Treaty Scrutiny: Working Practices (EUC Report)

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Monday 7th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to be back physically in your Lordships’ House, despite the hostile environment that the risk-averse House authorities have created for us. It is also a pleasure to take part in this debate on a trio of interesting reports from committees of your Lordships’ House.

I particularly welcome the Constitution Committee’s acknowledgement that treaty-making is a function of government exercised through the royal prerogative. I also welcome the fact that the committee did not recommend that our Parliament copied the European Parliament’s procedures.

There is undoubtedly at present a greater appetite in Parliament for detailed involvement in treaties. The Government responded positively to that with the new procedures for FTAs set out in their February 2019 Command Paper, and I understand that that broadly remains government policy. But the three reports being debated show that there is an insatiable beast lurking in the committees of your Lordships’ House. This beast wants more information and more involvement on more aspects of treaty activity.

The beast also has the CRaG Act in its sights. That is clear from all the reports we are considering, although the treaty sub-committee’s report pragmatically accepts that there will be no immediate change to the CRaG Act and has wisely concentrated on its working procedures. The Ponsonby rule, which underpins the CRaG Act, was quite good enough for Parliament in the days before we joined the EU. It should be quite good enough for Parliament now that we are a free-standing nation again. I can see no need to change the Act.

In particular, given that new FTAs will be discussed with Parliament at various stages of their evolution, the 21 sitting days, which is practically five elapsed weeks, seem to provide an adequate window for final scrutiny prior to ratification. It may well be that your Lordships’ House needs to work in more agile ways to accommodate that timeframe, but the starting point need not be that more time is required.

I believe that the root cause of this desire to spend more time scrutinising treaties is a belief in your Lordships’ House that Brexit is a bad thing and that everything the Government do as a consequence of it is potentially bad. Even when our new pro-Brexit Peers arrive, that will likely remain the dominant view of your Lordships’ House. I hope that the House will continue its journey through the various stages of grief over Brexit and arrive at the final stage of acceptance. I predict that at that stage the appetite for spending significant time on treaties will diminish. We will of course still need a treaties committee in your Lordships’ House, unless a Joint Committee is set up. But, like my noble friend Lord Lansley, I hope that it will be a fully fledged Select Committee, not a mere sub-committee of the EU Committee, which will itself of course recede in importance as we start to live in a post-Brexit world.