Treaty Scrutiny in Westminster (International Agreements Committee Report)

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the committee and its chairman on the report. I hesitate to participate in this debate since I have limited expertise in foreign affairs, and still less on the scrutiny of foreign treaties, but I was puzzled by the report’s focus on the scrutiny of treaties after they have been negotiated. By then, surely, it is too late to influence the substantive content of any treaty. Parliamentarians cannot revise a treaty and would reject it only if it were demonstrably malign. All Parliament can do is accept or reject a treaty.

Surely it would be more valuable to scrutinise the Government’s negotiating mandate at the start of negotiations. We do not do so because Governments rarely, if ever, publish the mandate they have given our negotiators. By contrast, the EU often does publish its mandate. As a result, I know more about the aims of the EU in the current reset negotiations than I do about my own Government’s. For instance, I know that the EU intends to secure a—I quote from the title of the mandate it gave its negotiators—

“financial contribution from the UK towards reducing economic and social disparities between the regions of the Union”.

That is in addition to cash payments the EU is demanding towards its administrative costs in each of the sectors now being negotiated.

This is an issue on which I am in rare agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, who said very pithily in the debate on these negotiations on 26 November:

“We also suffer from a degree of timidity in what we are putting forward, and the other side suffers from a bit of excessive ambition. I do not think we should be paying contributions into the EU budget, that it is right to try to charge us €10 billion to join SAFE, or that it is right to try to charge us for integration into the EU electricity market. These things are a common benefit—they suit both sides—so why should we pay?”.—[Official Report, 26/2/26; col. 777.]


If Parliament has an opportunity to express a view on issues such as this at the start, rather than when it is too late, that could surely strengthen the Government’s negotiating hand.

I have been struck by how many negotiations seem to have gone awry for the UK over the years. Most recently, the way the rationale for the Chagos deal has unravelled has been very disturbing. The incoherence of the Government’s approach to the reset negotiations suggests that a similar failure is in the making. But it is not just this Government’s negotiations: the withdrawal agreement started off just like the current reset negotiations, as I shall show in a moment.

There seem to be recurrent weaknesses in the way the FCDO negotiates, which might be alleviated if we had debates on the scrutiny of mandates rather than outcomes. I make it clear that any such weaknesses, even if they reflect the culture of the FCDO, are ultimately the responsibility of Ministers and Parliament. Ministers are responsible for the advice they take and the culture they tolerate. In my experience, officials do respond to clear guidance from Ministers. Parliament should, therefore, examine the FCDO culture that Ministers allow to prevail.

I will mention just a couple of weaknesses that seem to beset our approach to negotiations. Both perhaps reflect typical aspects of the British character. The first is a belief that making early concessions will generate good will and elicit corresponding concessions from the other side later. This naive belief makes the UK prey to the EU practice of demanding key concessions as a price for opening negotiations. The EU refused even to start reset negotiations unless we had first agreed—signed, sealed and delivered—to restrict the catch of fish from our waters for another 12 years. This supine Government committed us to that so that, even if the negotiations fail, we will have conceded it.

The EU employed the same gambit in the withdrawal negotiations, refusing to proceed unless the UK agreed that there should be no hard border in Ireland. Since the EU was threatening to erect a hard border, the UK had to accept whatever the EU deemed necessary to avoid it erecting one, in practice subjecting Northern Ireland to EU law and creating a border with Great Britain. My noble friend Lady May sadly signed up to that.

The second congenital or prevailing weakness is a very British aversion to rows, scenes and failure—or the prospect of failure. General de Gaulle in his memoirs said that when he was utterly dependent on Britain to arm and equip his Free French forces, he had only to threaten a row to equip another division. This aversion to rows, scenes and admitting failure results in the most egregious weakness of the British approach to negotiations: the failure to prepare, let alone deploy, what negotiators call their BATNA—their best alternative to a negotiated settlement. Sometimes, no deal can be better than a bad deal. It was Parliament, through the Burt-Benn Act, that deprived government of the option of exercising its BATNA, walking away from negotiations or threatening to do so—with very damaging consequences for the outcome of the withdrawal agreement negotiations.

Normally, I hope that parliamentarians would use the option of scrutiny at the beginning of negotiations to insist on the Government including a BATNA—a best alternative to a negotiated agreement—therefore stiffening our negotiators’ spines in future negotiations.