Lord Callanan (Con)

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the Bill, and I will come to some of her points shortly. This is now the second opportunity that we have had to debate the UK-Mauritius agreement concerning the Chagos Archipelago, including Diego Garcia, but it is of course the first time that your Lordships’ House has been asked to approve the agreement in law. When we debated the Motion to approve the treaty under the CRaG process, I lamented the fact that the other place was denied the opportunity to have a substantive debate on the treaty at that point. If the Government are so confident in their arguments, why did they deny the other House the opportunity to debate this properly? As I said then, the Government played fast and loose with the conventions on treaty approval, despite promises that had been given by their own Ministers when the CRaG process was first introduced. The Government were elected on the back of pledges to put public service and integrity first; refusing to adhere to the conventions in this case hardly lived up to those promises. That said, as a responsible Official Opposition—and recognising the primacy of the other place, which approved the Bill at Third Reading—we will not seek to deny the Bill a Second Reading today. We already know that the other place did not have the opportunity to debate the treaty when it was laid before the House, and the Bill subsequently received minimal scrutiny. In fact, Committee and Third Reading were both taken on the same day, and a total of just 17 hours of debate were allocated to a Bill that fundamentally changes our strategic security role in the Indian Ocean and puts £35 billion-worth of taxpayers’ money in the hands of politicians thousands of miles away from the UK. Not only was there no mention of the Bill in the Labour manifesto; there was a specific promise to protect our overseas territories. For the election, the Minister’s party’s manifesto said: “Defending our security also means protecting the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies … Labour will always defend their sovereignty and right to self-determination”. It seems that tax is not the only manifesto commitment being binned today. Crucially, the views of the Chagossian people have not been heard. We feel it is only right that the Government should be required to consult the Chagossian community on the implementation of this treaty, including on the establishment of the Chagossian trust fund, which the Minister discussed. The UK taxpayer will fund it, but the Mauritian Government will have sole responsibility to distribute it however they see fit. That is why I tabled the amendment to the original committal Motion that would have required the Government to consult the Chagossian community over a period of 30 days. If the Minister is concerned that 30 days is not long enough, I note that we talked about making it longer, but we did not do so because we wanted the Government to have the opportunity to get their Bill through this Session. If I had set the Motion at three months, the Minister would have told us that there is no time to have a Committee debate before the end of this Session because the Opposition are trying to deny them the Bill. We deliberately selected a short period so that the Minister could not argue that we were trying to wreck the Bill—that was not our intention. It was a measured, reasonable approach which we felt would have made up completely for the Government’s failure to consult the Chagossians to date and would help us in our work to give the Bill the proper scrutiny it deserves, informed by the outcome of that consultation. It was not a wrecking amendment, and the Minister knows that in her heart of hearts. Without that additional consultation—