers’ money at Mauritius. The cost of this Bill is what I want to focus on today.
The Bill itself contains no financial provisions, but it is important because, if it passes, it will pave the way for ratification of the treaty, which will trigger the payments described in the treaty. This is where the smoke and mirrors start to come in. As has already been mentioned today, the Explanatory Memorandum to the treaty says:
“The average annual cost to the UK … is £101 million in 2025/2026 prices”.
That is technically correct, but we will be spending taxpayers’ money in cash, not as expressed notionally in this year’s prices.
The biggest element of the package runs for the whole of the 99 years. It starts at £165 million for the first three years, then it is £120 million for the next 10 years. After that, it is indexed for the whole of the remaining period using the GDP deflator. This means that, by the end of the 99 years, we will be paying more than £650 million a year—assuming that the deflator comes in at 2%, which is a fairly heroic assumption given the Bank of England’s current performance on controlling inflation. That is what compounding does, even when using the very low rate of 2%. As say, if inflation goes above that, the figure could be very much more. In cash terms, the average is not £101 million; it is at least three times that.
That is not all. The payment structure is front-end loaded, which means that using an average of 99 years understates the short-term fiscal impact. If we look just at the first 10 years, the average payment in 2025-26 prices is not £110 million; it is about £150 million. In cash terms, it is around £170 million. The Secretary of State for Defence told the other place that the treaty would cost the UK less than 0.2% of the defence budget. That is about £120 million, using the 2025-26 budget numbers. In cash terms, we will never, never pay less than £120 million a year. At current prices, we do not pay less than £120 million until about year 30 of the deal. Did the Secretary of State for Defence not understand the deal—or had he concocted this description in a deliberate attempt to confuse?
The Explanatory Memorandum goes on to say that the total expected cost of the finance package, using a net present value methodology, is £3.4 billion, as we have already heard. The total cash cost to taxpayers via the Exchequer is nearer 10 times that. The figure of £3.4 billion not only knocks off future inflation to get to 2025-26 prices; it then knocks off very much more by using a social time preference rate in accordance with the Treasury’s Green Book, and that rate starts at 3.5% and drops down to 2.5%. I will spare noble Lords a discourse on the social time preference rate. It is a fact that the Government use a lower figure when it suits them. Indeed, when the noble Lord, Lord Stern, was asked to analyse the economics of climate change, he used a discount rate of 0.1%. The Government did not even challenge that. Far from it: they used the report to justify the completely crazy costs of net-zero policies.
It is clearly convenient for the Government to use a high discount rate when they are calculating what they claim to be the cost of this policy. I am not going to argue about the discount rate. Instead, I am going to argue that it is simply not relevant. The Treasury’s Green Book draws a clear distinction between what it calls the economic dimension, and the financial dimension. Discounting is relevant to the economic dimension but not to the financial dimension. The Green Book describes discounting in the following terms. The reason for social discounting is to allow proposals of different lengths and with different options, and with different profiles of net costs and benefits over time, to be compared on a common basis. That is not what we are doing here. There is no question of comparing differing proposals in the Bill we have before us. The Government are using discounting to try to pull the wool over our eyes, but we are not deceived. The financial cost of this Bill is not £3.4 billion. It is £35 billion at best.
This is a bad Bill, for the many reasons that have been given by my noble friends and other noble Lords today. For me, it is another example of the reason why the Labour Government cannot be trusted with taxpayers’ money. This morning, the Chancellor of the Exchequer as good as announced that she is going to raise taxes in this month’s Budget. In the first five years alone, hugely important to the Budget arithmetic, nearly £900 million will be given to the Mauritian Government. How can the Government look British taxpayers in the eye and say that they will make us pay more tax so they can give it away to a foreign Government?
Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I first mentioned the Chagos Islands back in 2008 in the other place, when we had set up an all-party group on Chagos. I have to say that over the years, when I was at those meetings in the other place, I never once heard a Chagossian say that they were asking to be put under Mauritian rule; they were asking for the British Government to allow them back home. To me, a basic underlying problem with the Bill is that, despite how we behaved to the Chagos Islanders—in our lifetime, let us remember, not in some far-off time in colonial history—when we arbitrarily evicted them out of their homes, which was a gross abuse that we undertook and, let us be clear, would these days be called ethnic cleansing, this Labour Government are repeating the mistakes of the past, with no involvement of the Chagossians and no attempt to get their views by way of a referendum.
I know it would be difficult to organise a referendum right across the world for Chagossians, but it could be done if there was the will to do it. Instead of rushing to announce this deal with Mauritius, the Government could have started a process of real engagement with Chagossians all over the world. That would have shown all the various bodies passing judgment on us that we were serious about looking after the interests of those whose islands were being discussed. The entire basis for this surrender of sovereignty seems to be the principle in international law that territories generally ought not to be divided at independence, but there are countless examples of that having occurred and having been right at the time—India, for example.
The Government say it is important that we ensure the future of the Diego Garcia base, and that without this treaty its future would be uncertain. Why should it be uncertain? There is no one in this House who disagrees about the importance of the base for our security. The uncertainty they mean is based on three international judgments. The International Court of Justice advisory opinion of 2019 was just that—advisory. The UN General Assembly resolution of 2019 is only a recommendation. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea judgment of 2021 followed a process that did not even involve the UK and is therefore not binding.
I am afraid this is just another example of our Government refusing to stand up for our own country and our own national interest. Can anyone imagine China or the United States giving up territory because of some international legal opinion? Of course they would not, because they put their own country first, and it is about time that we did that too. What if this advisory council suddenly said, “We think the Falklands should be given back to Argentina”? Would the Government then say that perhaps that might be something we should do?
We are now going to pay out millions of pounds to give away our own territory, and no amount of fine words from lawyers, liberal ideas and international law will convince the public that this deal is anything other than a shameful act of betrayal of Chagossians. As it stands, not a single Chagossian has the right to return to the islands. It is all down to the Mauritian Government —a Government who are getting closer and closer to China and will face any direction if the money is there. They will decide how the money that we give will get to the Chagossians, if it ever does. Whatever assurances there are on paper are likely, in a short time, to become of little value. Guarantees will be worthless, and where then will be all these pillars of international law? I doubt they will be anywhere to be seen.
This Bill was not in the Labour Party’s manifesto. It was announced very soon after the election and I think that it came out of the blue to all of us. Yes, the Conservatives had started to negotiate, but I am not really interested in blaming who started what. The reality is that the Conservatives did not actually sign up to anything; it is the Labour Government who are signing up to it now. That is their decision that they took quickly just after they were elected.
Why are the Government surrendering a vital geopolitical asset, a matchless environmental protection order, vast reserves of increasingly precious seabed resources and the right of self-determination of the Chagossian people, to say nothing of the massive price tag that the people of the UK will pay for generations to come to rent something that we presently own? Why the rush?
This whole deal and the Bill make no sense to me morally for the British Chagossians, legally, economically or from a security perspective. I genuinely do not understand where it has come from, and that makes me wonder if the only way to understand it—I know noble Lords will not like me saying this—is to look at the role of the Attorney-General, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer. For it is the Attorney-General who, as a barrister, moved from Doughty Street Chambers, which he had shared with his friend, the current Prime Minister, to join the chambers jointly founded by their mutual friend, a certain Philippe Sands, the lawyer who has represented Mauritius’s interests over those of the British Chagossians throughout this sorry saga. The noble and learned Lord became a member of Matrix Chambers and I can only assume that he assumed his friendship with Sands presented no conflict of interest when he became Attorney-General. Nor, indeed, did he suggest a conflict of interest when, in 2023, before he was Attorney-General, he represented a group of Sri Lankan asylum seekers in Chagos and then decided a few years later, as Attorney-General, to allow their case and let them resettle in the UK. Surely this was a conflict of interest.
I am raising this because this is what people out there are asking. If I cannot raise it here in this Chamber, where can we get these answers? Some people may say that this is all above board and it is not for me to say it is not, but it is true, as the noble Lord, Lord Glasman, observed in an interview with the New Statesman recently on the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hermer—he actually said, “He’s got to go”; I will not quote what he said about the noble and learned Lord, because it was pretty harsh—that
“They talk about the rule of law but what they want is a rule of lawyers”.
The Attorney-General said in his 2024 Bingham lecture on the rule of law:
“Since taking office, this Government has already taken steps to uphold those obligations and demonstrate our deep commitment to international law. We have reached agreement with Mauritius to settle the historic sovereignty claims over BIOT/Chagos Archipelago in a manner that successfully marries our international law obligations with vital national security requirements”.
There was not a single mention in that speech of the Chagossian people—shameful. Surely he should recuse himself from anything to do with the Chagos Islands. We should get a statement from him on his position and we should get the legal opinion.
I am deeply ashamed of the Government’s position on this. It is probably the most shameful act of their one-year tenure. I am pleased—people will not like this either—that Reform has said quite clearly and unequivocally that if it gets into power it will tear this treaty up. I will back that, whatever lawyers and international bodies say, because this deal is wrong for our country. It is outrageous that a Government are getting away with giving away our sovereignty in this very short time.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
I would prefer the noble Baroness to be consistent. If she is criticising the Attorney-General under this Government for giving advice on continuing negotiations to cede sovereignty, why is she not as critical of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Prentis, who was Attorney-General in November 2022, when, presumably, she gave advice to the previous Government to commence negotiations to seek sovereignty?
Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
The noble Lord has obviously seen some of these legal agreements. I have not. I would like to see all this legal advice. I see no reason why this House should not see the legal advice.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)
My Lords, we have an opportunity to right an old wrong and prevent a new injustice. We have an opportunity to stop the handover of tens of millions of pounds a year—billions in total—to fund tax cuts somewhere else while taxes are rising here. We have an opportunity to prevent the handover of strategic territory to a state that may come under the influence of unfriendly powers. Above all, we have the ability to stand up belatedly for the injured party here: the Chagossian people.
Sitting silently in the Gallery throughout your Lordships’ debate has been a contingent of our friends from the British Indian Ocean Territory. Their role as silent spectators has been eerily symbolic of the role they have played these past 50 years, and especially these past five years, as decisions about them have been made without them. But we have an opportunity to go in a different direction. Article 18 of the treaty makes it clear that it cannot enter into force until both parties have informed each other that they have concluded all the national ratificatory procedures.
I remind noble Lords one more time of what the Labour manifesto said about this. As my noble friend Lord Callanan quoted, it said:
“Defending our security also means protecting the British Overseas Territories … Labour will always defend their sovereignty and right to self-determination”.
I would argue that, under the Salisbury convention, it works both ways. You could at least make the claim that this Chamber has not just the opportunity but the duty to enforce the manifesto on which Labour was elected, and that means recognising the self-determination of the Chagossian people.
Why are we doing this? I will not repeat my noble friend Lord Lilley’s speech. There is no legal obligation. For one thing, military facilities are excluded from the purview of these courts, but even if you set that aside, it was expressly drawn up in the clearest language that our lawyers could devise that there was no purview for a court such as this in a dispute between two present or former members of the Commonwealth. That was expressly put in to prevent challenges of this kind.
I think we all know the answer—we heard it from the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, a second ago. I cannot help noticing from the sparse Benches opposite that there is no great enthusiasm from the governing party for this measure, but there is a clique of people for whom “Decolonise” is everything. It is painful for them to see little union jacks in the upper corners of flags. They approach these questions impressionistically, based on vibes and emotions, almost regardless of the legal rights and wrongs or the interests of the people concerned.
It is very clear from Philippe Sands’ book, in which he wrote about the whole process, how he, the Attorney-General and, I suspect, the Prime Minister, have come at this. You must always back the ex-colony against the ex-coloniser, always back the poorer state against the western one, always back the non-white population against the white one, regardless of the rights and wrongs. This is even though the people being injured here are, of course, the dispossessed Chagossians. Even as a decolonising exercise, it totally fails on its own terms, because here is a territory now being handed to a genuinely colonial power that has no interest in it and no connection except a pecuniary one.
I will not get into the ecological arguments, which were so well stated by the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, or indeed the strategic ones that we have heard from other people. To emphasise the wrong done to the Chagossian population, I just want to canter very briefly through some of the history.
The archipelago was uninhabited until 1783. The French then populated it with enslaved people taken from the African mainland. It was seized during the Napoleonic Wars—or rather, it was not seized, but the Indian Ocean French-speaking territories were seized—by the Royal Navy, as dramatically rendered in one of the Patrick O’Brian novels.
At the end of that war, in 1814, Mauritius and the Chagos Islands were ceded—separately—to the British Crown. The Chagos Islands were never part of Mauritius. They were administered from Mauritius because there was no suitable administrative seat in the archipelago.
I invite noble Lords to entertain seriously for a moment the argument that, because somewhere was once administered from somewhere else, that creates a sovereignty claim. By that logic, Anguilla would be part of St Kitts; the Turks and Caicos Islands would be part of Jamaica; indeed, come to that, Burma would be part of India. It is a ludicrous argument, an incredibly dangerous precedent that we are setting, not only for our fellow subjects in other overseas territories such as Gibraltar and the Falklands, but for any other country that was ever administered from somewhere else, which is a great many places on the planet.
Let us fast-forward to 1965. As we have heard, the Mauritian Government accepted and gladly pocketed the then huge sum of £3 million in return for renouncing in perpetuity any claim to the Chagos Archipelago. They were far from unhappy about that; this was a territory to which they were unconnected, and they saw this as an extremely good deal. I will quote what the then Prime Minister, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, said shortly afterwards. He said this was a territory
“of which very few people knew, which is very far from here, and which we had never visited”.
As far as he was concerned, that was that. The deal was done.
Mauritius then pocketed some further funds that were handed over by this country, supposedly for the betterment of the Chagossian diaspora, although a lot of that money somehow never quite trickled through to the people that it was supposed to help. Indeed, a lot of the bad feeling of the diaspora population towards Mauritius stems from the way in which those funds have been disbursed down the decades.
It was really only 15 or so years ago, as China began to become interested in Mauritius, that the claim was pressed again in earnest. There was a state visit from the Chinese Head of State, an unusual thing for a country the size of Mauritius. The first free trade agreement, I think, between China and an African state was with Mauritius. At that point, suddenly, Mauritius became very interested in exercising sovereignty over this territory, and can you blame it? It has been referred to aptly as the Malta of the Indian Ocean. Of the seven great naval choke points in the world, it is within reach of four of them: the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, the Strait of Hormuz, the Malacca Strait and the Cape of Good Hope. It was from the Diego Garcia base in 1991 that the waves of B52 bombers took off to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. It was from there that a brave part of the campaign against the Taliban was waged.
It is worth noting, if we are playing the game of decolonise, that for a diaspora Chagossian to dispute Mauritian sovereignty is an imprisonable offence under a law passed in 2021. Simply to say what I am saying would get me a spell in chokey if I were in Mauritius. However, there is an alternative solution, and it was touched on by the noble Baroness, Lady Foster. I want to put this forward because it is not just that we are stopping this; we have to have an alternative. It was one that was initially looked at when Tony Blair was Prime Minister. He commissioned a feasibility study by KPMG into resettling the Chagossian population on the outer atolls. The feasibility study came back much later and said that it could be done for the cost of £3 billion over a century, which, in a rather short-sighted move, the subsequent Conservative Government decided was too big an outlay during the time of austerity. But even if we accept the Minister’s figures on the liability to British taxpayers—and I suspect that my noble friend Lady Noakes is much closer to the actual sum—that is still a lot more expensive than putting in the infrastructure and resettling the Chagossian population as British subjects in a British overseas territory. Then, because it would be an inhabited territory, that would put the sovereignty claim for ever beyond doubt. It would then be up to the people there, and them alone, if they wanted to change their sovereignty.
When this Government took office, they promised growth. What we are seeing is that they are delivering shrinkage in every sense: economically, morally and geographically. If this Bill goes through and we compound the injustice to our fellow subjects of Chagossian descent, we will be in every sense diminished as a country.
Lord Horam (Con)
My Lords, I shallow narrow down the grand anti-colonial views of my noble friend Lord Hannan—it was a splendid piece of radical demography, if I may say so, and really well done—to the point made very clearly by the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, and my good and noble friend Lord Bellingham, which is the position of the Chagossians.
I should declare an interest straight away in that I am vice-chairman of the All-Party Group on the Chagos Islands; this is because I took part in a parliamentary delegation to Mauritius many years ago and have maintained contact with the island since. I have been there once. It is a splendid place to go, by the way—thoroughly enjoyable, rather different from a November day in the House of Lords. There is no doubt that Mauritius is a very pro-British colony, so pro-British that it follows our Premier League football avidly. There is even, I found to my surprise, in the middle of Mauritius, a village called Arsenal, with a football team called Arsenal Wanderers. I tried to find out whether there was a Manchester United, reflecting my own interest, but no luck, I am afraid.
None the less, I reiterate the point that the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, made: Mauritius is a significant player and is in a vital part of the world. It is currently very pro-British and successful, and we should be careful in how we handle this diplomatically. It could easily go very wrong if we do not take their point of view into account.
More importantly, there is the position of the Chagossians. There is no doubt that we did a terrible thing to them in 1965. My noble friend Lord Bellingham compared it to the clearances in northern Scotland; what happened in 1965 is similar in that we took their hereditary land and banished them from it. Forget the law—we have a moral debt to these people, which we must fulfil. I am glad some of them are in the Public Gallery. There is no doubt that opinions are mixed: I know that many of the UK Chagossians are against the Bill, but, equally, many of the Chagossians in Mauritius and the Seychelles are in favour of it. Indeed, the chairman of the Chagos Refugees Group, Olivier Bancoult—parts of whose statement was read out by my good friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford; I will not repeat it—makes it clear that there has been good consultation, with which he is satisfied, and that he supports the Bill.
What really worries me is a point that has not yet been made in today’s debate; it was raised by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, the chair of the International Agreements Committee, in earlier debates on this subject. The Bill and the treaty are notably deficient in dealing with the Chagossians’ rights. Only one sentence in the whole treaty deals with the position of the Chagossians, saying that the Mauritian Government are now in a position to do something for the Chagossian people. That is all it says: in effect, that the Mauritian Government are able to do something.
I have a suggestion for the Minister, whom I am glad to see back in her place. My noble friend Lord Callanan homed in on an important point: there is a big gap on the treatment of the Chagossians in the treaty and in the Bill; they are incredibly insufficient in that regard. I am sorry that we are not discussing the amendment he proposed, because the idea of having four or five weeks in which we could discuss all this properly—in a measured way, without relying on what people outside the Chamber are saying, and perhaps through a Select Committee—is entirely sensible. If we cannot have that, could we none the less do something else to meet the problem by a different method?
I understand that, normally, in treaties of this kind, we do not want to get into how a partner to the treaty should handle people who are, after all, its own citizens—namely, in this case, the many Chagossians in Mauritius. We would not normally do that in diplomatic circles; that is not the way it is handled. However, the Government could have attached to the treaty an exchange of letters that drew on any views that may have been expressed by the Chagossian people. There could have been a referendum or some other means to find out opinions on exactly how this should be handled and what they want.
To go forward on this, frankly, sketchy basis is not sufficient. It is a shame that we appear to be so far advanced down the line, but have not fully addressed this in the way we should. I seriously suggest to the Minister, who has admirably put forward her position, that we should attach to this treaty an exchange of diplomatic letters which, at the very least, take into account any views expressed, while we have the further discussions my noble friend Lord Callanan wishes us to have.
Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP) [V]
My Lords, I first declare an interest as a friend of British Overseas Territories.
The Bill is labelled the Diego Garcia Bill, but we all know it goes much further than that and deals with the full implementation of the Chagos Islands deal. The Government have told us that the previous Government started negotiations on sovereignty. The Opposition have told us that they would not have signed that Bill. I suspect that both those assertions are true.
Our task is to dissect whether the Bill is an appropriate one. In my view, this is a poor deal for the United Kingdom as a whole, but above all, a shameful deal for the Chagossian people. The Chagos Islands have been British since 1814. That was before the final defeat of Napoleon, and indeed before the Falkland Islands, for example, were British. It is before the vast bulk of countries across the world were in their current form—certainly before their current boundaries. It is before even the UK’s current boundaries themselves existed. Yet, we are handing over sovereignty to a country which is over 1,000 miles away from the Chagos Islands and has never ruled over or had control of them. It is akin to us handing over the Isle of Wight to Belarus, so limited are the geographical connections between the two. As the Government have indicated, we are doing so in part because of the advisory ruling of the ICJ and the threat legally of what is to come. I will not reiterate the very wise points, from a legal perspective, made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley; suffice it to say that I am not convinced by the Government’s legal case.
Let me go further—and I appreciate this will appear as heresy to some in the House. When it comes to British sovereignty and the self-determination of those under British sovereignty, while international opinion is always something to which we should have regard, we cannot simply give carte blanche to international opinion. Those who would treat international opinion as sacrosanct in these matters will have to answer at some future stage, when the ICJ, no doubt prompted by some feeling of anti-colonialism, declares that the Falkland Islands should be part of Argentina, or that Gibraltar should be part of Spain. That is the logical conclusion of saying that we cannot at any stage challenge what is ruled by an international court, and it is why I believe that British sovereignty and regard to the self-determination of the people within that must be paramount.
It is not simply a question, as others have said, of giving away sovereignty. We are not simply giving it to Mauritius; we are actually paying them a substantial fee to take it off our hands. Whether we regard that as the £3.4 billion the Government are talking about, the £35 billion the main opposition party is talking about, or somewhere in between, we are paying a vast sum—a cash cow—to Mauritius to ensure that the Chagos Islands become theirs. Not only are we giving a feather in the cap—a big financial gain—to Mauritius, but we are also giving them an asset.
We know already of the deep involvement of China, which sees Mauritius as part of its sphere of influence. There is no doubt that in the days to come, we will see parts of the Chagos Islands being built on by the Chinese, who will encroach more and more in that area. Then, the Government will ultimately be left with no real response, because they have already surrendered the sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius.
The other motivation is, perhaps, a feeling of colonial debt or guilt. But if we take at face value the premise that there is colonial debt, to whom do we owe that debt? Surely it is to those who we colonised in the first place—namely, the Chagossians. They have been treated shamefully. That is no different from what I suspect has happened over the last 60 years—we have a very poor record in the Chagos Islands.
The Chagossians, throughout these negotiations, have not had a veto, have not been directly involved in negotiations, and when it comes to consultation have effectively been consulted after deals have been done. That is not the way to reflect self-determination. In the deal itself, as well as giving over sovereignty to Mauritius we have a trust fund supposedly for Chagossians which will be entirely controlled by the Mauritius Government—not a penny will go directly to the Chagossians themselves. We did not even, within this deal, get a right of return; we have ceded that entirely to Mauritius. I have no doubt that, if there is any form of right of return, it will be for those Chagossians who have shown subservience to the Mauritian Government. Anybody deemed to take a different view from the Mauritius Government will not be able to return to their homeland.
This is a shameful deal. I welcome, at least, that the committal Motion has not gone ahead. I urge the Government, even at this belated hour, to take advantage of that time and genuinely consult and reach a view on the self-determination of the Chagossian people. We have been told by the Minister and others that Chagossians are content to be with Mauritius. Let the Government put that to the test and show proper self-determination to the people of the Chagos Islands. Let us use this pause to abandon this appalling deal and this rotten Bill.
Lord Altrincham (Con)
I thank the Minister for her patience in hosting this debate and welcome the Chagossians who have joined us this evening—they are very welcome in our House.
I start by noting that some matters are not obvious because they are not obvious, and this one is really quite a complicated story to explain. It was interesting to hear how the Minister was able to explain it, in a sense tactfully, because it involves at least three countries, the rights of individuals, a wide-ranging view on legal matters and interpretations, and environmental issues. And only then do we get to the defence issues and, finally, to a very large amount of money.
To understand why we are paying out so much money, we need to understand why the agreement is in the form it is. That always goes back to the claim on sovereignty and the Government’s anxiety over the legal risks. The Minister in the Commons, just like the Minister this evening, referenced once again the International Agreements Committee report from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and the statement in that report—the report is very carefully written—that if agreement was not reached then there would be some risk to the base. We always hear this. The Government do not like to quote the other statements made in the conclusion of that report, where it says that the findings in 2019 were non-binding. It also notes that the treaty does not make appropriate provisions for the Chagossians and concludes with an observation that the treaty is a compromise. That is a good word to describe the situation the Government are in: it is some kind of compromise.
Indeed, our colleagues on the International Relations and Defence Committee, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, struggled with the legal position here. They heard lots of legal opinions and they were not able to reach any conclusion. They said there is a wide range of opinions, and came up with the language that it was a political decision. Again, that is a fair way of describing it: we have a compromise for political reasons in the judgment of the Government.
We would expect the financial part to reflect the spirit of that—a spirit of compromise and of a rather complicated story. However, when you get to the financial part of this agreement, you find that, in fact, it is a great deal of money. My noble friend explained the initial payments, but the Government like to talk about an amount of £101 million, in this discounted, not-real-money way. The initial payments, incidentally, are over £200 million a year. The Government always go back to try to justify why we are paying this rental fee. They say, with great triumph, that there is precedent —we heard this in the House of Commons—in the example of France paying €85 million a year for a military base in Djibouti.
Of course, it is extremely unlucky to justify British public spending with reference to French public spending, but, putting that aside, the Minister in the House of Commons was probably not aware that the whole idea of introducing Djibouti came from the Mauritians. They introduced it because they wanted to introduce the concept of an open market rent—this had to be on an open market basis. But this situation is not even beginning to be on an open market basis. As we have just discussed, it is a very complex compromise. We should never have accepted the comparison to the Djibouti example at all and should never have started from that position. With a moment’s reflection—just a moment’s reflection—we find that the UK is in no position to seek an open market rent for an American military base. It is preposterous. It is not even beginning to be an open market situation.
Then we get to the overall economics of the situation. The Government love talking about this number of £3.4 billion. It is a great deal of money for those who do not really wish to pay any money for this. Unluckily for the Government, they do not seem to understand the financial risk of the contract, which could be for a great deal more. The reason for that, as we have heard, is that in the contract there is an inflation ratchet from year 14 to 99. It is not a question of how we account for it today; it will be real money that flows out. The ratchet starts in year 14, so quite soon.
The reason that matters is that a future Government will almost certainly need to retrade this situation, for reasons that we do not know today. What they will find is that the Mauritians do not see the contract the same way—they do not account for it the same way. They will see an extremely valuable exposure to UK inflation. The Government do not seem to understand the risk in their own contract. Could the Minister report to the House whether the value of this contract is actually £3.4 billion—that is, the capped value—with no further exposure above £3.4 billion? It is extremely important that the Government find a way to cap this exposure, because if it rolls any longer then it will be locked in as being uncapped. That will create a frightful row in the future between the UK and the Republic of Mauritius, but we are trying to settle rows between the two countries. We do not want a misunderstanding of the value of the contract.
Finally, I add one other important thought, because we are deficit financing the Government at the moment. It is very burdensome for the Government to pay money out of the country to another country. The Government like to point out that some public expenditure creates domestic stimulus. That itself will always be argued over, because some people will say there is too much waste and that the spending is inefficient. When the Government waste money domestically, there probably is some level of domestic stimulus, but when the money is sent to the Republic of Mauritius, there is not any. It is worse than that because, in addition, the money is not being spent on the military base and the treaty provides for priority to Mauritian contractors and Mauritian workers—there are no jobs for people from the UK in this. It is a straight loss out of the UK. It is particularly burdensome.
The treaty amounts to a shakedown of UK taxpayers by the Republic of Mauritius. In addition, it points to weakness in financial controls at His Majesty’s Treasury and by the Government. It may in due course create great misunderstanding if the Government have not properly appreciated the inflation exposure that they have in the contract. A future Government will meet that exposure with dismay, and future taxpayers will be taking the cost of it.
Lord Craig of Radley (CB)
My Lords, there is general agreement about the importance to the UK’s defence security, and to the USA’s, that a stable and legal arrangement should be agreed. The 100-year and more period of this treaty makes some valiant assumptions about the longevity of the relationships between the countries involved. Governments rise and fall, and relationships shift—sometimes dramatically, sometimes on a generational rather than a centenary timeframe. Although this is far from being a well-received arrangement and treaty, it may now be increasingly difficult to change course completely. However, in following from what the noble Lord, Lord Altrincham, was saying, I have one question about the arrangements covering the payments to the Government of Mauritius.
Article 11 of the treaty says that in consideration of the agreement, which applies to the whole of the Chagos Archipelago, certain sums will be paid to Mauritius. The exchange of letters dealing with the details of these arrangements also forms part of the agreement, but the British and American interest is confined to the island and surrounding seas of Diego Garcia. In 100 years and more, there must surely be a possibility of some natural catastrophe—an earthquake or tsunami, or even a rise in ocean levels due to global warming. The runway at Diego Garcia is only a metre above today’s sea level. Any of these might make the base and/or the airfield no longer functional. Has the UK any automatic right to cease payments to Mauritius if the base is no longer usable nor capable of recovery at any reasonable cost?
Maybe the Minister will point to some section of the agreement that covers this eventuality. If it is not explicitly covered, will Mauritius still be lawfully entitled to the annual payments even if Diego Garcia is unusable? Were the UK to stop payments, would it have to be settled along the lines outlined in this agreement by arbitration and, ultimately, agreement between the respective Prime Ministers? It would not be in the UK’s national interest to be devoting scarce defence funds to a useless white elephant, but a clash over interpretation could also be damaging to our national interest.
The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton of Richmond, raised this point on my behalf in the debate on 30 June. In reply, the Minister suggested:
“Like all small atoll islands, it is naturally dynamic”.
He would not speculate about future erosion but was confident that surveys overall concluded that the natural land area
“has decreased by less than a single percent over the last 50 years”.—[Official Report, 30/6/25; col. 535.]
Is that a sufficient reassurance about a natural disaster or sea levels not rising by less than a metre for the next 100 years-plus? Considerable sums might be at stake. If this eventuality is not satisfactorily covered, should it be corrected before the treaty is finally approved?
Baroness Meyer (Con)
My Lords, as I look at the empty Benches opposite, I wonder whether some Labour Peers are just realising how unnecessary and reckless the Bill is.
First, the people of the Chagos Islands were not even consulted about the future of their homeland. Having already suffered the injustices of forced removal half a century ago, they have now been denied a voice in deciding its fate. For a Government who claim to uphold human rights, this is an extraordinary moral failure. The treaty claims to allow a programme of resettlement on some of the outer islands but not on Diego Garcia itself, the very heart of their former homeland. It provides no detail on where, when or how such a return might occur. The Government concede that settlement remains “necessarily uncertain”. In reality, the Chagossians’ right of return depends entirely on the discretion of the Government of Mauritius, who have shown little interest in their welfare. So those who were exiled more than 50 years ago will once again be denied any guarantee of justice or a true homecoming.
Secondly, this Government have chosen to give away British territory to Mauritius, even though there was no legally binding obligation on the United Kingdom to do so. In February 2019, the International Court of Justice issued only an advisory opinion—a political statement that carries no legal force, not a judgment. I will not go on about all the legal bases for why there was no need for us to sign any legal agreement, which the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, pointed out earlier.
In short, the Government are acting not out of legal necessity but by choice, while jeopardising one of the most important axes in the defence of the free world. The Government insist that this is about the long-term security of the base, but under Article 13 the lease expires in 99 years. What happens if Mauritius decides not to renew the lease? Only last month, its Prime Minister publicly questioned the duration and terms of the lease, suggesting that it may not guarantee long-term British or American access. A poor country will always be tempted by Chinese money. What if Beijing simply outbids us? Without a right to extend, this deal does not secure Diego Garcia, safeguard the marine protected area or protect the rights of the Chagossian people.
This is not an investment; it is an expensive and humiliating surrender made at a time when British taxpayers are already struggling. The Prime Minister has admitted that it will cost around £3.4 billion but, as my noble friend Lady Noakes so clearly set out, it will be at least £35 billion. Why are we giving away billions of pounds for territory that we already administer while the Americans keep the base? In other words, Britain pays, America stays and China watches.
Thirdly, the freehold now rests with a non-nuclear power. What if Mauritius objects to nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed vessels using the port or airstrips, or imposes restrictions on operations vital to our defence? What if Chinese trawlers, granted fishing rights close to Diego Garcia, begin gathering intelligence under the cover of commerce? China, Russia and North Korea all have an interest in this vital region. This is not only a very expensive concession but a very dangerous one.
We have weakened our position, undermined our allies, burdened our taxpayers and silenced the Chagossians. This is quite simply the worst deal for Britain in living memory—a moral outrage, a legal folly and a strategic danger.
Does the Minister not agree that it is time to pause, admit that the Government have got it wrong and stand up for what is truly in our national interest? Will the Minister not agree that, before relinquishing sovereignty over any British territory, the Government have a duty to ensure the consent of its people? Can the Minister explain why the Government are proceeding with this Bill without first consulting the Chagossian people—those most directly affected by it? Will the Government commit to rectifying this omission—maybe, as suggested earlier, by a referendum? Will the Minister also confirm whether the Government recognise the Chagossian right to self-determination under international law, and if so, why their right of return has been made dependent on the discretion of Mauritius rather than on a clear guarantee within the treaty itself? Lastly, I remind the Minister that the trust fund is controlled by Mauritius and will not necessarily go to the British Chagossians.
Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer—despite not agreeing with a word she said. I am pleased because I have waited a long time to make this relatively short speech in this debate.
I concluded my contribution to the debate on 30 June on the Motion from the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, with the following sentence:
“I will offer this agreement my full support in these and any other proceedings in your Lordships’ House”.—[Official Report, 30/6/25; col. 524.]
That is still my position in relation to both the agreement and the Bill, the more so because, as my noble friend Lady Liddell remarked in the earlier debate in June, and as the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, reminded us today:
“Our allies, not just the Five Eyes communities of the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand—along with ourselves—but India, Japan and South Korea—
and the African Union
“—strongly support the deal”.—[Official Report, 30/6/25; col. 501.]
I congratulate my noble friend Lady Chapman of Darlington on her comprehensive opening remarks. I thank her and my noble friend Lord Coaker for their openness and engagement with noble Lords on the many issues and complications that are raised by this treaty. I thank my noble friends in particular for arranging an all-Peers drop-in session on the Bill on 29 October, and even more for ensuring that the key FCDO officials, including the UK chief negotiator, Harriet Matthews, were present to share their knowledge and respond to noble Lords’ remarks or questions, which they did candidly and, in my view, credibly. I am only sorry that the representatives of the Official Opposition who were in the room at the beginning of that conversation mostly left without taking advantage of the opportunity to question those who negotiated this and to ask the questions that they clearly have.
In as few minutes as I can possibly do, I will focus my speech on what was the main purpose of my speech on 30 June: to examine, in so far as I am able to, the principles that appear to underlie opposition to this treaty and, consequently, to the Bill.
The strategic importance of Diego Garcia and its base to the United Kingdom and the United States, and to all our allies globally, is well known. Interestingly, I found in my research, despite the fact that much of the commentary about this base refers to it as a secret base, that it is very easy to find out the detail of quite a substantial amount of its capability in open source. It is available in some detail. I proceed on the basis that no one engaged in this debate needs to be reminded of the specific or strategical operational support that it offers. My own experience of its importance to UK security and to that of our allies was the support that it gave our operations both in Iraq and in Afghanistan when I was the Secretary of State for Defence. I have no intention of going into the detail of that, but it is well known and, for those who do not know, a lot of this can be found in open source.
As a consequence of our agreement with Mauritius, we will have access to this capability, enhanced by more investment by the United States. It is not a case of saying that if we pay, the United States stays. The United States invests many multiples of its cash in this base in order to give it the extraordinary capability that it has. Nobody can do anything to change its position on the global map, but the Americans can continue to invest for a period and they have plans to invest further in the long term. We will get value for our money from what the Americans do to help support us and the way in which we work with them to make sure that capability improves all the time.
However, the fact of the matter is that in 2019, when the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion concluding that the UK’s administration of the Chagos Archipelago was unlawful and that Mauritius has sovereignty over the territory, it immediately imperilled continuing new and planned investment in Diego Garcia. I worry if this is not known to those on the opposite Benches. I understand, from an open source comment, that the US suspended that investment until the issue of sovereignty had been resolved. One of the advantages of having the negotiators in the meeting of 29 October was that I was able to ask them openly if the information, which is available for people to see and read, was known to the FCDO: was the fact this link existed known to the Government at the time when the negotiations started?
The uncertainty that justified the United States position is to be found in the evidence given by Sir Christopher Greenwood to the International Agreements Committee, which has also been referred to earlier by other speakers. Sir Christopher Greenwood is one of the UK’s pre-eminent practitioners of international law and a former judge in the International Court of Justice. In his opinion, any international court examining the sovereignty dispute would likely find in favour of Mauritius. Such an outcome would clearly represent a risk to the future of the military base, and thus to the UK’s national interests and security. That is not something we can just dismiss. Had the issue of sovereignty not being resolved by a negotiation, the suspension of US investment would also have represented a risk to the future of the military base, and thus to the UK’s national interests and security. That is the environment in which these decisions to enter negotiations were made back in November 2022.
I practised law for the best part of 20 years before I was elected. A substantial proportion of my practice was in negotiation. There are many lawyers in this House and I am sure that they realise that lawyers spend more time in negotiation than in almost anything else. On some occasions, my clients wanted me to enter negotiations in order to protect a status quo— I think we have called that a red line in this debate. It appears to me, from the many speeches that I have listened to, that this was the latter objective of the negotiations that the Conservative Government started: to get back to the status quo.
I always told my clients that I would argue for the status quo in negotiation but, if there was a judicial assessment that made the status quo unattainable, it would be a failure in the negotiations to try to achieve that. That is the situation that the Government were in in 2022.
The whole process, of course, started with the Written Statement made on 3 November. There has been toing and froing about what was said in the Statement in order to try to water it down, but let me read the first paragraph of that Statement, because it is extraordinarily revealing as to what the then Government were seeking to do. It reads:
“Following the meeting between the then Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Norfolk … and Prime Minister Jugnauth at the UN General Assembly, the UK and Mauritius have decided to begin negotiations on the exercise of sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT)/Chagos archipelago”.
Next comes the important sentence:
“Through negotiations, taking into account relevant legal proceedings, it is our intention to secure an agreement on the basis of international law to resolve all outstanding issues”?—[Official Report, Commons, 3/11/22; col. 27WS.]
In other words, we were beginning to negotiate with the only people we could negotiate with—Mauritius, which was holding this particular card—to transfer the sovereignty to them in a way that would give stability, allow our major ally to get back into the relationship that we had, and continue to build this mother of all bases in the world. It is as simple as that.
I do not understand why everyone is looking for explanations for this by suggesting that, in these 11 exercises of negotiation, we were seeking to do something else. It is perfectly clear what the Conservative Government was setting out to do. They were pushed into this position by the fact that the United States was unwilling to continue to invest in this until that uncertainty was resolved.
On 29 October, I took the opportunity to ask the negotiators if that was what they understood to be happening; that is exactly what they understood to be happening. I understand why now, for political reasons, the Opposition wish to rewrite this, but that is what they were doing and what we continued.
Secondly—
Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)
I am happy to stop there because I have made my point. The nonsense about the Chinese has already been dealt with.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
My Lords, to pick up on a theme identified by the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, and as identified by my honourable friend Tom Tugendhat on 9 September, when he noted in his speech at Second Reading of this Bill in the other place, yes, negotiations were commenced under the last Government. As Ministers, both he and I wrote to the Prime Minister—both Prime Ministers—to complain about the decision to institute those negotiations. We were right: the treaty was not one that should have been considered then, and it is not one that should be considered now; the whole principle was wrong then, and it is wrong now.
Why do I say that? The main rationale for handing over the islands is that an international tribunal—the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea—may abuse its jurisdiction in treating the ICJ’s advisory opinion as if it had established, as a matter of binding international law, that Mauritius was sovereign over the British Indian Ocean Territory. As I said when the House debated the treaty on 30 June, the risk of an adverse judgment and the real risk to the operation of the UK-US airfield at Diego Garcia are very significantly overplayed by those who favour this treaty. The ICJ had no such power and did not, in fact, reach the conclusion that Chagos should be transferred to Mauritius. Its advisory opinion left open other courses of action on the UK’s part other than surrender of the islands to Mauritius.
Mauritius cannot, as a matter of international law, secure a binding judgment before an international tribunal establishing that it is sovereign over the Chagos Islands, because the United Kingdom is not required to consent to a dispute of this nature being adjudicated by the International Court of Justice. Accordingly, if I might expand on the point made by my noble friend Lord Lilley, the Government explained their position by saying that they anticipated that another tribunal—as I said, specifically the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which, I may add, has no jurisdiction over questions of sovereignty over territory—will presuppose that the ICJ’s 2019 advisory opinion has settled that Mauritius is sovereign, and will thus proceed to exercise its jurisdiction in relation to disputes about the law of the sea on the premise that Mauritius, rather than the United Kingdom, is sovereign. Yet how can this be, since there is not a word about sovereignty over the Chagos Islands in that advisory opinion of the ICJ?
We must be in no doubt that the Government, on their own account, are handing over a priceless strategic asset and trampling over the Chagossian people as they do so, because they want to avoid being on the wrong end of a potential future abuse of adjudication. However, this is a premature and wholly unnecessary surrender that blazes a trail for other abuses of the ICJ’s advisory jurisdiction to be leveraged into future United Kingdom defeats and compromise of our vital interests. We need to resist now, not only for our national security and that of our global allies but also to refute this abuse of law.
Furthermore, the deal is a terrible one, for the reasons ably outlined by my noble friend Lord Blencathra. Some of the examples are that the terms of the treaty provide very little in the way of leverage or protection for the UK. We cannot, for example, withhold payments for a breach of the terms that nominally protect our interests, and there is no machinery to enforce Mauritius’s commitments. Instead, Mauritius will be well placed to take our money and to reach accommodations with other states in relation to the archipelago that are injurious to our interests.
Lord Beamish (Lab)
I am following the noble Lord very closely, and I do not disagree with some of the points is making. Could he, however, clarify why it was that James Cleverly on 3 November said that the Government were to
“begin negotiations on the exercise of sovereignty over the British Indian Ocean Territory”?—[Official Report, Commons, 3/11/22; col. 27WS.]
Clearly, the Government then were talking about the sovereignty of the actual islands.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
As I said earlier in my remarks, that was a decision with which I strongly disagreed then, and I strongly disagree now. He was plainly wrong in so saying.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
Forgive me: I have given way once, and time is limited.
Professor Ekins, professor of law and constitutional government at Oxford, set out in detail, when he gave evidence to the House of Lords International Agreements Committee, the failings in the treaty. In particular, he set it out in even more detail in his Policy Exchange paper published at that time. I strongly urge the Minister to consider those two items in detail during the pause in proceedings brought about by the decision not to proceed with the committal Motion tonight.
There can be little doubt, contrary to the Government’s expostulations about saving the base, so ably outlined by my noble friend Lord Altringham, that this in fact weakens the strategic interests of our country. It does so without any sound legal or geopolitical basis, and, as many noble Lords have noted, without any reference to the wishes of those who lived in the archipelago, shamefully removed on the orders of a Labour Government —a shame that, as the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, noted, is about to be repeated and amplified by this present Labour Government.
Finally, the Minister said that the previous Government had entirely overlooked the Chagossian people, a calumny that was repeated by the noble Lord, Lord Beamish. Not so. Section 3 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 —a Conservative piece of legislation—was the first legislation to make provision for Chagos Islanders and their direct descendants to obtain British nationality, something successive Labour Governments had failed to provide.
Lord Biggar (Con)
My Lords, the treaty that the Bill before us would ratify vaunts its righting of the historic wrong done to the Chagossians, while doing little for them. It signals its virtue, without much exercising it. That has been made plain several times over the past few hours, so I will not labour it.
As my noble friend Lord Hannan of Kingsclere has rightly urged, the treaty’s real concern is not the Chagossians but completing the decolonisation of Mauritius. The Government accept the ICJ’s 2019 advisory opinion that, in effect, the detachment of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius in 1965 was unlawful because it defied UN General Assembly resolutions in 1960 and 1966. These declared that:
“Any attempt aimed at … disruption of the national unity and the territorial integrity of a country is incompatible with … the Charter of the United Nations”.
The 1966 one urged that the UK take no action that would dismember the territory of Mauritius and violate its territorial integrity.
However, this principle of non-partition is nonsense. Supporting the 1960 resolution, the president of the General Assembly, Irish diplomat Frederick Boland, invoked Ireland’s loss of its historic integrity to illustrate the injustice of partition. He thereby expressed the Irish nationalist’s typical historical blindness. The island of Ireland had never been a political unit, apart from its union with Great Britain; and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Foster of Aghadrumsee, has already well said, there is no natural law prescribing that a geographical integrity has to be a political one. On the contrary, there can be good reasons for dividing it. Ireland was divided in 1922 because Irish republicans wanted home rule so much that they were prepared to use violence to attain it, while Irish unionists disliked it so much that they were prepared to take up arms to oppose it. Ireland was petitioned to prevent civil war—a justified act of political prudence. What is more, if the principle of non-partition were applied impartially, applicants to the ICJ would be clamouring for the restoration of the territorial integrity of British India and the return of the Gulf states and Burma to rule by Delhi. Oddly, we hear no such clamour.
The 1966 resolution is no less absurd than the 1960 one. It appeals to the national unity of Mauritius—as if the Chagos Islands were not separated by more than 1,000 miles of Indian Ocean, and as if the islanders were an integral part of the Mauritian people; but many Chagossians feel as Mauritian as Irish republicans feel British. The only connection between Mauritius and the Chagos Islands is an accident of colonial administrative convenience. Talk of some national unity that was ruptured in 1965 is an opportunistic fiction.
Notwithstanding its opportunistic absurdity, the principle of non-partition was invoked and confirmed by the ICJ in its advisory opinion. What is more, the court used that principle to adjudicate a crucial point of contention between Mauritius and the UK, notwithstanding the fact that, when originally submitting itself to the court, the UK explicitly excluded its jurisdiction over such a dispute.
Among the Government’s several, shifting justifications for signing the treaty is said to be the fear that a subsequent international tribunal—such as the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea—would use the ICJ’s opinion to make a binding judgment against the UK. Therefore, to avoid that embarrassment, the Government prefer to give up the fight now, conceding sovereignty and negotiating an expensive lease.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Jay of Ewelme, that international law deserves respect. However, I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Weir of Ballyholme, that respect requires much more than blind, slavish compliance. When international law embodies an absurd principle that is opportunistically and partially applied outside of its agreed jurisdiction, it brings the international order into disrepute and corrodes the law’s authority.
For the sake of upholding confidence in international law, the UK should stand its ground, argue the strong, rational case for its sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, expose the imprudence and partiality of the General Assembly’s resolutions, and remind the international community that the ICJ has no jurisdiction. If some international tribunal were irresponsible enough to issue a binding judgment against the UK on the basis of the ICJ’s opinion, the UK should, with respect, not comply with it.
I have no doubt that that would cost us diplomatic good will in progressive circles that are entranced by an idealised view of international law, but we have no good will to lose with ideologically hostile states such as China, Russia and Iran. The rest of the so-called global South is not a politically uniform bloc; it embraces nations ranging from India to Nigeria and Peru, which have divergent—sometimes opposing—interests and views. They would not all react with equal disapproval to our principled non-compliance. Some might even be impressed by a self-confident Britain’s refusal to yield to opportunistic lawfare, in bold defence of the law’s integrity.
This treaty is disingenuous in championing the Chagossians and slavish in its blind compliance with absurd and partial law. For those reasons, we should not ratify it.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
My Lords, over breakfast I read the views of the noble Lord, Lord Biggar, and can confirm that they have not changed over the course of the day.
I begin with an apology to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. He, the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and I spent 10 years in the Permanent Secretary’s office in the Foreign Office, and I certainly never discovered the secret plan to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago that officials were apparently sitting on. I saw a number of changes of Foreign Secretary, and I cannot remember ever seeing the huddle of officials saying, “Is this the soft one we can manage to persuade that it’s time to cede the Chagos Archipelago?” I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, may have been watching too much “Yes, Minister”. It is sad that he has never been Foreign Secretary, because he has far too high an opinion of officials in the Foreign Office.
I have only three small points to make; I will be very brief, because I spoke at enormous length when we debated the treaty in July. At that time, the Opposition suggested that the treaty should not be ratified, but the House voted that it should be ratified. It cannot be ratified without this Bill; therefore, we should now pass it. That is my first point.
My second point is about the China syndrome. We heard then, and we are hearing again today, even from the Opposition Front Bench, the theory that recognising Mauritian sovereignty somehow opens the door to Chinese influence in the Chagos Archipelago and to a Chinese threat to the base. I have never understood this theory. If the risk were real, why did the Indians warmly welcome the treaty? Why did Secretary of State Rubio in Washington call the treaty a “monumental achievement”? Mr Rubio, like President Trump, is hardly soft on China. Mauritius is one of the only two African countries that have not signed up to the belt and road initiative. Why would the Mauritians enrage the Indians, to whom they are close, by helping the Chinese, whom they seriously distrust? Why would they forgo the payments we would be making? The theory makes no sense, and I strongly suspect that some of those who advance it know that perfectly well.
That brings me to my third point, which is, of course, the emollient one. The pernicious doctrine that the duty of opposition is to oppose, regardless of principle, merit or consistency, is perhaps particularly irresponsible in the sphere of foreign affairs. Mr Cleverly announced in 2022 that we would open negotiations to
“ensure the continued effective operation of the joint UK/US military base on Diego Garcia, which plays a vital role in regional and global security”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/11/22; col. 27WS.]
We agreed; I heard no dissent. I did not know about the approaches of the noble Lord, Lord Murray. There was no public dissent from what the Government were going to do.
Under Foreign Secretary Cameron, negotiations continued—11 rounds, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, reminded us. I am rather sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, is not here tonight. It would have been very good to have his verdict on the Bill which results from the work he supervised. The legal issues and the China risk explored by Conservative Back-Benchers today will have been thoroughly explained to him at the time. Indeed, we now know that the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Blidworth, no less, advised against the course that he was pursuing. There is nothing new in these arguments. They were known to the Conservative Ministers who proceeded with the negotiations.
The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, said that it is one thing to start a negotiation about transferring sovereignty and quite another to conclude one. That is very true, but if I were absolutely determined not to cede sovereignty, I do not think I would start a negotiation about ceding sovereignty. I do not think, if I was strongly convinced that it was a bad idea, that I would have let it run on for 11 negotiating rounds.
We are shortly to hear from the Front Benches. I look forward to hearing from the Liberal Democrats; their concerns about the Chagossians do them credit. Their reservations about the treaty are ones I understand —they are honourable, although I believe they are unjustified.
We will also be hearing from the Conservative Front Bench—the heirs of Cameron and Cleverly. I have the greatest respect for the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, not least because she hails from my part of the world. So my hopes are high that, unlike some of her colleagues, including those on the Front Bench, she will contrive to steer clear of the twin rocks of hypocrisy and irresponsibility.
Lord Northbrook (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of the Chagos Islands APPG. I give its secretary, David Snoxell, credit for persevering with the cause over the years. Unfortunately, having reflected carefully on the issue and the treaty, I have come to disagree on the conclusions formed by many of the group. I now feel that Mauritius will unfairly benefit more from the treaty than the Chagossians will. Indeed, I now feel that this agreement is bad for our national security and financially a disaster.
Until recently, I was under several misapprehensions. First, I was led to believe that the International Court of Justice—ICJ—verdict that the island should be handed back to Mauritius was legally binding on the UK. Secondly, I had not realised that the UK had already paid Mauritius £3 million in 1965 to retain ownership of the Chagos Islands after Mauritian independence. Thirdly, I believed that the UK was bound by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea—UNCLOS. Fourthly, I believed that we had to obey the diktat of the International Telecommunication Union—ITU—concerning the threat to the electromagnetic spectrum. Fifthly, I had underestimated the threat to the islands on the defence front from future restrictions on nuclear weapons and from encroachment by China, Russia and Iran. Sixthly, I am not sure that the guarantees and financial promises to the Chagossians will be honoured.
I will now deal with each of the above issues in turn. First, on the ICJ verdict, I have since discovered that, while from February 2017 the UK has accepted in declarations all judgments of the ICJ, it does not accept that they apply to any dispute with the Government of any country which is or has been a member of the Commonwealth.
Secondly, the payment of £3 million in 1965—over £80 million in today’s money—means that we should not be paying Mauritius again.
Thirdly, the UK is not legally bound by the decisions of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. According to Dr Luke Evans, at Second Reading in the other place on 9 September,
“back in 2015, under annex VII, the tribunal agreed with the UK that sovereignty could not be determined by UNCLOS. This was a marine protection issue”.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/9/25; col. 818.]
Fourthly, as forensically examined by colleagues in the other place—Sir Jeremy Wright, Sir John Whittingdale and Mark Francois—it is clear that the ITU has no jurisdiction over the UK’s electromagnetic spectrum. The ITU treaty, to which we and others are a party, states specifically that the ITU has no authority over the allocation of military spectrum. Individual countries, not the ITU, make their own sovereign spectrum assignments in accordance with the radio regulations. The ITU has no legal authority over these assignments regardless of the country’s civilian or military classification of spectrum. Will the Minister please confirm this, in light of the fact that any judgment by the ICJ against us is not legally binding?
Fifthly, I want to focus on the defence threat to the West from this deal. The Pelindaba treaty, as already mentioned, to which Mauritius is a signatory, prohibits the stationing and storage of nuclear weapons, yet Ministers have failed to explain what that will mean in practice once sovereignty is transferred. Also, an element of the agreement involves a requirement for us to expeditiously inform Mauritius of any armed attack on a third state directly emanating from the base. Can the Minister tell us whether this means that it must be done before the armed attack?
The defence threat also comes from hostile powers in the region. The risk to Britain’s security is great. Diego Garcia is our most strategic and important base in the Indian Ocean, critical to our partnership with the United States, and vital to project influence in the Indo-Pacific. Yet the Bill leaves huge questions unanswered. What safeguards will prevent hostile powers such as China, Russia and Iran seeking a foothold in the archipelago once Britain steps back? Beijing already describes Mauritius as a partner with strategic advantages, and Mauritius could well join its belt and road initiative. Port Louis boasts of advancing co-operation with Russia. Iran, since the first Iran-Mauritius Economic Forum in 2022, has explored export and import opportunities and joint ventures in agriculture, fisheries, pharmaceutical industries and nanotechnology.
Sixthly, I want to focus on the situation for the Chagossians themselves after this treaty. The speeches at Second Reading by the Labour MP Peter Lamb and the Conservative MP Aphra Brandreth are very relevant on the subject. Peter Lamb, MP for Crawley, where many Chagossian exiles live, makes very relevant points, from which I shall quote directly:
“Although mention of the Chagossians is made in the wording of the deal, I remain concerned … that there are gaps that leave the Chagossian people at risk. While there is the option for Chagossians to be allowed by the Mauritian Government to return to the islands, there is no requirement in the deal that that happens. There is no guarantee that any Chagossian who does return to the archipelago will not face restrictions that prevent permanent habitation, even at a subsistence level of economic activity. There is no guarantee at this time that the trust fund that is being created will be in the control of the Chagossians and used exclusively to address the consequences of their forcible removal from the islands. There is no guarantee that returning Chagossians will not face a 10-year prison sentence for questioning Mauritian territorial integrity through taking on British citizenship”.
Aphra Brandreth adds another key point on the issue, saying:
“The Government must … take the opportunity to implement a recommendation put forward by the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee and International Agreements Committee … that looked at the treaty. They urged the Government to ‘Enhance Chagossian engagement by establishing a formal consultation mechanism with the Chagossian community to monitor the Agreement’s implementation and ensure their meaningful inclusion in decision-making.’ Will the Minister confirm whether that recommendation will be implemented?”
Further, she states that
“the … trust fund, established as part of the UK-Mauritius treaty and financed by the UK, is to be distributed solely under the control of Mauritius, yet the Bill contains no provisions to monitor whether the rights of British Chagossians are upheld or to create any statutory oversight of the trust fund. Have Ministers secured from the Government of Mauritius any firm commitment that British Chagossians will have a formal role in the oversight and decision making regarding the fund? Indeed, why was a model of joint governance not agreed, ensuring that British Chagossians themselves have a voice in how the fund is governed and can benefit directly from it?”.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/9/25; cols. 773, 812.]
In conclusion, this is a terrible deal for the UK, giving away full ownership of a vital defence asset and paying the Mauritian Government an extraordinary sum of £34 billion in cash terms to lease it back. I have shown how the key pillars of the Government’s argument for the necessity of doing this do not stand up. These are, namely, the ICJ judgment, the ITLOS argument and the electromagnetic spectrum. I reiterate that the Chagossians have certainly not been looked after in this deal, hence I would have strongly supported the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, in his amendment.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
My Lords, I wish to acknowledge those of the Chagossian community who are here observing this debate, those following it at home and those who will read it. My noble friend Lady Ludford, in her powerful contribution to the debate, informed by decades of work on behalf of the Chagossians, told us of the remarkable sequence of November anniversaries, including some which are a dark stain on this country with regards to how we have treated the Chagossian community. We should all share blame for this generational mistreatment.
I start by stressing in clear terms that we still need more clarity on the rights given, potentially, to the Chagossians of a permissive nature, but by virtue of us providing those rights to the Mauritian Government, not directly to the Chagossians themselves. I hope the House will recognise that this has been a consistent and constant concern of these Benches, and it continues. We pursued it in the debate on the treaty and I am glad that the Minister acknowledged it in her opening remarks. My colleagues in the House of Commons pursued it when the Bill was in Committee there and I reiterate it today.
A test for us now is how, finally, we give rights back to Chagossians, including the right of self-determination for their future, which should be in their hands. If we negotiate an agreement on Gibraltar with the statement, “Nothing for Gibraltar without the Gibraltarians”, that should apply in this context too. Indeed, we divided the House of Commons in Committee on the right to self-determination. It is worth placing on the record in this debate, which I point out to the noble Baronesses, Lady Foster and Lady Meyer, that the Conservative Official Opposition did not support us in that. It is fine to call for self-determination and a referendum in this debate, but it is worth recalling that, just a couple of weeks ago, that party opposed it in the House of Commons.
We touched a little on history today. I went through a lot of the history in the debate on the treaty, so I do not need to rehearse it. Today, there was a slight new edge to this. It was interesting that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, criticised the Labour Government for concluding an agreement in 1965. That may well have had cross-party support, but the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Blidworth, called it a shame on our country. With interesting parallels, it should be recognised that negotiations to detach the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius commenced on 29 June 1964, under the Conservative Government. The Conservative Party has form, as the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, might say.
Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)
Forgive me, but the shame, as I am sure the noble Lord will agree, comes from the removal of the Chagossian people from the Chagos Islands, not from the agreement itself.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
Yes, and as the noble Lord will recall from the debate that we had on the treaty, that was accelerated under the Heath Administration in 1970 and concluded under the Conservative Government. The denial of repatriation was then subsequently under another Conservative Government. My point is that all of us in this country have a dark record when it comes to Chagossian rights. Our task now should be how we at least restore some of those.
The noble Lord, Lord Callanan, started his remarks by saying that the House of Commons was denied the opportunity of debating the treaty during the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act period of scrutiny. He knows, because he will remember the debate we had on the treaty, that, as Erskine May makes perfectly clear, one of the mechanisms for the House of Commons to deny ratification of a treaty would be through an Opposition day debate. During the scrutiny period of this treaty in the House of Commons, the Conservative Party chose a different subject for its Opposition day debate. It had the chance, if it chose to take it, of debating and moving an amendment in the House of Commons during the scrutiny period.
We are here today debating this Bill for one reason and one reason alone: the previous Administration made a political decision to cede sovereignty and to enter into negotiations to conclude this. I hear noble Lords saying no, and I will come on to that, when they may wish to change their minds. Not one Conservative colleague today said why the previous Government opened negotiations to cede sovereignty in 2022. The then Government did not open negotiations to improve relations or co-operation with Mauritius. They made the principal decision to cede sovereignty, but they still have not said why. I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, will outline clearly today why that was the case.
All legal considerations on this issue, which have been debated quite a lot during this debate, predate 2022. The complaints received in this debate predate James Cleverly and that Government’s decision. We have had complaints in this debate from the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, of the current Attorney-General and the advice given to this Administration. As my intervention on the noble Baroness suggested, the same would have been the case under the previous Government. I assume that when the previous Government made the policy decision in November 2022 to open negotiations which would conclude with the ceding of sovereignty, they were also advised by Attorneys-General. I have a hunch that it might have been the Attorney-General at the time of November 2022, but it could have been any of the three Attorneys-General that the Government had in 2022. No doubt, history will tell us which one of those it was.
A new argument has been presented today by the noble Lords, Lord Lilley and Lord Blencathra, that the Conservative Government were powerless and feeble and that their Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries were forced against their will by officialdom to make that statement in 2022. This is the argument of being in office but not in power. It was our suspicion at the time that the Conservatives were in office but not in power, and I am glad noble Lords have confirmed that.
I understand the argument that might say that this is a bad deal or that it has been handled badly. I think that many parts of it remain problematic, and I would have liked the Government to have handled it differently. But that is different from the Conservative Opposition in the Commons, who said in their amendment that they were “implacably” opposed to “ceding sovereignty”. They were not implacably opposed to ceding sovereignty in November 2022, so what changed?
Lord Bellingham (Con)
The noble Lord is actually putting a very strong case. What I said in my speech was that there was a red line about a sovereign base area—the concession of sovereignty across all the rest of the territory, but keeping the sovereignty of the base.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
I am grateful to the noble Lord; I listened carefully to his speech, which he made in his characteristically sincere way. I will try to address that point in a moment.
I asked: what changed? In the absence of the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, explaining when she winds up on behalf of her party what policy changes were being made, I might assume that the only relevant change is the fact that the Conservatives were in government and are now in opposition. Without there being a clear policy change, we can only make that assumption.
This is quite important because the Statement in 2022 said,
“on the exercise of sovereignty”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/11/22; col. 27WS.]
I have wondered why the same party that was implacably opposed then can be in favour of it now, especially because that Statement by the Government said that they were doing this to “resolve all outstanding issues” of international law. They knew that they had to resolve those outstanding issues of international law, but now they are denying the very virtue of the fact that they had any issues at all to address. That is quite hard to understand, and they have not made it any clearer today.
The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bellingham, was also made by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. The 2022 Statement, which was the policy choice of the previous Government, was a mistake—as the noble Lord, Lord Bellingham, indicated; I respect his honesty —or was, according to some of his colleagues, the result of deep state. Nevertheless, if that had raised serious defence concerns, the Minister of State in the Ministry of Defence at the time would presumably have raised concerns about it. That Minister was the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, so she has ample opportunity to address the noble Lords’ points in her speech today.
Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
We have heard a lot about what has gone on in the past and whether the Conservatives did this or that. What I want to know is: are the Liberal Democrats implacably opposed to this treaty? Do they want to see the Chagossians be given full democracy and have their rights listened to?
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
I am sure that the noble Baroness heard me—I am sure she was paying attention to the early part of my contribution—when I said that we moved that very Motion in the House of Commons just a few days ago but did not get support from the Official Opposition. So I appeal to the noble Baroness to wait until the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, makes her contribution and then to intervene on her with the same question.
The noble Lord, Lord Murray, made an interesting contribution. It was a post hoc breach of collective responsibility when he referred to his letter of opposition to that policy choice of his Government. I was going to intervene on him to ask politely whether he would place that letter in the Library for us all to see; I am very curious about it. I would be interested to know how many of his colleagues made the same complaints. I have mentioned the fact that one of those colleagues was the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie; of course, another of his ministerial colleagues at the time was the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. He did not intervene on the noble Lord, Lord Murray, so I assume that he did not write a letter of complaint at the time; I am sure that we will find out in due course.
Ultimately, we have to recognise, to be fair to the previous Government, that they entered into negotiations in good faith. I do not think a British Government would likely enter into negotiations on the ceding of sovereignty if they knew that the conclusion of that was not the ceding of sovereignty, so I give credit to the previous Government for acting in good faith about that. The question now is how we seek to raise our concerns on those very aspects of the Chagossians’ right to self-determination and on the scrutiny and operation of the trust fund. I hope we can continue to raise these concerns during the passage of the Bill in good faith.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
My Lords, I will try to get this debate back on track and deal with the issues that I think have been confronting us. The debate was ably introduced by the Minister and it has been predictably interesting, presenting some sharply contrasting views. It has also demonstrated a dichotomy between sincerely held views of former and venerable public servants and political views. There has been a further dichotomy within the political classes as to what constitutes responsible decision-making. As my noble friend Lord Murray indicated, even within the same party you can sometimes find a dichotomy of view—it happens, I say to the Minister. I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, that when it comes to a party having differences of view, I would think the Liberal Democrats could give master classes.
The position of these Benches was laid out clearly by my noble friend Lord Callanan. He also addressed the precipitate and surprising decision of the Government to delay their own Bill by, unusually, not proceeding with a committal Motion. The Minister, with admirable verbal gymnastics, sought heroically, if perhaps not completely convincingly, to explain that decision, but I think the reason is simple: the Government had concerns that the sensible amendment to the committal Motion that my noble friend had tabled was drawing support, and it may well have been that the Government were fearful that support for the amendment or a version of it would prevail and the Government would lose. But that was a judgment for the Government to make. I observe that the amendment was not prescriptive and would have left matters entirely under the control of the Government. What has now emerged is a welcome breathing space for the Government to consider and answer some serious questions about the agreement on which the Bill is predicated. Some of these questions have already been asked, but it will be my pleasure in a moment to add to them.
My noble friend Lord Callanan raised some of the most serious issues arising from the agreement, and it is interesting that the concerns he expressed were mirrored during the debate by a number of contributors. If we look at the agreement and at the trust fund, we find that there is an absence of knowing in detail what the views of the Chagossian people are on these issues. That was raised by a number of contributors, including my noble friend Lord Lilley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, has concerns about that.
The noble Lord, Lord Morrow, and my noble friends Lord De Mauley and Lord Bellingham spoke movingly about the treatment to which the Chagossian people have been subjected over decades. I found that moving— I say to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that I am not being hypocritical in expressing that sentiment—and it was very much echoed by the noble Baronesses, Lady Hoey and Lady Foster of Aghadrumsee, who graphically described the lack of engagement in relation to current matters.
Then there is the issue of money—in today’s economic climate, a hot potato if ever there was one. The Chancellor is scratching around looking for every penny she can find, defence urgently needs upfront cash and taxes are almost certainly going up, yet the British taxpayer is going to be asked to pay almost £35 billion to Mauritius, a point that was raised by a number of contributors. My noble friend Lady Noakes gave a devastatingly forensic analysis of the costs and the Government’s disparate approach, and I will leave that to the Minister to respond to. Those concerns were echoed by the noble Baroness, Lady Foster of Aghadrumsee, and the noble Lord, Lord Weir of Ballyholme.
Then there was the position of China, and the not imagined but avowed objective of China to strengthen ties with Mauritius because of its strategic advantages, and China’s commitment to elevating the bilateral strategic partnership. These clearly cause concern to many of your Lordships, notably my noble friend Lord De Mauley. Even the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, nobly supporting his Government, said, “China is a threat”. I agree. That was again referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Weir of Ballyholme. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that I was a Defence Minister for nearly four and a half years, and one of my areas of responsibility was south-east Asia. China is a resolute prosecutor of its own interests, with an overt desire to exercise influence globally. At our peril do we waver in our vigilance.
Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)
I am so grateful to the noble Baroness. I just want to say that I am quite sure that the Mauritians would agree with that.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
That is an unexpected source of encouragement, for which I thank the noble Lord.
Finally, and very importantly, the defence and security implications of this arrangement are clearly ringing alarm bells, as noted in the contributions from my noble friends Lord Lilley, Lord Blencathra, Lord De Mauley and Lord Bellingham. My noble friend Lord Bellingham helpfully distinguished between this agreement and the sovereign base areas in Cyprus, to which the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, referred. The whole point is that we have sovereignty in Cyprus and can control these arrangements, but we cannot under this arrangement: we are in the hands of the agreement and Mauritius’s disposition to us.
The Minister described the base as a prized military asset. I was very glad to hear that and, of course, I agree. It was also emphasised by the noble Lord, Lord Jay. But it is this aspect of defence and security to which I wish to devote my final remarks. The Minister already has a lot of questions to which a response is required, and the observations from my noble friend Lord Lilley certainly require comment, but here is my addendum.
With the help of the Bill, I have been endeavouring to knit together the components of the agreement with the text of the Bill. Seeking clarification from the Government on a number of vital points is part of a necessary scrutiny process, but His Majesty’s Opposition reserve their overall position on the Bill and will determine their approach at a subsequent stage in the procedure. In the meantime, let me set a general perspective.
We reach the ninth introductory paragraph to the agreement before there is any mention of
“protecting international peace and security”,
with specific reference to
“the long-term, secure and effective operation of the Base on Diego Garcia”.
Although I might have hoped for earlier recognition of the primacy of defence and security, this is where we are. But the drafting confirms that this is a pivotal part of the agreement, which then promotes defence and security to Article 3 of the agreement and enhances that status by including Annex 1, so progress has been made. I mention this because it goes to the heart of what the agreement stands for, what it is about, and the need for absolute clarity.
There is the further question of the extent to which material text in the agreement should be replicated in the Bill. I propose to raise a number of factual questions, which I appreciate may require the Minister to go back to her officials. I am content that she does that and can respond by letter, a copy of which could perhaps be laid in the Library. At least the Government have now helpfully provided some time within which to do that.
Going back to the agreement, under Article 3,
“the Parties shall not undermine, prejudice or otherwise interfere with the long-term, secure and effective operation of the Base, and shall cooperate to that end”.
That is an undertaking of fundamental importance by Mauritius to the UK. It explicitly implies that Mauritius should not enter into any arrangements, either on its own account or with any third party, which could be in breach of that undertaking. That, by implication, logically confers upon the UK a right to respond to such arrangements by taking whatever action is necessary to safeguard the base, and our interests and those of our allies on the base. Can the Minister confirm that that is the Government’s understanding?
An important protection is granted to the UK by Annex 1, paragraph—
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
Forgive me for interrupting, but the noble Baroness said a few minutes ago that the sovereign base area in Cyprus was not the subject of a treaty. It was the subject of three treaties: the Treaty of Guarantee, the Treaty of Alliance and the treaty of establishment.
Baroness Goldie (Con)
I hesitate to correct the noble Lord. I think what I said in response to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, was that the sovereign base areas in Cyprus and this arrangement are not the same. The point that the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, made was, in fact, about expeditiously communicating with Cyprus if we are going to do something. With the greatest respect to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, I thank him for his intervention but I think we are slightly on different planes.
I had got to the UK’s position under Annex 1, paragraph 1A, which says that the UK shall have
“unrestricted access, basing and overflight for United Kingdom and United States of America aircraft and vessels to enter into the sea and airspace of Diego Garcia”.
That is good. Annex 1, paragraph 1B(i), says the UK shall have “unrestricted ability” to
“control the conduct and deployment of armed operations and lethal capabilities”
on Diego Garcia. That is strong; it is a clear reassurance and there should be no ambiguity as to what it means. But less clear is Annex 1, paragraph 1B(viii), which says the UK shall have “unrestricted ability” to
“permit access, basing and overflight for non-United Kingdom and non-United States of America aircraft and vessels, upon notification to Mauritius”.
If that is merely a courtesy intimation then it does not compromise the UK controlling the conduct and deployment of armed operations and lethal capabilities on Diego Garcia. If that notification requires the consent of Mauritius then it most assuredly does, so can the Minister confirm that such intimation is purely a courtesy and that consent to the proposed action is not required from Mauritius?
Under Annex 1, paragraph 2, the UK
“agrees to expeditiously inform Mauritius of any armed attack on a third State directly emanating from the Base on Diego Garcia”.
It is in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and a territorial armed attack on a third state could theoretically be mounted from the base, albeit that is perhaps unlikely. Can the Minister confirm whether that obligation to inform “expeditiously” extends to assets which, for example, merely called into the base to refuel and are once again at sea or airborne? Does that obligation also apply if UK forces disable hostile aircraft, drones, ships or other devices which present a threat to the base?
I ask these questions because in any live conflict, the environment is kinetic. The last thing on the minds of military commanders will be seeking consents. These questions which I have posed require clear, unambiguous answers.
I turn to how the agreement engages with the Bill. I would have thought that the issues I have already raised, plus the importance of the role of the joint commission under Article 12 and the mechanism for setting disputes under Article 14, all merit a specific mention in the Bill. Can the Minister confirm whether the Government are prepared to look at the drafting of the Bill with a view to incorporating some of these issues into it?
Specifically, there is in the Bill a reservation to His Majesty under his prerogative to make laws for Diego Garcia and to empower His Majesty to make Orders in Council. I raised this at the very helpful briefing meeting held by the Minister, for which I thank her, but I will add this point. His Majesty is commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces. What if a threat to the safety of our Armed Forces manifests in the base itself or in the assets operating from there? If there is a disagreement with Mauritius as to the character and gravity of that threat and how the UK proposes to respond, does the lawmaking power under Clause 3(3) prevail to do whatever is necessary to protect our military and civilian personnel and our assets?
This agreement raises two profound concerns. First, if the Government concede this area of British sovereignty, how safe are our other crown territories—the Falklands, Gibraltar and our sovereign bases in Cyprus? The moment that lawyers come sniffing around any of those, will this Government be resolute and stand up to that? Secondly, this agreement should not be seen as some tying up of loose legal ends with a box ticked. It has a significant impact on the British taxpayer, on the Chagossians themselves and on our defence and security interests.
Notwithstanding the acknowledged authority of the noble Lords, Lord Browne of Ladyton and Lord Beamish, and the respect in which they are held in this House, the lack of support from the Government’s own Back Benches is troubling. I look forward to the Minister’s response, because this debate has raised a series of profoundly concerning substantive issues, and this Chamber needs reassurance.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I start by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, for her closing speech. It was exactly the kind of speech I would have expected from her. It was forensic and detailed, asking absolutely legitimate questions that any respectable Opposition should put to a Government proposing this kind of Bill. I will try to answer all her questions— I was writing as quickly as I could—but I may not get through them all. The idea of a letter in the Library, explaining the detail so that everybody can see what we have to say, is a very good one. I would be happy to do that.
I thank all noble Lords for their contributions. It has been lively, as I suspected it might be. I might say that I agreed with some contributions more than others, and some were probably better informed than others, but that is the nature of these things. I will endeavour to respond to all the points raised by noble Lords, and we will, I hope, have further discussions in Committee on many of those.
I would like to remind the House why we are scrutinising and reviewing a Bill sent to us from the other place. The Bill is essential to ensure that the treaty with Mauritius can be ratified, a treaty that is fundamental to safeguarding the operations of a critical UK-US base on Diego Garcia and to the security of British people. As the noble Lord, Lord Jay, said, the Bill is also vital to protecting the British citizenship rights of Chagossians.
Noble Lords have questioned the legal rationale for this deal and asked what court could give a binding judgment. Let me set this out again: as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, explained well in his speech, if a long-term deal had not been reached, it is highly likely that further wide-ranging litigation would have been brought quickly against the UK. Both the International Agreements Committee and the International Relations and Defence Committee, in scrutinising the treaty, heard evidence of where these binding judgments could come from.
One possibility is that Mauritius would find a dispute under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that it could bring before an arbitral tribunal under Annexe VII of the convention. That also raises the prospect that Mauritius would seek provisional measures from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. Provisional measures of this type and the decision of an arbitral tribunal would each be legally binding on the UK. A further possibility is that a dispute under a multilateral treaty could be brought before the International Court of Justice. A judgment delivered in the manner by the ICJ in disputes between states may also be legally binding.
There are those—we have had this ever since we started debating this issue—who question where this binding judgment might arise, but they are fundamentally missing the point here. The risk was real. International courts were already reaching judgments on the basis that Mauritius had sovereignty, and this in turn, as my noble friend Lord Browne explained, put the base at real risk. The point is that the treaty with Mauritius prevents that happening in the future.
Noble Lords are perfectly entitled to take a different view on the extent of that risk; that is absolutely their right. The Government’s view is that that risk is real. Having that view, any responsible Government making that assessment has to seek to resolve it and to come to some lasting, legally enforceable arrangement with Mauritius. That is why we did the deal. Noble Lords are entitled to disagree with the Government, and I have absolutely no issue with that, but please do not impute some sort of bad intent or motive around political correctness, colonialism or any of those things. Our intention is to secure that base for the benefit of the security of our country. We did it so an agreement could be concluded on our terms, rather than it being forced upon us so that we would have to accept the imposition of an arrangement that would not have been in our favour.
I am interpreting the questions from the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, on the overseas territories as an invitation to the Government to restate their longstanding and clear commitment to all our overseas territories. The Conservatives, at some points in these debates, although not recently—the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, never did this, but others did—would raise the issue of the Falkland Islands. I thought that that was the height of irresponsibility, and I am very glad that they no longer attempt to bring that question into these discussions, because it was wrong that they did that.
This treaty has a complex resolution process attached to it because it needs to be long-lasting, and we are trying to cover every eventuality that might arise. That is a really good subject for us to get into in Committee, and we must test that to make sure that we have got that right. I have every confidence that the noble Baroness and her colleagues will bring to us situations that we need to hold up against that process, to make sure that we have got that right.
On the notification of activities of third countries with our consent, there is a notification there. I think that is right, but it is not in any way conditional. We do not need consent. It is not about permission or any of those things. I hope that that is helpful.
On the ability to make law, we had an interesting discussion at the briefing about royal prerogative and the ability of the King to make law in Diego Garcia. We need to get into that in Committee. There will be things in the Bill that, when I was sitting in the noble Baroness’s place, I would have been asking questions about, such as powers and flexibilities, the ability of Ministers to make decisions, and the various methodologies. I expect we will be having long discussions about negative and affirmative procedures, for example, and law-making power is one such issue.
I want to address some of the points that were made regarding the Chagossian community. As I stated in my opening speech, this Government deeply regret how the Chagossians were removed from the islands. This is a community that the Government are committed to working with and supporting in the months and years ahead. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford. She made a compelling and genuine contribution on this important issue, as did the noble Lord, Lord Horam, and I commend those who have been working on this for very many years. She did her party proud, and I respect the longstanding commitment that she and others have had.
The Bill ensures that there will be no adverse impact on Chagossians’ nationality rights as a result of the treaty. Chagossians will not lose their current rights to hold or claim British citizenship, and no one will lose existing British Overseas Territory citizenship status. The Bill does, however, remove Chagossians’ ability to acquire British Overseas Territory citizenship in the future, because once the treaty comes into force, BIOT will not be an overseas territory.
On the trust fund, the noble Lord, Lord Horam, raised the possibility of an exchange of letters on the future treatment of Chagossians under this fund. This is, again, a genuine issue that we ought to explore. I appreciate that noble Lords will want more detail on how the trust fund will operate. I look forward to discussing this in Committee. Who knows? We might be able to reach some sort of agreement on that issue.
On the citizenship law, which was raised by one or two noble Lords opposite—it may have been the noble Lord, Lord Hannan—there have been mentions of section 76B of the Mauritian criminal code and concerns that Chagossians are leaving Mauritius for fear of being prosecuted for their affiliation with the UK. This is really important: no one has ever been prosecuted under this law; but just because no one has ever been subject to it, that does not make it right. Last week, the Mauritian Government repealed this section, and, as of April 2025, 94% of Chagossians with British nationality also had Mauritian citizenship.
On the right to self-determination, there have been questions during the debate, and leading up to it, about consultation with Chagossians. The negotiations on the treaty were necessarily between states—the UK and Mauritius—and it is true that we have prioritised the operation of the base on Diego Garcia. That has been our priority. There may be people here who disagree with that and who would have preferred us to prioritise other issues, and I respect their right to hold that view, but that is not the view of the Government. We wanted to protect the base.
There were some, including the noble Baroness, Lady Foster, who raised the right to self-determination for the Chagossians. I have followed the noble Baroness’s career for many years; I do not know why, but I have always been rather attached to following what she does and says, and I have a real long-standing respect for her. I completely understand why she wants to raise this issue, and why it matters so much to her. The fact is that the Chagos Archipelago has no permanent population and has never been self-governing. No question of self-determination for its population, therefore, legally arises.
The English courts, noting the conclusion of the ICJ in the 2019 advisory opinion, have proceeded on the basis that the relevant right to self-determination in the context of BIOT was that of Mauritians rather than Chagossians. Both the English courts and the European Court of Human Rights have considered, in a series of judgments since the 1970s, the related but distinct question of an alleged right of abode or other rights said to flow from that. On each occasion, the English courts and the European Court of Human Rights have ultimately dismissed these claims. The transfer of sovereignty, therefore, does not deprive Chagossians of any existing rights. This is a long-standing legal position that previous UK Governments have also adopted, including in claims brought as recently as 2020. That all sounds very legalistic and cold; nevertheless, that is the legal position as it stands.
Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)
I thank the Minister for addressing this issue, because it has become a real touchpoint in the general populace. Does she agree that, while we might differ on the legality issue, there is a moral duty on the Government to engage with the Chagossians, who feel so let down, not just by this Government—I made that very clear—but by the whole political establishment in this country?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I agree, and I will say a little about engagement. It is an important point, and it deserves a proper response. If there is more that we can do, we would be very open to discussions about how it could be done in the right way that does not derail the process that we are trying to undertake about bringing the treaty into law.
Having said that, we recognise the importance of the islands to Chagossians, and have worked hard to reflect this in our wider policies. The noble Lord, Lord Purvis, has, as he said, a long-standing position on this which I understand and respect. His impressive command of the history of this subject was put to good use in his previous interventions. I completely agree with his point about the shameful treatment of the Chagossian population.
On engagement, in the past three years officials have met Chagossians and groups over 30 times to discuss the agreement and FCDO’s wider support to the community. The Minister for Overseas Territories, Stephen Doughty, has met with Chagossians four times since he has been in post since July last year and, on 2 September, the new Chagossian contact group met. It has wide representation from Chagossian communities in the UK, Mauritius, the Seychelles and elsewhere to give Chagossians a formal role that shapes decision-making in the UK Government’s support for their community. The group met for the first time on 2 September and will convene quarterly hereafter.
Claims that all Chagossians are opposed to the agreement fail to respect the differing views of this diverse and vibrant community. We have seen some of that reflected in our discussions this afternoon. Many voices support the outcome reached, and these include the Chagos Refugees Group, the Chagos Islanders Movement, the UK Natives Chagossian Council and the Seychelles Chagossian committee. However, I accept that there are many Chagossians who take a different view, which is their right.
On resettlement, points have been made that the treaty does not guarantee Chagossians the right of return to the archipelago and that it should have done. This has come up several times. In 2016, when in government, the Conservatives ruled out resettlement, acknowledging the acute challenges and costs of developing anything equivalent to modern public services on remote and low-lying islands. The KPMG report, which has been mentioned several times and was commissioned by that Government, concluded that resettling a civilian population permanently on BIOT would entail substantial and open-ended costs. This agreement gives Mauritius the opportunity to develop a programme of resettlement on its own terms without requiring the UK taxpayer to foot the bill.
There has been a range of views about Mauritius and its reliability. Some noble Lords have implied that Mauritius is somehow an unreliable partner that cannot be trusted. These claims are insulting to Mauritius, which is a member of the Commonwealth and a westward-facing country with shared democratic values. Mauritius ranks among the top African nations in governance, human development and innovation. It is a full democracy, a regional leader in human rights and a trusted partner in upholding the rules-based international order. It ranks second out of 54 African countries in the Mo Ibrahim index of African governance. It is also one of only two African countries not to have signed up to China’s belt and road initiative. As an act of good faith, Mauritius stopped its legal campaign against us while we negotiated.
Much has also been said about China. There has been a substantial amount of complete misinformation about China’s influence in the region and reported plans to develop a military base in the Chagos Archipelago. The Mauritian Attorney-General has stated publicly that these claims are a gross falsehood and calls them a political gimmick. I can confirm, unequivocally, that the treaty prevents any foreign security forces, civilian or military, from establishing themselves in the archipelago. Furthermore, if the UK believes, for whatever reason, that any activity taking place in the archipelago would jeopardise the security of the base, Mauritius is obliged under the treaty to co-operate with us to prevent that risk, and the UK can veto any construction or development across the archipelago which we consider to be a security threat to the base. As for claims that China supports the treaty because it grants it greater influence in the Indian Ocean, that is, frankly, nonsense.
This is why our closest allies and partners have welcomed the deal, especially the US and other Five Eyes partners. They are satisfied that the treaty protects the base against foreign influence and think that it is essential for our capabilities for generations to come.
Many of the points on the issue of the environment are really quite important, including on marine protected areas. The noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, made a thoughtful speech about this. There have been claims made, both during the debate today and in the other place, that the Mauritian Fisheries Minister wished to issue fishing licences in the area, which would risk, the argument goes, the protection of the unique marine environment of the archipelago. It must be noted that the point the Minister was making was more to do with sovereignty than with fisheries policy, but, as I said in my opening speech, the Mauritian Government confirmed only yesterday that they will establish a marine protected area that follows current bounds of the BIOT MPA and that they will not allow any commercial fishing in any section of the marine protected area.
Noble Lords have quite reasonably sought assurances on enforcement of the MPA, and I expect this is something we will get into detailed discussion about in Committee. For today, I point out that, if the UK at any point believes that Mauritius is in breach of its environmental obligations, we can seek to resolve that using the agreed dispute resolution mechanism in Article 14. In any case, the UK and Mauritius are working to finalise the arrangements on maritime security to ensure that there are patrolling capabilities and that these are maintained.
Lord Callanan (Con)
On the point about the marine protected area, I think the Minister said that Mauritius had duplicated the zone absolutely. Is it not the case that it is not a no-catch zone? Point B in the communiqué issued confirmed that fishing will still be permitted in over 600,000 square kilometres of the zone.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
That is right, and I said that in my opening speech. This is about artisanal fishing. In the event of some sort of resettlement on the outer islands, those communities would need to sustain themselves. They would fish using traditional artisanal methods, and that is what the permission relates to. It would not permit any other form of fishing, because that would clearly be detrimental to marine life.
The noble Lord, Lord Beamish, chair of the ISC, said—and this is about money—it is disappointing that there continues to be reference to artificially inflated figures of the cost of the treaty. It is misleading to ignore inflation and the changing value of money over time. The net present value of the treaty is what we have always said it will be: £3.4 billion over its lifetime. This is in line with long-standing practice in how the Government account for all long-term spend. The Office for Statistics Regulation and the OBR have verified these figures and confirmed that we have applied this methodology correctly.
Baroness Noakes (Con)
My Lords, the point is that, in accounting for money, cash accounting is used in government. What she is talking about is economic analysis, which is not the same as financial analysis. If she had been in the Chamber she would have heard my speech on this subject. It is clear that, when we come to draw up accounts for the Government, cash goes into this in pounds expressed in the time expended.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I apologise to the noble Baroness for missing her speech, and I will read it in Hansard; the bladder is only so strong. What matters here is that there is consistency across government and over time in the way that we do these things. These things are done the same as they would be done for any other agreement.
I know that some people take a different view of the OBR from the one that this Government take. We take it seriously, and it has looked at our figures and verified them. The noble Baroness could by all means come back to this in Committee—I am sure that she will—but, for tonight, I will stick with what the OBR had to say on this issue. The way that we have done this ensures that the figures are realistic and comparable, not inflated by simply adding up future payments while ignoring the depreciation of value over time.
The noble Lord, Lord Altrincham, made quite a thoughtful speech. He is worried about the money. I should point out that we do not see this as an open market situation by any means. He seeks clarity about total cost. I can confirm that £3.4 billion is just that—it is the total cost.
The noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, suggested that the US should be contributing to the cost of the treaty, given its joint use of the military base. We have to recognise that the US pays for the operating costs of the base, and these are several multiples greater than any payments by the UK. We benefit greatly from this arrangement. This allows us to access a valuable capability that keeps our country safe and the US is paying far more for it than we do.
Lord Beamish (Lab)
Does my noble friend agree that this agreement also allows the Americans to forward plan for their investment, which, as she quite rightly says, is substantial?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
Absolutely. I thought the point made by the former Secretary of State for Defence, my noble friend Lord Browne of Ladyton, added to this very well when he talked about how future investment is jeopardised by the legal uncertainty that we are seeking to resolve.
Some have questioned the use of defence money in particular for this treaty. To be absolutely clear, the cost will be split between the FCDO and the MoD, as is appropriate given the shared interests of both departments in maintaining the future of the base. As set out by the Defence Secretary in his Oral Statement on the treaty in the other place, the costs represent a fraction of a percentage of the total defence budget—less than 0.2%. It is a bit far-fetched to suggest that the annual payments are in any way comparable to the biggest uplift in defence spending that we have seen since the end of the Cold War.
The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley, raised sea level change. I do not know why I am dealing with this in the money section, but this is where I have written it down so we might as well get it on the record. As he said, it is true that sea level change has been less than 1% over the past 50 years, but it would be helpful for us to explore in Committee how a future sea level change, which he quite rightly alerts us to, would be treated by the dispute resolution process. I do not have a clear answer to that tonight but that is what Committee is for: getting to the bottom of exactly those sorts of questions.
I will give the last word to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. He made the very strong argument—it is not one that I had thought of, but I will definitely use it again—that this House voted in July to ratify the treaty. The Bill facilitates the enactment of this House’s wishes, because we voted in favour of the treaty. The Bill is necessary so that we can complete the ratification with Mauritius and therefore secure the critical military base on Diego Garcia. I thank noble Lords for their contributions and look forward to debating this in Committee.
Huntingdon Train Attack
(1 day, 6 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRead Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I express heartfelt sympathies from these Benches to all those injured in this horrifying attack, to their families and to everyone else affected. I also join others in paying tribute to the British Transport Police, Cambridgeshire Constabulary, Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service, and the East of England Ambulance Service. Their swift response, arriving within eight minutes of the first 999 call, brought an end to the violence and no doubt saved lives.
Above all, I acknowledge the astonishing bravery of the passengers and crew aboard the train. I pay particular tribute to Samir Zitouni, a man who, in an effort to protect others, ran towards the attacker and now remains critically injured in hospital. He went to work that day to serve the public. He has become a hero to the nation, and we wish him a full and speedy recovery.
It now appears that the individual charged, Anthony Williams, may have been connected to three prior knife incidents, including the stabbing of a 14 year-old in Peterborough. The Home Secretary rightly said that while investigations are ongoing she cannot comment on those events. When the case concludes, it is vital that a full account is given of what was known, when and by whom. Only through transparency can lessons be learned to prevent such atrocities occurring again.
The Home Secretary also noted that knife crime has fallen in recent years; that progress is very welcome. It is not my intention to politicise this tragedy, but I will make a couple of observations as more can and must be done. If the Government are to make good on their manifesto promise to halve knife crime by 2030, they must take a tougher stance against those who carry and use knives.
When the Crime and Policing Bill was before the other place, my colleagues tabled an amendment to raise the maximum sentence for the possession of a bladed weapon with intent to commit violence from four to 14 years. Disappointingly, the Government opposed that measure. As the Bill comes through this Chamber, I hope that noble Lords will reconsider. There can be no ambiguity: those who carry and use knives should face serious custodial sentences.
Equally, there is a widespread concern that the forthcoming Sentencing Bill risks moving in the opposite direction. The prospect of offenders being released earlier—or, in some cases, not serving their sentences in custody at all—sends the wrong message to dangerous criminals. The public are entitled to expect that those who commit violent crimes are punished proportionately and that justice is served.
On these Benches, we welcome the Home Secretary’s openness to using technology to innovate in how knife crime is tackled, such as through knife detection scanning and live facial recognition. Both have shown promise in identifying dangerous individuals and intercepting weapons. We hope that the Government can roll out live facial recognition technology at pace and that it will not be unduly delayed by further consultations. It is particularly needed in high-crime areas, many of which are centred around transport hubs.
The Government must also ramp up the use of stop and search. The former Metropolitan Police chief scientific officer found that increasing stop and search in London to 2011 levels would reduce knife homicides by around a third. I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of stop and search. When used intelligently and fairly, it saves lives. That is why the Conservatives sought to amend the Crime and Policing Bill to lower its threshold, but this was once again opposed by the Government. The police must have the powers to act decisively when intelligence suggests that lives are risk.
This country has witnessed too many tragedies of this kind. Each incident compels us to ask the same question: what more could have been done? When the investigation concludes, the Government must ensure that every department—whether it be the police, transport or probation—examines its role and translates the lessons into action, not just reports. We on these Benches welcome the Home Secretary’s commitment to halving knife crime, but words alone are not enough. It will require robust sentencing, an expansion of policing powers, and investment in technology. It will require the political courage to act decisively in the interests of public safety.
In the aftermath of this horrific attack, we have seen both the worst and the best of humanity. So, in closing, I say to the Minister: we owe it to the Huntingdon victims and to every victim of knife crime to ensure that this tragedy is a turning point, so that the public can have faith that our law enforcement and justice systems are well equipped to protect our streets and deliver justice.
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
My Lords, I want to put on record, on behalf of the Liberal Democrat Benches, that our thoughts are with all those affected by this terrible incident: the staff, the victims, friends and families, and those who witnessed this attack—an attack that left 11 people in hospital, and many haunted by what they saw. I also thank the courageous work of the LNER staff, the Network Rail signallers and controllers, and the emergency services, and the heroic acts of some of the passengers that we have been hearing about.
Staff prepare for major incidents routinely, but they rarely have to put this into practice. The calmness and professionalism have shone through this gruesome attack, and the goodness of the public too. It would be very easy to jump to conclusions at this point, using this horrific incident to feed our own policy positions. I believe that is wrong. It is for the police and key partners to piece together what happened on the train and elsewhere, to review whether this could have been prevented and to learn from it. It is always easy from the outside to point the finger of blame, but we know how stretched all our emergency services are, including policing—and indeed mental health. The police and other services need time to establish all the facts and clearly there is an ongoing legal process.
I would therefore like to ask the Minister a few practical questions. For example, what measures have been taken to reassure rail passengers and staff across the network following this incident? Will the Department for Transport look to review security protocols on high-speed and intercity routes, particularly considering the confined environment in which this attack occurred? How will the Government ensure that any proposed measures to improve public transport security are proportionate? Finally, last autumn, when we debated the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill, I flagged my concern about the future funding of the British Transport Police, resourced in large part by the train operating companies. The BTP does such a superb job working with our other police services across the country.
I ask the Minister to confirm that resources for the British Transport Police will now be reviewed and how the service will be funded fully going forward. I look forward to the Minister’s response with interest.
Lord Snape (Lab)
My Lords, I endorse everything that has just been said by the noble Baroness from the Liberal Democrats—
The Minister of State, Home Office (Lord Hanson of Flint) (Lab)
I am grateful to His Majesty’s loyal Opposition and to the Liberal Democrat Benches for their contributions this evening. I give a broad welcome to their comments on the work of the emergency services, the British Transport Police, the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, the Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service and the East of England Ambulance Service. I would add to that the officials in the gold team in the Home Office and in the Department of Transport who also liaised on these matters.
I am pleased that my noble friend Lord Hendy is present in the Chamber, as some aspects of the responsibility fall within the Department for Transport, and he wished to be here this evening to hear contributions and comments.
It is also extremely important that we place on record the heroism that I have seen reported from passengers as well as the train driver, Andrew Johnson, and the member of LNER staff, Samir Zitouni, who is in hospital tonight. All our wishes are for his speedy recovery.
A number of points have been raised, and I want to try to deal with them as best I can. First, it is right that there have been—I use the word—allegations of issues prior to the incident on the train at Huntingdon that occurred within other areas of the United Kingdom, notably in Cambridgeshire. It is important to say that the police and crime commissioner and the chief constable of Cambridgeshire have initiated a review of those incidents. It is best to not comment on that until we hear what the facts are.
It is also important to note that British Transport Police has now taken overall responsibility for examining all incidents that took place, even those not strictly on transport policing areas. Again, I cannot comment too much in detail because there are outstanding potential charges to be made and investigations to be undertaken, but I am very clear—and I will give this assurance to both Front Benches—that when both British Transport Police and Cambridgeshire police produce reports, they will be subject to scrutiny in this House as a matter of course.
The noble Lord mentioned the question of knife crime, which is important. This is not a political point, but I hope it is reassuring in one way: in the year to June 2025, British Transport Police has reported a decline of 33% in knife and sharp instrument offences in its area of responsibility, which is positive. More widely, knife crime is falling: knife homicides are down by 18%; all knife crime is down 5%; knife assaults have dropped by 6%; and hospital admissions for under 25s have fallen by 10%.
It is worth putting on the record that there are further measures that we can take. The noble Lord will know that, in the Crime and Policing Bill before us now in this House, there are strong measures on a range of issues on knife crime, including sales, age verification and further measures on possession of knives. Those measures will come before the House, and we will have a debate on those issues. It is right that the Opposition table amendments and test government policy, but I hope there will be a consensus in part on some of those key issues. There is also the Sentencing Bill that will come before the House in about a week’s time. Again, there will be a discussion on sentencing issues then. But that is best left for another day, because today is about the immediate response.
My noble friend Lord Hendy has drawn to my attention the actions of the driver, Andrew Johnson, who took a decision when the first incident was reported to him without any visuals on that incident. He phoned and got in touch with the signallers and got into Huntingdon station. British Transport Police was notified, and an arrest was made by British Transport Police within eight minutes of the first violence occurring. It is remarkable, particularly given the strategic challenge of getting a fast-moving train off a main line into a non-mainline station; that takes great skill, and the staff involved deserve great praise.
The noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, mentioned British Transport Police. I can tell her that British Transport Police had a 6% rise in funding in this recent financial year. I have the exact figures here somewhere. Obviously, that is a matter for discussion, and we will make assessments on that, but it is important to recognise that I do not think funding is an issue now—obviously, more funding is always available. I have found the figures: the British Transport Police funds were up 6% and were £415 million in the last financial year.
There have been allegations of mental health issues related to this, potentially—we will examine that in due course. Mental health funding is up £688 million this year as well. There are issues to be developed and looked at.
We will examine all the points that the noble Baroness raised. We are open to scrutiny from the House on that. However, we should recognise today that this was a very serious incident. There was immense bravery and skill on the part of individuals and a very good response by the police. There is now a criminal justice procedure to follow, and there will be an investigation into allegations that have occurred elsewhere. Ultimately, I wish those injured a speedy recovery. Whatever the criminal justice outcome of this case, we will examine any lessons to be learned both by my noble friend at the Department for Transport and by those of us at the Home Office.
It is also worth placing on record that this was initially assessed as a potential terrorist incident. That assessment lifted very quickly. We are looking at specific circumstances that are not political, or terrorist related or motivated. We can reflect on that and be thankful that, as of now, no lives have been lost.
Lord Snape (Lab)
My Lords, I first apologise to my noble friend the Minister for jumping the gun earlier. I have been here long enough to know better, and I will see that it does not happen in future.
I endorse the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, representing the Liberal Democrats: we owe a great debt of gratitude to the railway staff concerned in this incident. I will come to the driver and the member of train crew in a moment, but my noble friend the Minister should acknowledge the prompt action of the signallers. As a former railway signalman, I know that it is a grade that is often overlooked. The fact that, once he was informed of the circumstances, this train was moved from the fast line on which it was booked to the slow line platform, ought to be commended.
My noble friend rightly paid tribute to driver Johnson. I point out to him that driver Johnson acted initially after being informed of the circumstances on the train by a member of the train crew. I also pay tribute to the gallantry of Mr Samir Zitouni, the member of train crew who acted in the highest traditions of the railway industry by placing himself in a position of considerable danger between the assailant and the passengers for whom he felt justly responsible. All too often, we forget the daily efforts of our railway staff to keep trains moving and to keep passengers safe. The fact that it is still, despite incidents like this, the safest form of transport in this country, is enormously commendable, so far as our railway workers are concerned.
I say to my noble friend the Minister, however, that if the assailant in this case had boarded a train from Liverpool Street to Stansted Airport, for example, he would have boarded a 12-coach train full of passengers with no staff on there at all, other than a driver locked in the cab. I say with respect to my noble friend—and I am glad that my noble friend the Minister of State at the Department for Transport is present—that there is still considerable concern, not just among railway staff but among passengers themselves, about the continuous destaffing of the railway industry. A combination of driver-only operation and unstaffed stations is not one that makes passengers—particularly women passengers, and particularly at night—feel any safer. I hope that, once Great British Railways is formed, the question of further destaffing is looked at by Ministers and that we take steps to ensure that passengers and the railway industry are properly protected.
Finally, I am always delighted to hear praise from the party opposite for railway staff. I hope they will feel just as well disposed towards them the next time they want to fight to protect their jobs, or, even worse, ask for a pay rise.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend. I know that he spent time in a Stockport signal box in a previous life, and he is right to pay tribute to the signallers who helped with the safety measures that undoubtedly saved lives. Whatever the incident on the train, arriving at the station with police and ambulance services there saved lives. That speedy response was made by the driver, who made instant judgments and took steps that involved risks, which is something that the House should commend. I hear what my noble friend said on staffing. The Transport Minister, my noble friend Lord Hendy, is here, and this is an area for which he has responsibility, so I am sure he will reflect on that.
It is worth pointing out something that I have learned only in the last hour: Samir Zitouni, the LNER staff member who put his own life at risk to save the lives of others by standing in the way of the alleged assailant, is a customer service host. He is the person who would normally be serving tea or refreshments, but he stepped up to the plate and put his own life at risk by taking strong steps. We should recognise his act of tremendous bravery, and I wish him well for the future.
My noble friend made a number of points around the need for good, well-paid staff. I use the train every week. During one bored day, I worked out that, over 28 years, I have probably spent a year of my life on the train transporting myself back and forth to this House and the House of Commons. This Monday, I looked at the train guards and the train staff in a very different way from how I looked at them last Monday. I pay tribute to them for the service that they give.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, according to the Statement, the Government are committed to halving knife crime within a decade. However, recent research shows that last year there were 1,300 offences in schools. Does the Minister agree that a watertight, zero-tolerance policy should be taken in schools, so that if you bring a knife into school you will be expelled—end of story? Surely that would ensure a positive knock-on effect into adult life and help to reduce knife crime.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Earl for that contribution. It is slightly off the topic we are talking about today, but it is important that we focus on the issue of halving knife crime. The measures we have brought forward to date concern education, policing, new legislation on knife sales and tackling the culture of young people in particular carrying knives for defence. The noble Earl raises points that, with respect, are not directly for me, but I will make sure that my noble friend Lady Smith of Malvern is apprised of his view. The point we can agree on is that, in the Crime and Policing Bill that will come before this House for Committee shortly, there are a number of measures that we believe will assist in continuing to reduce the level of knife crime. I will certainly reflect with my colleagues on the points that the noble Earl has made.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester
My Lords, these Benches pay tribute to the train crew and others who responded so heroically. Our thoughts and prayers remain with all those who have been impacted. The traumatic effects of being involved in an incident like that, in an enclosed space, do not just go away after a short period of time. I declare my unpaid role as co-chair of the national police ethics committee. I am grateful that information about the perpetrator was got out early, and not just the fact that it was not terrorism. Since Southport last year, we have known that releasing other information is vital to calming some of the public’s fears. That is something that my ethics committee has been discussing at length in recent times.
Like many noble Lords—I am looking at the noble Lord, Lord Goddard, who may want to intervene shortly—I travel a lot on trains that do not stop for quite a long distance and which have many carriages. I could have made some of the points that have already been made about this. It is about having enough first responders, who are equipped to respond effectively, on those trains throughout the journey.
My trains have CCTV in every carriage—it usually works. That helps. I think facial recognition technology has been referred to. That needs to be managed very carefully. Many of the models that I have seen still have an in-built ethnic bias, inherited from the fact that the original training of their algorithms is often based on the faces of white men such as me. These models sometimes struggle to distinguish people from other groups within society, leading to too many false positives and causing people who are entirely innocent to have their lives interrupted by being stopped and accused of an offence. If we are to increase stop and search, there is no problem with that as long as we ensure that the officers involved are trained in unconscious bias so that they are not carrying it out in a way that is unfair.
Finally, does the Minister agree that deterrence for knife crime and other crime is driven much more by fear of detection and arrest than by the theoretical length of a maximum sentence?
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate. A number of us in this House spend lots of time on trains. He makes a very interesting point about the distance between stops. On the train I get every week, the last stop before London is normally Stafford, and there is a lot of time between those stops, a lot of carriages and a lot of individuals. I had a very brief conversation with my noble friend Lord Hendy, who said that the most important thing that he expects on a train is the ability to have contact with the driver, so that the driver can take immediate action, such as was taken in this instance by diverting the train to a non-mainline station, Huntingdon, where police and resources were made available. I know that my noble friend has heard what the right reverend Prelate has said on staffing issues and will reflect on that as part of his normal day-to-day duties.
The question of stop and search is an interesting one. I have some statistics, which I hope will help the noble Lord who raised this issue—I may not have given him as full an answer as I perhaps should have at the time. In the last year, 16,066 stop and searches led to an offensive weapon or firearm being found on the individual, but, interestingly, that was only 3% of all stop and searches. It is an interesting statistic. We can make of that what we will in slower time, but only 3% of stop and searches found a weapon on the individual who was stopped and searched.
The question of facial recognition is important. As a Government, we have invested in live facial recognition. We have 10 new vans in static location pilots. We have undertaken piloting of this, and it saves a lot of police time. We need to ensure that we trial it so that the right reverend Prelate’s points on facial recognition and characteristics are taken into account. The main thing it will do is this: in the case of convicted offenders who are known to the system, it will potentially help draw down the ability to identify them more quickly in a large crowd than would be the case otherwise. We are undertaking a public consultation on a new bespoke legal framework for law enforcement on the use of biometrics, facial recognition and similar technologies, and that will be launched very soon. There is an opportunity for the right reverend Prelate and others to raise those issues of interest and concern so that they can form part of our final judgment on the benefits versus some of the challenges.
Baroness Ludford (LD)
My Lords, I agree with everything that has been said about the courage and skill of the staff and the efficiency of response in the emergency services and the police. I also take the point about the signallers. It would be fascinating and would make a good drama—sorry, it is in a tragic context, but the way in which the driver had to communicate with the signallers, and goodness knows who else, is above my pay grade and was all extremely impressive.
I want to ask about the last point on CCTV and facial recognition. I absolutely hear what my noble friend Lady Pidgeon said about how we cannot jump to conclusions about what the police should have done, should be doing or whatever. I have been somewhat intrigued to see it reported that the British Transport Police had the CCTV of an incident on a DLR station and apparently identified the person involved on the police national computer, but that did not go anywhere before the Huntington train incident. I put down a marker that I would be interested to know about that in future as one of the lessons learned. I share all the reservations about privacy issues, CCTV and facial recognition, including the point made by the right reverend Prelate about the accuracy of facial recognition and the way it has been used. It would be interesting to know what lessons we can learn about identification and sharing that data across the country. I am not saying anything could have been prevented, but I would be interested to know what lessons can be learned about what happened between knowledge of the DLR incident and what happened in Huntington.
Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)
On what happened in Cambridgeshire and the DLR, that will be the subject of an internal inquiry by Cambridgeshire Constabulary. It will reflect on that, and I suspect it will produce a report that surfaces the issues. We use facial recognition in a number of ways. There is the opportunity, potentially, to look at a crowd and determine from a database of known individuals—or even, for example, missing people —whether they are in that crowd by identifying them. That is one way. Police can use operator-initiated facial recognition, which is an app that allows officers to take a picture of a person and compare it against any database we have of people who have been convicted of offences, and others. There are ways in which we can have live footage of people passing a camera, which we have been testing and monitoring.
British Transport Police, under my noble friend, will be piloting live facial recognition technology very shortly. That pilot will look for a short period—six months —to determine whether it is valuable and what lessons can be learned. However, as the right reverend Prelate said, it needs to be put into a legal context, and we will also look at that, potentially later this year. The issues about what happened, we need to examine. I do not know as yet what lessons are to be learned from the CCTV and how it was used, but that is what the investigation will lead to.
I want to go back to one point the right reverend Prelate mentioned, which is the early announcement of what happened and who, potentially, is the subject of the investigation. That is an important point, because we have learned from previous examples that putting information into the public domain—although not, in the first instance, the name of the individual, until any charge is made—takes away social media and other speculation that can lead to people having false information that leads them down alleyways that are not productive of public good and public order. I welcome the fact that in this instance, early information was given, and I would expect that in any situation. This individual was described in one way, others may be described in other ways; but the fact that further information was given about who the individual of interest is, is extremely important.