Treaty Scrutiny in Westminster (International Agreements Committee Report)
House of Lords · Grand Committee · 16 Mar 2026 · 28 speeches · Official Report
Motion to Take Note
Moved by
That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the International Agreements Committee Treaty Scrutiny in Westminster: Addressing the Accountability Gap (10th Report, HL Paper 168).
My Lords, it is fitting that my final act as the outgoing chair of the International Agreements Committee is to open a debate about the process of treaty scrutiny in Parliament. I am delighted to see that so many present and past members of the committee will take part today. The inquiry we launched last year was designed to take stock of how scrutiny has operated in the committee’s first five years. Our conclusion, in short, is that the current framework for treaty scrutiny under CRaG is, to quote one of our witnesses, “a weak and insufficient mechanism for securing meaningful accountability”. I will briefly address the main reasons leading to that conclusion. As many will know, the framework for treaty scrutiny is set out in Part 2 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, commonly known as CRaG. This legislation gives both Houses of Parliament 21 joint sitting days to consider a treaty and decide whether to vote against ratification. This process has not fundamentally changed in 100 years. The first issue is that the CRaG process does not allow enough time for scrutiny. It is frankly impossible to conduct an in-depth, evidence-based review of a significant treaty within the 21-day CRaG deadline. Remember, this deadline is for Parliament to debate and vote on the treaty; the International Agreements Committee and its officials have even less time to produce their report for Members of the House to consider ahead of a debate. Your Lordships will appreciate that such...
My Lords, we have already sung the praises of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and I am delighted to do so again in relation to this excellent report and his chairmanship of this committee over the past few years. I also commend the team who put a huge amount of effort into creating the report, which I think people have found enormously useful. It is very powerfully written. It is 100% clear that the current process of treaty scrutiny falls far below what is expected in a democracy and what is seen to operate in other countries, such as Australia. I am embarrassed to quote Bagehot. I have taken him from the other side, because he is clear in my view that the prerogative of treaty making lies with the Executive, which I think the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, was referring to. He is correct that the work of making an agreement with another country or multinational body is indeed the work of the Executive. However, these agreements are central to the policy-making and laws of this country, and it is also the prerogative of Parliament-I think he is quite clear about that-to scrutinise the work of the Executive post the treaty’s creation and before it can be properly ratified. The issue we have is not with the Executive’s role, but with the absurdly short time-which is very clearly demonstrated in this report and has been mentioned by numerous similar committees over many years-given to us to properly assess the validity of any agreements that we as a nation...
My Lords, I am loath to repeat what has been said before, but I want to thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, for this report and for outlining its principles very clearly, which are, to encompass them in just one sentence, that the current legal framework in which we operate is not good enough and does not work in the interests of our people, Parliament has to work to ensure that it is fit for purpose and we need to make sure that that change is ahead of us. I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, for his work and for his clear explanation. The matter before us is that the Government’s response to what has been put before them is. “Well, we’ll have a look at absolutely anything you want us to, but what we will not do is enter into a statutory change”. In fact, somewhere within the response there is the wonderful phrase that we hear so often, “Parliamentary time is not available”. The reason for this work is primarily contained in a single sentence in paragraph 39: “Treaties are now not just about high policy affecting relations between states, but deal with a huge range of issues directly touching on matters of domestic law and people’s daily lives”. It is that function, which is charged by the CRaG legislation, that is so poor in the way it can be interpreted to provide an answer to that single point inside the report. I would like to ask the Minister how co-ordination works between the FCDO and those who provide the background work on developing...
My Lords, your Lordships’ International Agreements Committee, on which I have the honour to serve, is a relatively newly established committee, with a mandate that in its vagueness perhaps reflects its novelty. It is a good step that we should be debating today the committee’s own report on its early years, so well introduced by our recently rotated chair, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and the incoming chair, the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Lainston. The first point to make is, as all the evidence we took records, that our Parliament is an outlier-probably better described as a backmarker-among democratic parliaments attempting to scrutinise their agreements with third countries, behind the US Congress and the European Parliament. That is not a place that we should accept as Britain navigates its way through increasingly choppy international waters. For all the territory that we have traversed since the committee was set up, I record with gratitude that we have been given much help, in particular by the Department for Business and the FCDO. Even so, gaps and weaknesses have been revealed in our task of helping to apply the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act, which is our basic duty. Those gaps and weaknesses could be remedied by modest changes. None of those that I will put emphasis on would require primary legislation. Here are three examples that I hope the Minister will reflect carefully on and respond to. First, and by a long way foremost, is the need...
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...
My Lords, it is very welcome that we have, in the space of a fortnight, two chances to debate committee reports from one of our most senior committees-I say that as a recent member of it. I find it is often the case that the House does not see the work going on in committees; we should see more of it, and it is good to do so today. I thank my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith for his excellent introduction and, of course, for his chairmanship in the time that he was on this committee. The problem at the heart of this debate is how we should balance the current right of the Government to negotiate treaties and to ratify them using the royal prerogative against the rights that Parliament has, or should have, in all other policy matters. In the past, treaties were largely concerned with war, peace and international policy more generally but, today, trade policy is growing in importance, not just because of its return to the UK, having previously been dealt with by the EU Commission and EU Parliament but, most importantly, because it is evident that modern trade deals increasingly bring with them changes to a wide range of domestic policies. As we know from recent experiences in what is agreed outside parliamentary sight in bilateral trade discussions and, as referred to already, as we have seen in treaties such as Rwanda and the Chagos Islands, it is often necessary to look at collateral changes that follow in primary legislation. This impacts directly on existing terms...
My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, for his fair-minded chairmanship, and intellectually able and collegiate steering of our committee. It was particularly welcome to me, as a refugee from the European Affairs Committee. Others have discussed the report and its conclusions, the most striking being that there is a strong case for reforming, by law, the arrangements for effective parliamentary scrutiny of international treaties under the CRaG Act 2010. Indeed, the report suggests, as other noble Lords have mentioned, that the UK is an outlier from other countries where Parliament has more of a say over treaties that sometimes require legislative consent. I believe that treaties should remain a royal prerogative power. We need not be swayed by the example of continental states, most of which are relatively new or have emerged from revolution, war or violent struggle. By contrast, the UK’s constitutional arrangements emerged over centuries; they brought stability and the potential for change, and ensured the accountability of the Government and Parliament to the electorate. This was demonstrated at the 2019 general election, when the central issue was whether Parliament should decide the terms of the treaty with the EU or the Government on behalf of the people’s wish expressed in the referendum. Our system allowed the will of the majority to be followed, where a more continental system would have allowed a parliament, out of touch with those...
My Lords, I need to respond to the rather surprising compliment from the noble Lord, Lord Lilley. I can do so because I agree with a number of things that he said, in particular on the case for parliamentary scrutiny during negotiation and before a deal is struck. I am sure that we all agreed with his strictures on the negotiating stance of his noble friend Lord Frost. I join in the tribute to the committee and its outgoing chairman, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, under whom I served, and let us not forget the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, who stood in so well for him when he had to step aside. I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Grimstone, who was by far the most sympathetic Minister with whom we did business, and to the incoming chairman, who maintained the Grimstone tradition. There is an accountability gap; the report proves it very satisfactorily and clearly by comparing our procedures with those of comparable countries, including those with dualist systems. They have more say than we do. However, there is also a gap relative to the past. We have much less say now than we did when we were in the EU. With our Ministers taking part in Council decisions on opening, handling and concluding negotiations, Parliament’s scrutiny reserve meant that Ministers could be and were summoned to answer our questions before casting their votes. I served on our EU committee and four of its sub-committees, and I can confirm that their scrutiny, unlike today’s, was real....
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
I was making the point that the European Parliament has the right to vote on the outcome of any treaty negotiation, of course: treaties require its positive consent. Its debates informed ours. My point is not just that there is an accountability gap relative to the European Parliament, but that our Government are now much less accountable to our Parliament than they were 16 years ago when CRaG was debated and agreed. So it really will not do for the Government to assert, as their reply to the committee does, that “the CRaG Act strikes a careful balance between the power of the Executive to conclude and ratify treaties and the power of Parliament to scrutinise treaties subject to ratification”. If CRaG got the balance right, by definition, the balance is wrong today. Or did careful Prime Minister Johnson correct, by Brexit, a mistake made by the careless Prime Minister Brown? I do not think so. Two years ago, the Opposition Front Bench spokesman on trade in the other place stated that “the CRaG process … is clearly not fit for purpose ”.-[ Official Report , Commons, 19/3/24; col. 869.] I agree. So let us not have any more of this “careful balance” nonsense now. I am not naive enough to expect that legislative time will be made available for major CRaG reform. I recognise that the Government’s response to the committee is not all nonsense; nor is it all just, “What we have, we hold”. The Government are prepared to discuss possible improvements in the way CRaG works. My plea to...
My Lords, page 8 of our report states baldly that “governments since 2019 have not listened to Parliament” in respect of treaty scrutiny at Westminster. So the question before us is, “Does there exist, as is stated in the report, an accountability gap?” Further, do the Government recognise that such a gap exists? If so, are they prepared to respond positively to meet that gap? In short, will they deal with it, with the aim of strengthening parliamentary oversight? Alas, the answer is, “Only marginally, if at all”. The Committee will be disappointed by the Government’s somewhat Panglossian reply to the report. I recall being a young diplomat in about 1961 and hearing a joke doing the rounds among colleagues. It was a spoof draft for Ministers replying to the recommendations of a parliamentary committee: a model, all-purpose response. I still remember some parts of the suggested reply. “We are most grateful to the committee. We welcome and pay tribute to its hard work, which has made a valuable contribution to our consideration of the subject. We commend its expertise and wisdom and have examined with great care its conclusions. But Rome wasn’t built in a day and we aim to continue to work closely with the committee in a positive dialogue”. As I read the preamble to the Government’s response, I detected echoes of that spoof from more than 60 years ago. It is of course true that the Government have made some limited advances, but, overall, when I read their response, I saw the...
My Lord, I welcome this report and the reports from other committees, including the Constitution Committee, on the subject, but I rather regret that they are necessary. I was involved in the passage of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill. I served on the Joint Committee on the draft Bill and, when the Bill was introduced, I managed to get an amendment accepted covering the provision of explanatory memoranda to Parliament. With the benefit of hindsight, I realise I should have gone further, utilising the leverage of the wash-up to press for an amendment to provide for every significant treaty negotiated by government to be subject to approval by affirmative resolution by the House of Commons. That is what the Hansard Society has pressed for. What this report recommends-I think at paragraph 70-is crucial, and it is entirely feasible in legislative terms. Alex Horne, a former senior legal adviser to several parliamentary committees, has drafted a Bill to amend CRaG to achieve this. This leads to the key points I wish to make. I very much welcome this report, but I do not extend that welcome to the Government’s response, which I fear is what is to be expected from the Executive. There is a clear executive view, whichever party is in power, which is at odds with a parliamentary view. Negotiating treaties, as my noble friend Lady Lawlor said, takes place under prerogative powers. Treaty-making always has been and should remain within the gift of His Majesty’s Government....
My Lords, it is a real pleasure to follow that speech, which was a useful and authoritative view on this topic. I will attempt to sum up some of the issues, but I will first make a couple of observations. First, since the change in the machinery of government in the last Parliament, the focus of the equivalent committee in the House of Commons has been very much dimmed. Now that it is a Business and Trade Committee, it is absorbed in a whole range of issues and cannot focus on trade as it did. Your Lordships’ committee has been carrying the lantern on this since that change. I will not comment on many contributions. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for reminding me what I had been missing since I last heard him speak. On the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor, when on a committee we have an opportunity to debate the terms of reference; there is a full opportunity for every member to affect and change them and to suggest or insist on-if they want to-particular witnesses. I feel that there is room to scrutinise. We wait for an International Agreements Committee debate and then two come along within a week. It gives us a final chance to thank our now retired chairman for his work, as well as all my colleagues. This will be my last time speaking as an alumnus of the committee. It is an important committee and I am very encouraged that the new chair, the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, is embracing many of the themes of this report. It was clear from the evidence we...
My Lords, like others, I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, for so ably introducing this debate and setting out the findings of his committee. It is indeed a thought-provoking and timely report, and the committee is right that Parliament should be given a full opportunity to scrutinise the terms of the Government’s treaties with other nations. I also particularly enjoyed the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson. If I was not so afraid of the results, I would be tempted to look back through Hansard at the number of times that I as a Minister might have used some of those phrases in reports before the House. I suspect the results would not be good, so I probably will not. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, outlined, the current position is that His Majesty’s Government make treaties under the royal prerogative, and foreign policy more generally is the responsibility of the King’s Ministers. Of course, Members of Parliament may seek to bind the Secretary of State to recognise a state, as with the Palestinian Statehood (Recognition) Bill, and parliamentary committees may seek to recognise states, as the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee did in 2023 when it declared that Taiwan is already an independent country under the name “Republic of China” and it possesses all the qualifications for statehood. I probably agree with the second statement rather than the first. Even though I profoundly disagree with the current incumbents, it is, in...
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
My Lords, I was developing a point about the Government’s refusal, under the Ponsonby rule, to grant a debate in the House of Commons on the Diego Garcia Bill. Their refusal to do that prevented the ratification of the treaty, making the CRaG Act, in essence, worthless in that respect. Of course, this principle was not just outlined by Sir Arthur Ponsonby so long ago; it was also repeated in the House of Commons by the then Europe Minister, Chris Bryant MP, a member of the current Government. At the time, he said: “If Members-whether Front Benchers or Back Benchers-sought to debate a motion, the Government would ensure that there was a debate within the time”. He went on: “I hope that I have reassured the House that the Commons would always have the right of veto, should it choose to implement it”.-[ Official Report, Commons, 19/1/10; cols. 216-18.] Following the passage of the CRaG Act, we have learned that these assurances were empty words, in a sense, and that the Government have ditched a Labour principle that lasted almost a century. I have tabled a Written Question on this point; perhaps the Minister might be kind enough to answer it today. Do the Government still consider themselves bound by the Ponsonby rule in full? If they have decided to abandon it, that may be defensible, but what is not defensible is the lack of transparency around this apparent, fairly major change in government policy-if, indeed, that is what has happened. I hope that the Minister will clarify...
Baroness Chapman of Darlington
My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak on behalf of the Government in response to this debate. I am well aware of the poacher-turned-gamekeeper nature of the response that I am about to give. I remember saying something very similar to what the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, shared with us earlier. I probably said it to the noble Lord opposite, regarding some implementing legislation around Brexit, and I definitely said it in the other place when we were debating various approaches to the Brexit negotiations between 2016 and 2019. It is important that we all approach this in the spirit of openness and candour. I very much enjoyed what my good noble friend Lord Anderson had to say; it was almost as though he was reading from my script. Having said all that, I have in my mind what the noble Lord, Lord Fox, said; I always enjoy his speeches. He said that he did not anticipate a surprising reaction from the Government today, but that he was looking for empathy for the arguments made. He will get that. It is one thing to complain about a process while in opposition, or even to read the excellent report conducted by the committee; it is very different to hear the arguments made in the way that we have this afternoon. I admit that when I first saw this debate in my diary I thought, “Well, that’s an afternoon”, but it has been a really interesting and engaging opportunity. All noble Lords here are people I have found myself debating on various sides of both Chambers over quite a few years...
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington
My Lords, I am sorry that I did not manage to conclude what was left of my speech before the Division Bells rang, slightly earlier than we expected. There is an important debate on media to follow, so I will not take too much longer. The Government believe that the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 continues to provide a suitable and proportionate framework. However, the FCDO’s treaty unit will continue to work with the committee and its secretariat to ensure that our ways of working best deliver the balance between efficient executive function and accountability. I will consider further the issue of multilateral and plurilateral agreements. We very much welcome the committee’s continued engagement and I once again thank my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith for tabling this debate.
Before the noble Baroness sits down, do the Government still consider themselves bound by the Ponsonby rule?
Baroness Chapman of Darlington
I answered that in saying that I did not know why the debate in the other place, which the noble Lord thought the answer to that question hinged on, did not take place. I thank noble Lords for their contributions.
My Lords, I have a few things to say, though I recognise that there is another debate to follow. I thank all noble Lords who have contributed. This has been another debate where a lot of thoughtful things have been said, most of which I agreed with. I actually agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, that there is merit in the negotiating mandate being the subject of debate, and that has happened. I am afraid that the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, was not right that two things were missing from the report; it touches on the negotiating mandate in paragraph 55(a) and sets out the Ponsonby rule fully in paragraph 30. I again thank all the members of the committee who participated in making the report, but I particularly thank the officials. I have made this point before, but they do an extraordinary amount of work in a very short time. If I may, though it is invidious, I will slightly embarrass her by particularly thanking and singling out Cathy Adams, who is leaving the committee and your Lordships’ service as international legal adviser. She has been an extraordinarily valuable member of staff and I thank her personally as well as on behalf of the committee. I listened very carefully to what my noble friend said. I listened more carefully to what she said than to what she read out, if she does not mind my saying so, as there were hints of what my noble friend Lord Anderson of Swansea said, as she recognised, in her responses. I know that work is going on; I have heard that and...
I did not say we should not take evidence, but simply that we should have a greater diversity of expert witnesses.
I thank the noble Baroness. I think we have much more diversity than she is giving us credit for, but she has perhaps not been a member of the committee for quite as long as I have. I am also grateful to my noble friend the Minister for recognising that the defence of, “Do not worry, there is implementing legislation”, is not an answer to the concerns raised by the committee. With those comments, and the kindly meant suggestion that the Minister comes back to this debate, I beg to move.
Motion agreed.