Exchange of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information Agreement

Lord Tunnicliffe Excerpts

Monday 17th January 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Hayter and her committee for the report and for calling this debate. The committee invites us to look not only at the agreement in front of us but at the broader area in which it fits. It is important to see the big picture.

I am new to this area of treaties, and I always like to see a piece of paper. The first piece of paper that one is likely to come across on AUKUS is Boris Johnson’s speech. I am not entirely comfortable with that as a document of record, so I went on Google, as one does, and addressed the White House website. It has an excellent document which puts the range and objectives of this package, or whatever we want to call it, in a joint leaders’ statement on AUKUS. I would be happier about the statement if it had three signatures at the bottom; nevertheless, it uses very inclusive language. I shall quote some parts of it. The statement begins:

“As leaders of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, guided by our enduring ideals and shared commitment to the international rules-based order, we resolve to deepen diplomatic, security, and defense cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region, including by working with partners, to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. As part of this effort, we are announcing the creation of an enhanced trilateral security partnership called ‘AUKUS’”.


To be clear on what it is to cover, the third paragraph states:

“As the first initiative under AUKUS, recognizing our common tradition as maritime democracies, we commit to a shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy. Today, we embark on a trilateral effort of 18 months to seek an optimal pathway to deliver this capability.”


Recognising that the agreement goes much wider than submarines, a later paragraph states:

“Recognizing our deep defense ties, built over decades, today we also embark on further trilateral collaboration under AUKUS to enhance our joint capabilities and interoperability. These initial efforts will focus on cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and additional undersea capabilities.”


It is clear from this carefully worded joint leaders’ statement that this is a comprehensive and ambitious initiative.

The Labour Party welcomes the increased co-operation with our allies and supports the AUKUS agreement. Australia and America are two of our closest security partners, and sharing resources and intelligence with them makes Britain safer. Britain must look after our most important relationships, or we will see our influence and security quickly decline. China’s actions in the Indo-Pacific pose risks to UK interests and threaten a stable trading environment, democracy and human rights, and it is important that we deal with those risks.

However—there is always a “however”—it is also vital that the UK maintain a commercial relationship with China and that we work with it on defining global issues of the day, such as tackling climate change. It is also important that this arrangement does not see resources redirected from Europe to the Pacific and that it strengthens our NATO alliance and other strategic partnerships. Finally, this arrangement clearly brings potential economic opportunities for Britain.

My only problem with this grand vision—and this shows my lack of international diplomacy experience—concerns what this statement is. Is it a treaty? Is it an agreement? How will things change as a result of it? Will it develop into a document which has some enforceability?

In addressing this from a UK point of view, I support the concept and focus of the noble Lord, Lord West. As this pact, this agreement—whatever we want to call it—matures, it will need a high-quality individual with a high-quality team to make sure that it goes right. There are a lot of potential problems. One thing we need is a change in the tradition of the political side of our leadership and the Civil Service. We will need people in a stable relationship with this task because the very considerable industrial and manufacturing complexities—there are also people complexities; this point was rolled out by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce—will need to be looked at all the time.

We support the pact, but there is a lot to flesh out before it is meaningful. Frankly, what we have in front of us is a modest part of that picture. As far as I understand it, it is a confidentiality agreement driven by the necessities of US law. The International Agreements Committee has brought out some of question marks, which I hope the Minister will be able to help with. I was particularly seized by paragraph 13 of its report, which states that the agreement

“shall settle any disagreements arising in the implementation or interpretation of this Agreement through mutual consultations and negotiations without recourse to any dispute settlement mechanism”.

That sounds wonderful but you end up asking where its teeth are. How will it actually deliver?

The next paragraph, paragraph 14, talks about

“four automatic extensions of six months each”,

which sounds like 31 December 2025; I do not know why it does not say that, nor what automatic extensions are. This paragraph also states:

“Any Party may terminate the Agreement by giving six months’ written notice to the other Parties.”


So it is a pretty fragile situation. When you think about why this may happen, it depends on trust. I suspect that if you asked the French about trust, they would give you a pretty dire analysis of what they see as trust.

Paragraph 16 of the report has been referred to; it is where all these conversations centre. It talks about the Explanatory Memorandum but really it is talking about the thinking behind the document. It states:

“We reiterate our recommendation made in recent reports that the Government should review its quality assurance processes to ensure that all EMs address whether amendments will be subject to scrutiny under Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010”.


I would go further: we must have mechanisms to supervise this enormous concept—this trilateral relationship —with parliamentary scrutiny.

We support the agreement in front of us, but we must be much clearer about parliamentary involvement, and I thank my noble friend Lady Liddell for bringing this out. The question is: why? There are two reasons. First, the probability is that this will involve lots of money. The Australians have a somewhat patchy reputation when it comes to building submarines and manning them. There is a reasonable possibility—possibly even a probability—that these boats will end up being built in Britain. That sounds wonderful until you look at the record of building submarines in Britain, with pauses, delays, changes in the shape of the programme et cetera.

The second thing that one has to realise is that this is going to go wrong. Things of this complexity go wrong; life is like that. If something goes wrong, it does not mean that it is lost, it means that the “going wrong” process will have to be managed. That management once again comes back to the talent that we put into the process and the extent to which Parliament is informed, to which there is a degree of transparency, to work through what will be a 10, 15 or 20-year relationship.