British Indian Ocean Territory: Sovereignty

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)]

I see that we are back to the charming noble Lord, Lord Callanan, whom we used to know and love. The cost of this will be around £100 million a year. That is about the cost of running the NHS for five hours or the Queen Elizabeth vessel—I hesitate to say which type, so I will not try. This is excellent value. It secures our ability to share this base with the United States and it is fundamental to our security in this country. It enables us to fight terrorism and keep ourselves safe. This is nothing to do with the ODA budget, as the noble Lord well knows. I will leave the spokesman for the Liberal Democrats to deal with whatever feud they have going on about process.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, I have in my hand a BBC News report of Jeremy Corbyn welcoming the Government’s decision on the exercise of sovereignty of the Chagos Islands. It reports that he was “very pleased” that the UK Government had backed down and said that the Foreign Secretary’s announcement was a “good step forward”. That report was from 3 November 2022. Jeremy Corbyn was welcoming the Liz Truss Government’s announcement in Parliament that negotiations would open on the ceding of sovereignty. What has happened since then—one would think that any agreement between Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Truss is not one that we would follow—was a shambolic process in which the Chagossian community was denied its rights under the Conservative Government and not consulted sufficiently by the Labour Government. There has been insufficient information about the trust fund; the money was not going to be provided by the previous Government and there is a lack of detail from this Government.

There is no feud between me and my Commons colleagues, because the position is perfectly apparent. When this House had an opportunity to secure a concession from the Government to have more information about the funding and to include the Chagossian community in a much better way, because it had been let down by the previous Government and this Government, we took the opportunity to try to end the shambles. When will we see the Statement that the Minister promised me on Monday?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

The Statement will be provided in due course. You will not find anybody in this House who gives less regard to what Jeremy Corbyn thinks than I do, although there is clearly some stiff competition.

The trust fund is important, because it is right that there is some acknowledgement and a fund to support Chagossians. I believe it will be held by the Mauritians. It is important to understand that there is a range of views about this within the Chagossian communities. There is not one voice; Chagossians living in different parts of the world—in the UK, Mauritius and the Seychelles—do not all agree on this. I have a great deal of sympathy with what the noble Lord says about the Chagossian communities having been badly treated over many decades. That is undoubtedly true, but it is not right to suggest to them that there is a way for them to resettle Diego Garcia or a straightforward way of holding some sort of process, when this treaty has been forged between the two sovereign Governments of Mauritius and the UK. This is a unique situation. We have prioritised our national security in this process. You can have only one priority, and that is our national security. That is right, but it does not mean that we cannot acknowledge and regret some of the issues that the noble Lord brings to our attention.