European Affairs Committee

15 September 2026

Contents updated on 15 Sept 2026

The Committee opens its scrutiny of the UK–EU Gibraltar treaty under CRAG, sets out the post‑TCA context, and examines how Brexit threatens frontier fluidity, Gibraltar’s economy and daily cross‑border movements, establishing why long‑term arrangements are needed beyond interim “bridging” measures.

Committee Tue, 15 Sept 2026 House of Lords

00:05 - 01:41

Speaker 1

Good morning and welcome to this evidence session of the Select Committee in the House of Lords on European Affairs into the UK-EU Gibraltar agreement, which has come before us under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act for consideration. This is a public session. We will be taking evidence and there will be a transcript which will be available for witnesses to correct for any errors that they might notice. And of course, the whole session will be in public. I'm delighted to welcome as our witness this morning Lord Wood of Anfield, who's Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

And with him Paul Hughes, who's the Deputy Head of the Southern Europe Department at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and was of course previously Joint Deputy Head of the FCDO's Gibraltar Negotiations Taskforce. We're hoping to conclude this in 60 minutes, so if we can keep the questions and the answers crisp, that would be very helpful. And to get us going, if I may, I'd like to just ask a general question, which needn't take too long to answer, but just to sort of set the context for the evidence, which is, you know, why wasn't Gibraltar included in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement in 2020 in the first place? We had bridging measures instead. How successful were the bridging measures?

Why did we need something other than those? And since negotiations began in 2021, they seem to have taken an extraordinary long time. Perhaps you could just set out why it's taken five years to reach this agreement. Minister.

01:41 - 02:08

Speaker 2

Well, thank you, Lord Chair. It's a real pleasure to be here with amongst so many colleagues in the Lords. Let me just start with one minute on the purpose of this bespoke treaty, which is what it is. As you know, Gibraltar was not included in the TCA, and I'll come back to why that might have been in a minute, which was negotiated obviously by a previous UK government. And that meant that the people and businesses of Gibraltar had an uncertain future ahead of them.

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