Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 18th November 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere]

5: Clause 1, page 1, line 7, leave out subsection (2) and insert—
“(2) Sections 2 and 4 of this Act do not come into force until the duties outlined in sections (Equality Impact Assessment) and (Implications of treaty on United Kingdom defence spending and United States of America) are discharged.”

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I beg leave to move the amendment standing in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Morrow.

The financial aspects of this Bill are the easiest for people not involved to understand. It does seem bizarre that at a time when we are borrowing money and scratching around for savings, we are raising taxes here in order to fund tax cuts in Mauritius. I do not want to detain noble Lords, so I will not go over the figures again. We had an expert disquisition from my noble friend Lady Noakes at Second Reading.

Even if we were to accept the Government’s figures, we still face an immense imbalance in where the money is going. I come back to the point that we were making just before dinner, about the wrong that everyone accepts was done to the Chagossians and what restitution would look like. The Minister said they had been very badly treated. Well, badly treated or otherwise, their compensation, if we measure it purely in financial terms, comes to a one-off £40 million settlement for good—whereas, even on the figures offered by the Government, we are paying Mauritius £101 million every year for the next 99 years. Who is the wronged party here? How is it that having done this harm to population A by moving them, we then reward the population that is in fact making permanent their exile and deepening their sense of grievance?

Never mind whether it is £3.1 billion, £35 billion or somewhere in between, at Second Reading my noble friend Lord Altrincham made the point that this is money being sent out of the country. We can argue about whether there is merit in Governments spending cash here to stimulate growth. I personally am of the camp that says it does not work. It is better to leave that money directed by people who are attached to it; they spend it more wisely and the growth impact is much higher. But I will allow that there is some impact in stimulating the domestic economy, even when a Government spend money badly. There is none at all when you just take a sum of money and send it several thousand miles away, which is what is being proposed here.

The amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, are about impact assessments, particularly on the financial consequences for the United States, as well as for us. I just want to tackle the view that this is a great deal for the US—that, however inconvenient it is for us, we are left with the bill and the US gets to keep the base. Every pound that we send to Mauritius to lease the property that we currently own is a pound that we are not spending on defence. It is a pound taken away from NATO and from the western alliance. That is just the immediate and direct cost of what happens when you take a freehold and then decide to pay for it as a leasehold.

There is then, it seems to me, an underexplored indirect cost: how have we now incentivised future Mauritian Governments to monetise this territory? If they can get this sum of money out of us, why not lease other parts of the archipelago to other powers? The Minister has said, of course, that in the treaty they are not allowed to for military purposes. The treaty says they cannot use these things for defence purposes, but I wonder: down the line, if Mauritius was indeed incentivised to make more money and leased an island for supposedly civilian purposes, then very gradually it was turned in a secret way by an unfriendly power into a more direct military installation, is that something realistically that is then going to trigger a military reaction from us?

It seems to me that the only way of ensuring that we do not have unfriendly neighbours in the Chagos Archipelago is not to have these islands being leased out in the first place, and the best way of preventing the islands being leased out is to hang on to them ourselves.

[Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)]

The noble Lord referred to £40 million. I assume he is referring to the trust fund that is going to be set up.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

Yes.

[Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)]

However, as he is fully aware, that is totally in the hands of the Mauritian Government. No Chagossian from here can access that money. Is that not something that should be considered?

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for that important correction. This would not be the first time this has happened. The sums that were disbursed to Mauritius in the 1970s, supposedly to be spent on the welfare of the Îlois exile community, were hung on to. They were disbursed very late, and their value had been significantly eroded by inflation in the meantime. Indeed, given that record, there is little wonder that there should be bad feeling from a lot of Chagossians towards the Mauritian Government.

Unusually in this House, the noble Baroness and I were on the same side in the 2016 referendum, so we are familiar with the argument that here is a little bit of your money back; we are spending it for you, and you should be grateful. It was an unconvincing argument to the British people in 2016, and I think it will be an unconvincing argument to the British people and to the Chagossian portion of the British family in 2025. I beg to move.

[Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)]

My Lords, I will refer to Amendment 24 in my name. I thank the Minister for her gracious remarks earlier in the debate. I can assure the Committee that I will not detain it as long this time. The amendment asks a simple and poignant question. Should the British taxpayer be compelled to fund a treaty that actively undermines our position on the international stage and erodes British sovereignty? I believe the answer is as simple as the question: no.

Article 11 of the treaty places the United Kingdom under financial obligations to Mauritius, including annual payments linked directly to the transfer of sovereignty. We are being asked to underwrite, year after year, a settlement that has not been endorsed by the people most deeply affected. In 2008 the Foreign Affairs Committee noted the “profound poverty” experienced by many Chagossians resettled in Mauritius. The United Kingdom Government have recognised the “hardship and suffering” caused by their displacement in the preceding years.

At a time when families across the United Kingdom are struggling with the cost of living, when public services are stretched and defence spending is under pressure, the Government are willing, and obliged under this treaty, to transfer British funds overseas in exchange for the honour of relinquishing sovereignty over a territory that hosts one of the most strategically important military bases in the world. Why would we pay for an island that we already own?

Without the inclusion of this amendment, we will be in the extraordinary position of financing, on an annual basis, a settlement that ultimately advances arguments that have repeatedly undermined British sovereignty. That is why this amendment is undeniably crucial. It protects not only the taxpayer but the constitutional integrity of this country, as well as relegating the overindulgent aspirations of the Mauritian Government, depriving them of even more British taxpayers’ money.

Let us also consider the native islanders—the Chagos people. Have we ever paused to consider how they might feel as this Parliament considers whether we should pay a foreign Government to take control of a territory in which they have never had a stake, all while ignoring the cry of the Chagos community in the UK?

Beyond that, there is also the question of accountability. Once these payments begin, Parliament loses direct control over how they are to be spent. There is no binding mechanism in the treaty to ensure that the native community will be benefited by these payments in a meaningful way. This arrangement risks repeating the injustice of the past, where funds provided in earlier decades did not reach the displaced communities in Mauritius who were living in poverty. Surely, we must learn from that history and not repeat it. That is essential.

I therefore believe we should not rush into binding financial commitments when so many broader questions remain unresolved—about self-determination, defence co-operation, the protection of strategic assets, and long-term political stability in a region where global competition is increasing and where the UK needs to be assertive and confident. The British taxpayer should not foot the bill for decisions that diminish our sovereignty and overlook the rights of sovereign British citizens. For these reasons, I commend my amendment to the House.

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[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

Of course we knew. My understanding is that this pre-dated negotiations and refers to something on the island of Mauritius itself. if I am wrong about that, I will correct the record and inform the noble Baroness.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

With the Committee’s permission, I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 5 withdrawn.

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[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

I will speak briefly in support of the amendments tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Lilley and Lord Callanan, in this group. On resettlement, what we have in the treaty may be described as less than useless. I say that because, to a certain extent, it confers a right that is already there, but it underlines it in such a way and denies others that right. The treaty explicitly says that there is a right for Mauritius to resettle people.

If we have handed over sovereignty to Mauritius, people implicitly have a right to resettle on the other islands anyway but, actually, it very much underlines that Mauritius is completely in control; it is completely in the driving seat. There is a lack of reference to the Chagossians: yes, Mauritius may choose to allow some Chagossians back, but it may choose also to deny them. There is no specific right for the Chagossians.

If, as has been mentioned across the Chamber, we are to try to rectify some of the many ills that we have done to the Chagossian people over the years, having at least some level of right of return is the bare minimum that we should be looking for here. The concern is that, from the point of view of Mauritius, the implication will be that, if it is to allow back some Chagossians, they will be the hand-picked Chagossians who have played ball with the Mauritian Government. If you are a good boy or a good girl, yes, you may be allowed back. If, however, you have been part of the awkward squad, you may have a much lesser chance of being resettled on the Chagos Islands than, for example, Chinese contractors. That is the problem.

These amendments would at least take a step towards trying to ameliorate and rectify that situation. If we cannot give the Chagossians an opportunity or a right, which is completely missing in the treaty and missing in the Bill, we are not giving them anything.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I just want to add my voice to those of my noble friend Lord Lilley and the noble Lord, Lord Weir. If the Chagos Islands had remained inhabited, this issue of sovereignty would not have arisen. They would have been in the same category as Gibraltar, the Falklands or any other territory with a permanent population that had expressed its right to self-determination.

Now, you could argue that that would solve our problem in terms of the base. Equally, you could argue that it is the obvious way of making restitution; it is the way of giving back what was taken. But if you flip that around and look at it from the point of view of Mauritius, is that not precisely why you would not want to have a Chagossian population—or an exclusively Chagossian population—in a doughnut in the outer atolls around Diego Garcia?

The last thing you would want is to risk a Chagossian secessionist movement, where the people who had returned to their ancestral homes had made it very clear that they felt no loyalty to the state of Mauritius and that—in most cases, with a few exceptions, as the noble Lord, Lord Weir, said—they did not want to be part of it. Therefore, you would have every incentive to settle the place with your own citizens, or with others, so that they were at least a majority.

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, for his remarks. Picking up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lilley—I have a subsequent amendment on the supplementary list, so we may get to it at some point but it is not on today’s list—does the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, agree with me that what makes this lack of provision for resettlement of the Chagossians worse is that we actually have a blueprint, albeit not necessarily perfect, of how this can be achieved, through the KPMG report in 2015? It is not as though we are doing this against a vacuum. We are not only ignoring the right of Chagossians to return but completely ignoring the pathway through which this can happen.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

The noble Lord makes an extremely good point. If you see this purely in fiscal terms, depending on whether we take the Government’s or my noble friend Lady Noakes’s figures, it is an obviously disastrous thing to spend either six times or 60 times as much as in the KPMG report, simply to give to another country.

We keep hearing from the Chancellor of the Exchequer that growth is her priority and so on. Here is a very good way of making a saving: by not giving money away for territory that we already have but, instead, using a much smaller fraction of that sum to make restitution to the people who were removed. It ticks every box.

I mentioned earlier that the Falkland Islands were saved, paradoxically, by the experience of war because it led to investment, it led to fishing and hydrocarbons being exploited around the coasts, and it led to employment opportunities and better transport links. If we had a settled Chagossian population around the base, they would be the obvious people to work as the contractors on the base. Instead of having to import all these Filipinos from Singapore by air, we would have a population there doing the non-military, non-sensitive jobs.

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[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I agree with the noble Lord that transparency and frankness with the Chagossian community is vital, which is why I have resisted some of the discussions around consultations and referendums. To give the impression that a consultation or referendum can elicit change to a treaty that has already been negotiated in a state-to-state negotiation is wrong. On the noble Lord’s question about how often we have discussed resettlement, it has been discussed throughout and repeatedly—of course it has. It is a very important part of the negotiation that we have had with the Government of Mauritius.

We are coming to some amendments on the operation of the trust fund in the next group, but some news will come from Mauritius shortly on exactly how that will operate. I think that will be reassuring for noble Lords and I hope that we get it very soon so that we can include it in our considerations.

I would point out that resettlement now is non-existent. It has not been possible. They have not even been having heritage visits since Covid; the previous Government did not get round to sorting them out. Having said that, it is good that the Conservative Party is now turning some attention to this.

The noble Lord, Lord Hannan, said, “But consider if the islands had not been depopulated”. In response, I point out that if the islands had not been depopulated then there would not be a base and we would not have a treaty. They probably would have been returned to Mauritius, as part of decolonisation, and be Mauritian now anyway. I am at a bit of a loss—but the noble Lord is going to tell me now what he was getting at.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

Forgive me, but I am not sure that is quite true. I do not think the Americans wanted the entire archipelago voided of population; they were satisfied with having Diego Garcia. The Minister and I were not born then, but our predecessors went ahead and volunteered the complete evacuation, which was the beginning of all our problems.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

But that is what happened, and it cannot be undone. We are in a situation where there is clearly no prospect of resettlement now on Diego Garcia—I am glad that that has not explicitly come up in debate—but there is the possibility of resettlement on the other islands and the prospect of visits to Diego Garcia in a way that has not happened for some years.

Specifically on the amendments in this group, I do not think that Amendments 10 and 72 are necessary, but I should explain why. Under the terms of the agreement, Mauritius is already free to develop a programme of resettlement on islands other than Diego Garcia. It will be for Mauritius to decide whether it takes that forward. We have already committed to making a ministerial Statement in both Houses, providing a factual update on eligibility for resettlement. The agreement gives Mauritius the opportunity to develop a programme of resettlement on its own terms, without requiring the UK taxpayer to pick up the bill. We know that would be considerable, because of the KPMG report.