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Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 18 November 2025

Debate

Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Contribution

The noble Lord makes an extremely good point. If you see this purely in fiscal terms, depending on whether we take the Government’s or my noble friend Lady Noakes’s figures, it is an obviously disastrous thing to spend either six times or 60 times as much as in the KPMG report, simply to give to another country. We keep hearing from the Chancellor of the Exchequer that growth is her priority and so on. Here is a very good way of making a saving: by not giving money away for territory that we already have but, instead, using a much smaller fraction of that sum to make restitution to the people who were removed. It ticks every box. I mentioned earlier that the Falkland Islands were saved, paradoxically, by the experience of war because it led to investment, it led to fishing and hydrocarbons being exploited around the coasts, and it led to employment opportunities and better transport links. If we had a settled Chagossian population around the base, they would be the obvious people to work as the contractors on the base. Instead of having to import all these Filipinos from Singapore by air, we would have a population there doing the non-military, non-sensitive jobs.

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