Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)

My Lords, I have not been well recently and the Chair has very kindly agreed that I might sit to make my address; I hope that that is acceptable. I congratulate the chair of our International Agreements Committee on his excellent introduction, which covered so many of the points that we made. I do not want to go back through them all, but I will pick up one or two things that might need to be reflected on by the Minister. I hope that she will be able to respond, if not today, perhaps in writing later. I will also talk a bit about the procedural points on which the noble Lord ended—about the CRaG system and how difficult it is for our committee to engage properly with the issues that come before us. First, the noble Lord pointed to the question of the timeline. This agreement was signed in 2018 but laid only in 2026. When we asked about that, the only information that we got was that it was due to pressure of business on government. I am rather surprised that a relatively straightforward piece of documentation that will be helpful on a major issue for the British public takes eight years to reach Parliament. I do not know whether the Minister can comment on that when she comes to respond, but it is perhaps something that we should note for the future. On the report itself, which the chair has covered very clearly, we are talking about something that is very important in the UK, and that is sport. You do not need to watch television or read newspapers to know that it is something that seems to dominate almost every conversation that we have—and that is right. It is important that it should, as it is a wonderful thing that we have, with wonderful sporting activities. But betting clearly is undermining quite a lot of what we watch and enjoy. The point made earlier about the significant involvement of organised crime syndicates, perhaps laundering proceeds from other crimes, is not really picked up by the legislation in front of us. I wonder whether, when the Minister responds, she might say what further work will be done in this area, because this will hit us very hard if we do not catch it early and properly. Given the geographical limits of the document that has been signed up to, emerging as it has from the Council of Europe, even though the Council of Europe admits other organisations into it, this issue is going to spread widely, despite what the legislation will say, because a lot of this is happening in the Far East, in Latin America and in places not likely to be party to the document in front of us. Do we have sufficient documentation and processes available to us to ensure that these evils can be tackled, and what more can be done to improve enforcement? I do not think that we got proper answers to that when we were receiving evidence and we were unable to cover it in any detail, but this is something which I am sure needs to be looked at. Again, could we have some thoughts from the Minister when she comes to respond? Even though signing up to this Council of Europe arrangement is important, it is not going to be sufficient to unwind some of the difficulties that we are already experiencing in prosecutions. We had evidence that, although quite a lot of activity can be seen to happen through the sports bodies and others, we do not actually see many people ending up in court. That is partly because prosecutions require a great deal of high-level evidence that is not often easy to get. It is not clearly the department’s responsibility, but it is something that the Minister might want to take up with other colleagues at some point. Of course, the whole question of what the future holds for us in terms of online gambling and other issues has yet to be addressed. Again, I think it would be helpful in future documentation that we are likely to see as the result of AI and other issues that gambling does not get forgotten, because it is clearly going to be something that we will need to deal with in future. The chairman mentioned in his comments the difficulties we had in getting access to material to carry out the work that the committee has to do under the CRaG rules. It may be recalled that we had a similar discussion on this issue when we had an earlier debate on issues when the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, was the responding Minister. The difficulty that we have with CRaG comes from the fact that we have tried to put into a system that was designed to deal with a very limited number of treaties, which the Government were undertaking under the royal prerogative, a parliamentary process that gives some responsibility to Parliament for addressing the issues around it. Given, at the end of the day, that the royal prerogative is going to trump anything that Parliament might want to say, that may be a vain hope. But at some point, somewhere in government, I think people will begin to think about the question of how we should look at issues. We had a good discussion on this in the committee, and the previous chairman made arrangements with the Department of Trade, as it then was, to try to get information ahead of the time when material was being laid in Parliament so that the committee could begin to think through where the evidence was required, which people should be approached, how it could be addressed best, and whether we would have time within our meetings schedule to do that. But that does not apply to treaties other than trade. We have, largely, no information given to us beforehand; anything we get is informal and not to be relied on. I ask that at some point this issue is addressed, because the intention when we first set up this procedure after we left the European Union, when I was involved in the process of setting up the new Trade Bill, was to try to follow what was happening when we were in Europe, where the European Parliament had a very active approach to all treaties, but particularly trade, with a considerable amount of time being spent in the Chamber and in the committee to make sure that issues were properly explored, officials helped and evidence gathered. This is not happening, as we currently do it. Our timelines are extremely tight. Gathering evidence is very difficult for the staff; they have very little time to do it, and we often do not really get as much as perhaps we should. The time available to consider and debate that is very much squeezed. This needs review. I hope that that is helpful to the debate.