Bosnia and Herzegovina

Baroness Helic Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I echo the noble Lord’s comments about the noble Baroness, Lady Helic. Her work has kept this House focused on the western Balkans over many years. On ODA and protecting various streams of work, I wrote to the International Development Committee in the other place last week or the week before, explaining the process that we are undertaking. Very briefly, for the benefit of Members of this House, we are protecting anything we are currently contracted to. We are also protecting everything for this financial year in our humanitarian work. Everything else we are looking at on a case-by-case basis.

I have been asked by the Prime Minister to look line by line at our spend. I am not in a position to protect any other streams of work or any particular programmes at this stage. Our desire is to create headroom to smooth out the spending reductions that will have to take place at the end of this financial year. That is the work we are currently undertaking. The noble Lord will understand that I am not in a position to make firm commitments today. That would be wrong. The work that he describes to do with security, particularly in the western Balkans, has proved to be effective and is incredibly important given the wider context in that region.

[Baroness Helic (Con)]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their kind words. I welcome the Foreign Secretary’s visit to the western Balkans, which concluded last night. He rightly stated that

“the Western Balkans is of critical importance to the UK and Europe’s collective security, and the UK remains committed to building resilience and stability in the region”.

With that in mind, Britain has now signed a deal with Serbia to disrupt people smuggling, an important step given the record number of channel crossings in the first three months of this year. These are fine words and fine agreements, but they will not be enough if secessionists with active support from Russia and Serbia succeed in breaking up Bosnia unchallenged, risking a new regional conflict. The Government have so far refused to move beyond rhetoric and support EUFOR, the only real deterrent on the ground.

Does the United Kingdom intend to negotiate a post-Brexit agreement with the EU of the kind that Norway and Chile have in place, to enable our participation in Operation Althea in line with standard procedures for third-country contribution to NATO’s EU-led missions?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

Since Brexit we have tried to work more and more closely with our EU partners, particularly on defence and security, for the reasons the noble Baroness has outlined. We are working closely to determine quite what form that takes. I am not in a position to say exactly what that will be, but we are in the business of resetting our deeply damaged relationship with the European Union. No one can be in any doubt, given the nature of the conversations that we have been having on this issue and on Ukraine, about our closeness and our collective determination that we must work more closely together in the future.