Treaty Scrutiny in Westminster (International Agreements Committee Report)

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, your Lordships’ Institutional 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 to address the choke point imposed by the limit of 21 working days for the committee to take evidence, report to the House and hold a debate on an agreement that the Government consider is covered by the CRaG procedures. I note, incidentally, that the choice of whether or not an agreement falls within the scope of CRaG procedures is entirely a matter for the Government. They have many other forms of agreement—memorandums of understanding being the favourite—by which they can evade those procedures, and they frequently do. It would be a great help if the Government would publish a text, setting out clearly the criteria that they use to make their choice as to whether the CRaG procedures need to apply.

Of more significance is the need to introduce more flexibility into the application of the 21-day limit. This hampers the taking of evidence by the committee and the drafting of its report. It is with some shame that I admit that, on one occasion recently, the committee was compelled to send forward to the House a report on which it had been unable to take any evidence at all. There is an easy remedy, put forward by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, which I strongly endorse. The Government should agree that, as a general rule, they would grant one—I repeat, one—extension of a second 21-day period when the committee submitted a reasoned argument for so doing. The Government would retain the right to refuse such a request if they could demonstrate that doing so was in the national interest. The committee has shown plenty of flexibility on its side, when, for example, it agreed that the UK-France one-in, one-out agreement needed immediate application, without any of the committee procedures being engaged.

The second example is the rather bizarre fact that the Government accept the need for a CRaG process when an agreement is bilateral, but not when it is plurilateral or multilateral, even if it imposes binding legal obligations on the UK. More and more agreements fall into the latter two categories. A recent example was the decision by the Government—a very welcome decision in the committee’s view—in their trade strategy to join the World Trade Organization’s interim dispute settlement procedure. This requires the UK to accept a ruling in a dispute between it and another country in the interim procedure.

In fact, the committee welcomed this step, but it did not welcome being cut out of the process of approval. Further examples could arise later this year if a pandemic convention is successfully negotiated on a multilateral or plurilateral basis, or if a WTO arrangement covering e-commerce is agreed, as we hope it will be. So, this distinction between bilateral and multilateral legally binding instruments makes no sense at all and certainly does not contribute to parliamentary scrutiny.

Thirdly, as more international agreements with binding legal obligations with the UK are negotiated by departments other than the Department for Business and Trade or the FCDO in the lead, there is a crying need for better co-ordination in briefing the International Agreements Committee and in ensuring that it can effectively carry out its scrutiny responsibilities, on which the noble Lord, Lord German, made some relevant remarks. This could easily be achieved by circulating guidance to all such departments and ensuring that they apply the procedures meticulously and in a similar fashion.

If the three points that I have put forward were addressed, we would have a far better system of parliamentary scrutiny, without any need for primary legislation or any loss of royal prerogative.