Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)

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 them is: be constructive about that process. Put a parliamentarian in charge of the process: that is, someone who has been a poacher. Do not leave it to the grim official gatekeeper/gamekeepers like me. The status quo is acutely unsatisfactory and unbalanced, and five years of unbalance is long enough. As I said in our debate last week, our treaty negotiators will be more powerful if the ratification of the outcome of a negotiation is no longer known to be a foregone conclusion of farcical formality.