Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 18th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, Amendments 8 and 9 are in my name. Amendment 8 says that the treaty shall not come into force until a binding case in an international court requires us to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. Amendment 9 requires the Government to spell out their legal position on why they believe such a ruling to be possible, let alone likely.

The whole basis of the Government’s case is that

“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.]

At Second Reading, the possibility of such a ruling was contested not just by me but by several other noble Lords, on the basis that there is no international court which can rule against our sovereignty in this way. Yet Ministers failed to address that issue and those arguments. Even noble Lords who have held the highest office in the FCDO—mandarins of our diplomatic corps who tenaciously defended this deal—failed to answer or address the question of which court could reach a binding judgment against us.

First, everyone acknowledges that the ruling of the International Court of Justice was purely advisory and not binding on us. Secondly, it was based on resolutions of the UN General Assembly which themselves are not legally binding; nor have they ever been endorsed by the Security Council. Thirdly, when Britain signed up to the ICJ, it specifically precluded disputes between the UK and present or past members of the Commonwealth. So the ruling was triply non-binding, and the ECJ cannot rule against us on this in future because it is a dispute with a Commonwealth country.

Ministers have chosen to ignore these arguments and not dispute them, although it is not clear that they were aware of this situation when they plunged into these negotiations. I rather suspect they were not. They have tacitly acknowledged the truth of these arguments by moving on to assert that the tribunal of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea could rule against Britain and in favour of Mauritius on the issue of sovereignty. As the noble Lord, Lord Murray, spelled out in forensic detail, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea has no such power. Britain has invoked Article 298 of the convention, which excludes military matters, so it is outside its wherewithal.

Even when the Philippines brought a case about artificial islands built in the South China Sea, ITLOS ruled that it cannot rule on the sovereignty of the area around those artificial islands—that is not within its purview. It can rule whether the islands are artificial or real and therefore have some territorial waters or not, but not whose they are and who they belong to.

We wonder why the Government got into this position. If the court has no power to rule on matters of sovereignty and the UK insists on exercising its rights under Article 298 of the convention, it just cannot do so. The Government’s silence on all these arguments must be deemed tacit acceptance that they are true. If there is some court or some hidden clause in the agreements that none of us knows about which overrides the points I have made, Amendment 9 will be no problem for them because they can implement it. According to them, within weeks, an adverse ruling will occur in a court which is binding on us. Since they have quite a long time before they can complete even these processes, we will get to know the answer to that conclusion. Alternatively, they could accept Amendment 9 and spell out the legal basis on which they believe an international court—which international court, why and on what grounds—could find against us.

If the Government reject this amendment, we will know that they do not even believe their own case. We will be forced to conclude that they are following, wittingly or unwittingly, the long-standing view of the Foreign Office—expressed very eloquently by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, in the Second Reading debate—that, unless we accept even an advisory ruling, we will not be able to persuade other countries to accept legally binding rulings. That is perhaps how diplomats think, but it ought not to be how this House thinks.

We ought to reject that doctrine and be very cautious about allowing ourselves to be driven along by long-standing arguments of the Foreign Office. Thinking back, it was very keen on us giving up the Falklands to the Argentines, so it is perhaps no surprise to find that it is very keen nowadays on us giving up Chagos to Mauritius. But none of them—and none of the great mandarins who spoke in the debate—spelled out why we are legally obliged to do so. It was all on the basis that the Foreign Office position would be easier to maintain logically and would be more persuasive with Governments that, otherwise, we were recklessly following.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

How far back is the noble Lord going to go in his historic examination of British Governments? Is his position that the British Government should never ever cede sovereignty to any former colony? I am thinking of Australia, South Africa or Canada. How far is he going back in saying that it is absolutely wrong to cede sovereignty?

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

If the noble Lord wants me to go back further, I think it is a shame that we did not follow the advice of Edmund Burke and reach an agreement with the American colonists to give them independence earlier on.

But we are not talking about giving independence to the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands; we are talking about giving the Chagos Islands to a country which has never ruled them and is 2,000 kilometres away. To do that simply on the basis of long-standing Foreign Office doctrine is, surely, unwise. I hope your Lordships’ House will consider seriously these amendments because, if they are passed, we will know once and for all whether the Government have a strong case or not. If they are rejected, we can be certain that they do not have a strong case for giving away these islands.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

Before the noble Lord sits down, I wonder if he could correct some remarks he has been making about people he has given a Chinese name to. I am not quite sure why he thinks that that is so telling. The arguments advanced were drawn from the testimony of Sir Christopher Greenwood, a former British member of the International Court of Justice. If he read his testimony—which, of course, is all available in the report from the International Agreements Committee of this House, which is being totally ignored by him and the noble Lord, Lord Callanan —he would see what the case is, which was set out very fully. It was set out not by the FCDO but by Sir Christopher Greenwood.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

I am certainly very happy to mention that the noble Lord himself mentioned Sir Christoper Greenwood’s testimony in his speech, but his primary reasoning was that we should accept even purely advisory rulings of foreign courts in order that we be able better to uphold the rules-based international order. I remind him that the chairman of the committee that heard that evidence said in the debate that, although the committee was divided on the evidence it heard, he was inclined to agree with the arguments I had put forward.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendment 1 by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. I take it that he was not entirely serious when he dreamt up this particular innovation, which is right at the start of the Bill, whereby the purpose of the Bill should be presented in the way that the opponents of the Bill would find most attractive. It is a novel constitutional idea. In his reasons for the purposes of the Act, he has included only things that obviously he agrees with, but he has not included, for example, that this will secure the base for the UK and the USA for the next hundred years. There are arguments for and against, as there with any piece of legislation, but to think that you should state at the beginning of a Bill that the purpose of the legislation is what the Opposition would like to see enacted is novel. The only parallel I can think of would be if the sundry privatisation measures that were passed by the Thatcher Government had said, “The purpose of this Act is to sell off at knock-down prices the assets of the British people”. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, would have been in favour of that kind of constraint when that legislation was going through. I do not take this as a serious amendment, and I am sure he will not press it to a vote—it might be fun if he did, but we will see anyway.

One part of the noble Lord’s proposed new clause that is contentious—well, a lot of it is contentious—on which I would certainly like to hear more from my noble friends on the Front Bench is paragraph (d), which suggests that the Bill will

“limit the citizenship rights of the Chagossians”.

I do not think the Bill as it stands does that, and I want to be clear about that, but I think it raises an issue which we will come to later in the Bill, which is of concern to a number of us here, about what further rights for the Chagossians are appropriate, given the appalling way in which—we are all agreed—they were treated when they were basically thrown out of their own island.

My specific query, which if my noble friend cannot answer at the moment I would certainly like to hear later on in subsequent amendments, is that I still cannot understand why the military requires the whole of the island of Diego Garcia without any other settlement on it other than what is required for military purposes. I have asked that question of Ministers. The last time I asked my honourable friend Stephen Doughty, the Minister, he answered by saying,

“it is impossible for that to take place”—

that is, to have permanent settlement of Chagossians on Diego Garcia—

“operationally. It is not suitable or appropriate”.

I am very fond of the Minister, but just saying something is not suitable or appropriate, without any further clarification or explanation, is not good enough, as far as I am concerned.

The best I have got so far is to be told that, operationally, it is very difficult if you have civilians alongside the military, and it is much more convenient to the military if they have it all to themselves. In response to that, I can say only that repeatedly, in all parts of the world, including in my former constituency, civilian workers at a base quite happily live adjacent to the base and do a job that is of mutual benefit to the military and the civilian workers.

I think it would be a huge step forward to be able to say to the Chagossians—there may not be many who would want to do it—that those who would really like to settle in the land of their forefathers on Diego Garcia would be able to do that and work at the base or, if necessary, work in other activities as well. So far, I have not had a good argument against that happening, and I hope that at some stage during the passage of this Bill my noble friends can provide me with one.

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[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, I have amendments to this Bill—I think they are in the last group—but I will not address them. I will keep to the amendments in this group, which has strayed into some wider areas. Since the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, is not seeking the guidance of the Companion, which discourages changing groupings that have already been agreed, we will no doubt discuss all the amendments in detail as we go. I tabled my principal amendment but no others because I chose to respect the work of the International Relations and Defence Committee, which may well have considerations in advance of Report for us to consider.

I will make some short remarks on the amendments from the noble Lords, Lord Lilley and Lord Callanan. I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, presented any different, additional arguments in introducing his amendments from those he presented at Second Reading. Therefore, we have heard them before. Other noble Lords agreed with his argument.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

If the noble Lord regards the amendments clearly, he will see that the difference is that I am saying, “Suck it and see”. If you believe there is a possibility of a court coming up with these judgments—they say it will be within weeks—then let us see.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

I understand that argument, which the noble Lord alluded to at Second Reading, but it is a curious one when a treaty has been agreed. If he had presented this argument under the previous Administration post 2022, during the negotiations, that may have held a degree of credibility, but I did not hear him at any stage ask the previous Government to abort those negotiations. This is important because he and others who agree with him are suggesting that the previous Government perhaps did not enter in good faith into negotiations based on ceding sovereignty to resolve legal considerations. That was the Statement that the Foreign Secretary made in November 2022. As I said at Second Reading, I assume—the noble Lord may be able to correct me—that the Government would not have made that policy choice in November 2022 without advice from the Attorney-General at the time.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

Since the noble Lord is famous for his pernicketiness, I remind him that the Statement in November 2022 referred to the “exercise of sovereignty”, not the ceding of sovereignty.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

I see. Presumably he is arguing that it would be joint sovereignty. How would you enter into negotiations with another sovereign state on the exercise of sovereignty if we were going to retain it? I do not understand. This is interesting. Is he now saying that the previous Government entered into those negotiations without the intent to cede sovereignty?

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

I promise the noble Lord and the Committee that this will be my last intervention. I had no insider knowledge and was not in any way involved, but the possibility, from reading the Statement, was that the negotiations would consider the possibility either of joint sovereignty, as has existed in certain parts of the world, or, as the noble Lord, Lord Bellingham, said—on a much better informed basis—of retaining sovereignty of Diego Garcia but ceding it elsewhere. There are all sorts of possibilities, and none of us knew at the time. That is why I certainly did not want those negotiations to take place, but I was not involved at all.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

Part of the noble Lord’s lack of involvement was in not raising his objections in Parliament at the time. If those negotiations were entered into to resolve the legal considerations then the Statement in 2022 undermines his quite novel argument now.

It is the case that the previous Government entered into those negotiations. I believe that they entered into them in good faith and they knew what the conclusions would be. The argument of the noble Lord, Lord Bellingham, is of course correct with regard to the 2017 declaration by the United Kingdom Government that they would be able to choose not to adhere to any rulings by the ICJ on the basis of a Commonwealth country, if that dispute started after 1987. It is a moot point whether this dispute started before then; there remain many arguments that it had. However, even if he is right, I am certain that the former Attorney-General—one of potentially three in 2022—would have advised the previous Administration that, regardless of that 2017 UK declaration, the ICJ would, as under its statute, refer to the General Assembly, because that is its purpose, and that there would be a resolution at the General Assembly. That was the entire point of the ICJ considering it, because it was referred to the ICJ by the General Assembly. I understand the noble Lord’s argument, but we would not be in a different place now even if his argument was very robust.

On the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, and our little to and fro on the treaty, we have been told on many occasions by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, and his colleagues in the previous Administration that treaty-making is a prerogative power. We do not have that short a memory in this House; we recall the Rwanda Bill and the Rwanda treaty. I recall the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Blidworth, telling us that it was not our role to interfere in the prerogative power of Governments making, implementing or changing treaties. I quote:

“My Lords, we are not aware of any precedent for Parliament mandating the Government in international negotiations conducted under the royal prerogative. The Government were not prepared to accept such a significant … shift”.—[Official Report, 24/7/18; col. 1598.]


That is ultimately what the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, puts forward. That quote from Hansard is from the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. He was insistent that it was not Parliament’s role to interfere or mandate a Government in the negotiation of treaties under the royal prerogative. He was either wrong then and right now, or he was right then and wrong now. I am sure he will be able to say which when he sums up the debate.

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[Lord Lilley (Con)]

I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way. I asked a very clear, core question: from which international court does she fear a damaging, binding judgment? She will not tell us. She says that she does not know but that the previous Government must have known.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

Forgive me, but I did not say that I did not know; I was just about to answer that specific question. I was making a point about the inconsistency and—frankly—ludicrousness of the Opposition doing something that, when they were in government, took up a great deal of time and resource, but which they now contend they never, ever needed to do.

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Moved by

[Lord Lilley]

2: 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 section 1(2A) (right to return), 1(2A) (lease renewal), 1(2A) (termination), (Referendum), (Employment rights of Chagossians), (Asylum claimants) and (Consultation) are discharged.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, connected to others in the name of Lord Lilley, seeks to make commencement of sections 2 and 4 dependent on certain conditions.

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[Lord Lilley (Con)]

I will speak in favour of Amendments 2, 13, 25 and 28. Amendment 2 is an all-purpose amendment saying that the treaty should not come into force until other conditions in amendments are incorporated. Amendments 13 and 28 call for consultation, and Amendment 25 for a referendum.

As I have mentioned previously, the advisory ruling of the International Court of Justice was based on a non-binding UN resolution about the process of decolonisation. That ruling explicitly says that a colonial state can sever part of a territory if it is the freely expressed and genuine will of the people of the territory concerned that they be separated.

The Chagossians cite the example of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. The parallel between the Gilbert and Ellice Islands and the situation of Chagos versus Mauritius is striking. When the Government consulted the people of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands before ceasing to be the colonial power, they found that there was considerable opposition in the Ellice Islands to being lumped in with the Gilbert Islands. The parallels between that and the Chagos Islands and Mauritius are very striking. The Chagos Islands are 1,339 miles away from Mauritius, and the Ellice Islands are just 800 miles away from the Gilbert Islands. The Chagos Islands have a different ethnic mix. They are basically populated by people from the African continent, whereas that is not the case in Mauritius. Likewise, with the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, one was Polynesian and one was Micronesian. The disparity of numbers is, if anything, even greater in the case of the Chagos Islands versus Mauritius than it was in the Ellice and Gilbert Islands.

After consulting, the British Government rightly decided that they should test the views of the people concerned. They had a referendum, and the vote was very striking. The people of the Ellice Islands voted to separate from the Gilbert Islands by 3,799 votes to 293. This is a comparatively small number of people—fewer, in fact, than the diaspora of Chagossian peoples in the UK, the Seychelles and Mauritius itself. It surely is possible for us to consult with them and seek their views, ideally through a referendum. The Government may say, “Why have a referendum? It’s so difficult. We can’t do it”. But the Chagossians themselves have today given the results of an opinion poll they have carried out, which 3,500 people responded to out of roughly 10,000 potential respondents. That is a very high proportion. Of those 3,500, an overwhelming proportion were against being lumped in with Mauritius.

The Government may well say that it is still only a minority of the total population. That is fair enough. Again, suck it and see—have a referendum of the total. Who would be the potential electors? The Chagossian nationals would be, as defined in this Bill. We have done that bit for the Government, so that is already there. It is clearly possible over a period to consult them if the Chagossians can organise a poll like this fairly rapidly and with such a high response rate.

The Government often argue that the Chagossians are “not really a people and in any case they’re no longer there”. However, there are precedents in history for people being removed from a place and allowed back. The Acadians were shipped out of Canada because they were thought to be unreliable French-speaking Catholics but subsequently were allowed back and are still a distinctive community in that part of Canada. Similar things have happened with the Chechens and the Crimeans more recently, after the Second World War. In history, we all know the displacement that was suffered by the ancient Israelites. It is possible to say that people who have been removed from a territory still have a right to that territory and should be consulted about its sovereignty.

These amendments seek to ensure that we do have a referendum. Failing that, if the Government can convince us that it is impossible in some way to organise a referendum, let us have a thorough and prolonged period of consultation. I would like to hear more from the Government on what they are doing now, having been provoked into it by the amendment to the committal Motion to ask the relevant Select Committee of this House to carry out a consultation. How are they envisaging that being carried out, and how will they define the Chagos consultation groups and so on? I think your Lordships’ House would almost certainly welcome greater information about that process and how the Government see it happening. If they do not satisfy us on this, I think we need to press ahead with Amendments 13 and 28 on the consultation, but ideally let us go ahead and have a referendum under Amendment 25.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I introduce Amendment 29 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, who is prevented by a family illness from being here. His amendment draws attention to the contradiction between the principles in this Bill and some of the UN resolutions dealing with when it is valid to partition a territory. The legal case on which the Government rest, as we established in the last round of amendments, is fundamentally UN Resolution 1514, which was the basis of the Mauritian claim that it was wrong to have divided the territory at independence.

This is an extraordinary precedent to set. The idea that if a territory, for reasons of administrative convenience, was at one time governed from somewhere else, that creates a lasting claim, would upend borders on every continent and in every archipelago. It would mean that Aden and Somaliland are again governed from India, and that the Cayman Islands are again governed from Jamaica. If we extend beyond British territories, it would mean that the Philippines were governed from Mexico, and that Bolivia was again governed from my native Peru, which was the seat of the viceroyalty. It would be an extraordinary principle.

Indeed, when read in context, the UN is not arguing that. If it did, it would have opposed the split of Czechoslovakia, the independence of Montenegro from Serbia, and so on. Of course it does not argue that. The three resolutions referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, essentially establish criteria where it is proper to divide a territory for reasons of geography, history, ethnic distinction or nationality—a sense of being a people and wanting to live in your own polity. As we just heard from my noble friend Lord Lilley, all those criteria are plainly met in this case. When the Chagos Islands were ceded by the French in 1814, they were ceded as a separate territory from Mauritius. They are populated by a different population, one that came from the west rather than from the east. The only reason that they were governed from Mauritius was not because they were part of Mauritius but because there is nowhere among those sparse and beautiful atolls suitable for a seat of government. It is similar to some of our continuing overseas territories in the Atlantic today, visited occasionally by a governor because there is no permanent seat there.

This is the key group of amendments—and the crux of the entire debate is the question of consulting the people who have the most at stake. They are the only people who have ever constituted a permanent population of that archipelago and their descendants, the people defined in this Bill as the citizens of the BIOT. My noble friend Lord Lilley gave a very good example: the consultation between the Ellice Islands and the Gilbert Islands at the moment of independence. They felt that they had not enough in common to accept government from each other’s hands, so the Ellice Islands became the monarchy of Tuvalu and the Gilbert Islands became the Republic of Kiribati. The distances here, ethnically and geographically, are much wider. There is not much doubt that if we had carried out a consultation in 1965, we would have had the same outcome as in the case cited by my noble friend.

Why does that suddenly stop being true now? Why does the passage of time invalidate that claim? This is a proposal to hand the Chagossian people to a nation that has never governed them, never seen them as part of their demos, that was very happy to renounce all claims in perpetuity and trouser a cash sum in exchange for doing so, and which has continued to treat the archipelago in essentially pecuniary terms. Why not test the proposition today?

I repeat a point made by my noble friend Lord Bellingham at Second Reading. It is perfectly logistically feasible to conduct a referendum across scattered territories. Last year I voted for our absent colleague—my noble friend Lord Hague of Richmond—to be Chancellor of the University of Oxford. There was a poll that was conducted electronically across five continents, the alumni being dispersed in their tens of thousands. There was a simple enough process. You establish the right of somebody to vote, you establish their identity, you show that they genuinely are an alumnus, then you have the vote. We have established who would be eligible here, and the right of descent that conveys BIOT citizenship.

I refuse to believe that it is logistically beyond us to consult the Chagossian people. I cannot speak for everyone on this side, but I am pretty sure that if the Chagossian people voted overwhelmingly for Mauritian citizenship, opposition to this proposal would dissipate and people would accept it as a valid exercise of self-determination. There is something more than perverse about acting in the name of decolonisation when taking a people against their will and transferring them to the sovereignty of a foreign state, a country whose Prime Minister at the time of the partition said that it is a territory which they never visit and of which they know little.

When I was a Member of the European Parliament, Crawley was part of my constituency. I got to know some of the disparate groups that represent our Chagossian fellow subjects, and it is fair to say that they did not always agree on every issue—like many small communities, they had a broad diversity of opinions on a lot of subjects—but honestly, hand on heart, I do not think I ever recall meeting any Chagossian in this country who wanted to be a citizen of Mauritius. There are reasons for that. The experience of Chagossians in Mauritius was not a happy one: they were confined in slums, and they were subjected to, in their eyes, racism and discrimination. The idea that we are now placing this entire population, against their will, because of a non-binding opinion from a tribunal without jurisdiction is a truly extraordinary and shameful moment.

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[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

That is a constructive proposition. The Government are very willing to engage in that kind of conversation and I note the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, which we will come to later in our considerations—perhaps not this evening, given our current rate of progress.

I point noble Lords to the statement by Olivier Bancoult, the leader of the largest Chagossian group, the CRG. I think it demonstrates that, while there are different views among Chagossians, there is strong support for the agreement from a significant number in the community.

I thought that Amendment 37, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord McCrea, was really interesting. I am pretty sure this is not exactly what he intended, but in some respects it seems to be trying to replicate that which our elected Members of Parliament are there to do: to represent the views of their constituents, including, in a number of cases, Chagossians. I draw attention to the All-Party Parliamentary Group, which does an excellent job of liaising between Chagossians and Parliament.

In addition, the Government have established a Chagossian contact group, which has wide representation from Chagossian communities in the UK, but also in Mauritius, Seychelles and elsewhere, to give Chagossians the formal role—this is what I think noble Lords seek —that can shape decision-making on the UK Government’s support for their community. As the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, again reminded us, he will seek to make sure that that group can be as effective as I know noble Lords want it to be. The group met for the first time on 2 September and will convene quarterly thereafter. As my noble friend Lord Coaker and I said in our letter to all Peers, we are exploring opportunities for enhancing that group, including increasing its transparency and frequency. But we are clear that any decisions about the contact group have to be made in agreement with its existing members, and the Government will engage with the group on these questions.

I forget whether we are considering Amendments 29 and 32 or whether they have been degrouped. I think we are doing those. They were tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, and relate to the UNGA resolutions. I do not think that would be an especially constructive exercise. The treaty expressly states that it constitutes the full and final settlement of all claims by Mauritius in relation to the Chagos Archipelago; it is hard to see how the proposed report would add to that.

In relation to Amendment 49, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord McCrea, there has never been a claim that all Chagossians share civic identity with Mauritius. As I have said, and as has been said numerous times in this Chamber and in the other place, it is a diverse community with a wide range of views. I said at the beginning of this contribution that the Government have prioritised the needs of security and securing the base on Diego Garcia. I know there are those who disagree with that and I have heard them. That being said, it does not mean that the Government should not do the very best job that we can of engaging with the Chagossian community, and making sure that its diverse range of views are reflected as best we can, as we move forward on the functioning of the contact group, the trust fund and other issues. I commit from the Dispatch Box that this Government will do everything they can to make sure that that happens, and I hope that the noble Lord will therefore seek to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

With the leave of the Committee, I withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 2 withdrawn.