The lead Amendment 436 in this small group is in my name. These three clauses are about putting into the Bill a list of who the treaty state suppliers are. They introduce Schedule 9, which sets out that long list of countries with which we have international trade agreements that give rise to access to procurement opportunities for them here and us there.
Turning to Amendment 436, I do not disagree with the Government wanting to use secondary legislation to implement international trade agreements’ procurement requirements. I think that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, because there will be a string of them, and amendments to them; changes to the general procurement agreement; and new agreements being entered into—all of which would lead to a tedious amount of primary legislation. Therefore, having secondary instruments is perfectly reasonable. As we will see later in the Bill, that the secondary instruments are subject to the affirmative procedure is also important.
We have to understand—I speak as a member of the International Agreements Committee—that there is a relationship between these processes and the scrutiny by Parliament. Essentially, treaties are laid under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act. We then have a period of time in which to report
to the House. I think our normal expectation is that the House would have an opportunity to look at any issues raised by the International Agreements Committee, in our case, either for information or for debate, before the point at which it is likely to have to decide whether there would be any reason to object to a draft of a statutory instrument of this kind. That would not be the case if the relevant agreement were not laid under CRaG. Noble Lords might say, “Surely they all are”, and indeed the reply from the Minister might be that they all will be. That would be a very useful thing for the Minister to say—I am not trying to lead the witness in advance—because they are not always.
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I have raised the amendment for two reasons. The first is the trade and co-operation agreement, which was not laid under CRaG because CRaG was disapplied by the relevant legislation, so the scrutiny that might have been applied to it was not. There was no value in that process, frankly, because the European Parliament spent ages looking at it anyway and we could have looked at it.
The second is that the International Agreements Committee is concerned by the increasing use of memoranda of understanding. That has been done in relation to the Rwanda agreement—I will not go on about that. We are looking at making sure that MoUs are used only where they should be. I do not think it likely that an agreement of this kind, which is intended to be binding in international law, would not be laid under CRaG. Memoranda of understanding can bypass CRaG because they are not binding in international law, and an agreement of this kind that was not binding in international law would be a very unusual instrument, so let us hope that is not the case.
This amendment is to get confirmation from the Minister that all such agreements and all such additions to Schedule 9 would be in relation to international agreements laid before Parliament under CRaG. I beg to move.