National Parliaments (EUC Report)

Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts

Monday 15th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has already made the important point that bringing national parliaments closer to the institutions of the EU, and particularly to the Commission, so as to improve familiarity of national parliaments with the issues and to enhance the influence of national parliaments on decisions being taken in Brussels is a cause that unites all three major parties in our democracy. It unites Eurosceptics and Europhiles. All those categories are well represented here this evening. Not surprisingly, UKIP is not represented here. Their representatives do not turn up much when they get elected to the European Parliament: they have the worst record for attendance there, a quite disgraceful one. They have not turned up tonight and they have demonstrated once again that they belong to a party that is very interested in demagogy, but not in doing an honest day’s work or even an honest evening’s work on European policy.

I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, on this report, which he has produced with his colleagues. I also commend him on the great energy and engagement that he has brought to his considerable responsibilities and the robustness with which he is prepared to talk—we had an example of that earlier this evening—both to our own Government here and to the European Commission, or to anybody else who might be relevant when that is required, in order to make clear the strong, serious position of this House and its committees on European-related subjects.

I agree with an enormous amount of what has been said this evening. I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, on the latter part of his remarks, about the desirability of involving the departmental Select Committees in the scrutiny work much more systematically than happens now. I take this opportunity to add to the proposals made in this very interesting document with tuppenny-ha’penny-worth of my own suggestions, and I will make three proposals.

We are really confronting three broad issues this evening. One is how to bring national parliaments closer to the Commission and to have more influence with the Commission. There I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, to whom I always listen not just with great respect but with great interest. He suggested that it would be a good idea to appoint a Commissioner responsible for relations with national parliaments and with the European Parliament. That would have unfortunate and counterproductive consequences: such a Commissioner would act as an insulating barrier between the two. It would be rather like dealing with the director of public affairs of a company instead of the chief executive. If you want to influence anything that a company does, that is not a sensible way forward. It is important to have much greater direct contact. I also disagree with the committee’s report in one respect—desirable as it would be—which is the proposal in paragraph 54:

“The Commission which will be appointed in 2014 should make a commitment that its Commissioners and senior officials will be willing to meet committees of national parliaments as a core part of their duties”.

That is very desirable, but idealistic and unrealistic as well. If a Commissioner spent half a day of his time with each of 28 different national parliaments or their representatives or their scrutiny committees, then he would be spending 14 working days—something like two and half weeks of his time—on that subject. That is not likely to happen. We have situations when we are able, in Select Committees of the House of Commons and in European sub-committees here, to meet Commissioners or senior officials of the Commission; I have been a beneficiary of that myself in various roles over time. However, sadly, I do not think it is realistic to expect that there should be some kind of statutory—or if not statutory, at least formal—commitment of the kind suggested in this document.

A much more promising proposal is that it should be a general rule that—and this can be agreed with the courts without any kind of constitutional change; it could be a rule decided by the Commission itself—once or possibly twice a year, every Commissioner would invite to a seminar in Brussels the departmental or specialised committees covering his particular responsibilities. They are called Select Committees in the House of Commons, but a lot of continental parliaments call them commissions. That would be an opportunity for the Commissioner to make a direct presentation to them of his agenda, and have perhaps some working groups getting into the detail of these proposals or other proposals that the national parliaments might want to advance, and to have some serious discussions from both sides, bringing the two bodies directly together without any kind of intermediary organisation or individual. I would be grateful if that proposal could be considered by our own committee. I myself sit on the Economic and Financial Affairs Sub-Committee of the European Union Committee.

The second thing that needs to be done is to bring national parliaments more closely together in the context of European scrutiny. Quite clearly, no national parliament is going to have much effect if it is isolated. If we want a yellow card—or not necessarily a yellow card, but some influence—it is necessary to combine with others, as is a normal rule in any sensible and functioning democracy. There is not much opportunity for that. The COSAC works well, but it brings together just the chairmen of scrutiny committees: that is a very narrow group of people. There should be an occasion once a year for, let us say, a two-day conference, bringing together those responsible for scrutiny in the national parliaments from all 28 member states. At the conference, it should be possible to have some detailed working sessions on particularly important or controversial issues, or on matters where there is a question of a yellow-card procedure being initiated—or having been initiated—by one or more parliaments. That would be an opportunity for anybody wanting a yellow card to make a case for that, and attempt to get other national parliaments to second that initiative. Human contact is absolutely indispensible; I have never believed in any context—in ordinary commercial marketing, advocacy or anything else—that electronics or digital communications can replace human contact. It is very important to be able to look at people in the face, hear the emphasis they put in their communications with you and make an assessment as to how reliable or serious they are and how much they have gone into the question that they are talking about. It is therefore central that there should be more human contact between the parliamentarians involved. That is the spirit in which I make these two proposals.

My third proposal relates to an area that has already been mentioned several times in this debate, and we are very conscious of it. We are not very good at scrutiny. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, the fundamental role of national parliaments as far as the EU is concerned is to make sure that we properly control our Ministers when they go to the Council of Ministers, because they go there as our delegates. In actual fact, with the exception of Denmark, no member state has really succeeded in making a reality of this theory, that democratic legitimacy stems directly from the national parliaments, because the Council of Ministers—one of the two legislative bodies in the European Union—is directly responsible to national parliaments. If we are going to make a reality of that, we need to change immediately the way we do business here. In my view, we need to make sure that we talk to Ministers before they go to the Council of Ministers. We should not take a decision to lift the scrutiny reserve merely on the basis of an Explanatory Memorandum and then, perhaps a month or two later, have an opportunity to talk to the Minister in retrospect about why he or she did or did not do whatever it was that is of concern to us. It is essential that Ministers appear before the relevant scrutiny committee or better still—here I agree totally with the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat—the relevant departmental Select Committee before they go to the Council of Ministers meeting, so that they are forced to disclose their brief and agenda, hear the comments of parliamentarians, take them into account, and, if they wish to disagree with them, to do so openly and to try to persuade them or not, as the case may be. It is up to Parliament to decide whether or not to lift the scrutiny reserve when it has heard what the Minister has to say.

Those are three suggestions. They are not modest suggestions because they are quite far reaching, but I hope that they will make a modest contribution to the debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, it is customary in these debates to applaud their timeliness. I am afraid, unfortunately, that this debate is not timely. It is behind time by quite a long way. It should not have taken the Government three months, as opposed to the regulation two months, to reply to the report, although clearly the imminence of a parliamentary recess has acted as a magnetic pull. It should not have taken this House nine months to organise a debate on a report that can legitimately be described as one of the most significant and potentially consequential to be issued in recent years. It owed much to the skill and persuasiveness of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, whose admirable introduction to the debate we have just heard and whose leadership I particularly appreciated when I served on the committee as this report was being prepared.

The noble Lord, Lord Boswell, set out some of the main recommendations of our report, which represent a wide-ranging menu of reforms to the role of national parliaments in holding their Governments to account and in shaping EU legislation. Those are the two broad thrusts of the role of national parliaments and there is no need to repeat what he said. The noble Lord, Lord Davies, suggested that asking the new Commission to take it as part of its duty to deal with national parliaments was nugatory and impossible to fulfil. In fact, with video conferencing and other such techniques, it is possible to do that with reasonable economy of time.

In the previous Commission, there were still commissioners who would openly say, in a quite aggressive way, that they had no responsibility at all to national parliaments: their sole responsibility was towards the European Parliament. That is not a correct interpretation of the Lisbon treaty, which gives them a distinct role. People who held those views would say: “National parliaments, you look after your own Governments; you do not have any control or influence over the Commission”. We have to break down those barriers. The recommendation, which was contained in the report and which I suspect the new Commission, with Vice-President Timmermans, is going to honour very considerably, was worth making.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. I am sure that he will recall that I said that if you can get this particular proposal, which was made in the report, so much the better. I personally thought that it was slightly unrealistic. However, my proposal of a rule that each commissioner should meet on a regular basis, at least once a year, with the members of the departmental select committees or commissions in the national parliaments on his subject of responsibility, would directly address the point just made by the noble Lord. It is important that commissioners should formally recognise a role for national parliaments and make sure that they take them seriously.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

If I may say so, that is an addition to but not a substitute for the recommendation we made. It is important, when one of the sub-committees of your Lordships’ House is preparing a report on a particular issue, that it takes evidence from the commissioner responsible at that time, not just once a year. It is normally possible to do this and co-operation is pretty good, on the whole. However, there have been occasions when it has not been and we suggested that it should never be that way again.

Suffice it to say that we did not need to go back to first principles when we started to write this report, because the Lisbon treaty settled once and for all that national parliaments have a role to play in shaping European legislation. They have a collective role to play through such procedures as the yellow card. We did not really have to argue that case: we just took it from there.

However, the evidence we took established that that role—which has existed since the Lisbon treaty came into force in 2009—was not being exercised very effectively, so far, and that reforms were needed if it was to be so exercised. That is not some British Eurosceptic fad; it is the view of many other national parliaments which we consulted when we were compiling our report. In the years to come, strengthening the role of national Parliaments needs to be one part of any positive reform agenda worthy of the name. I notice that both the Government, in their response to our report, and the European Council itself, in the strategic agenda for the next five years, refer to the need for that role to be developed.

I do not intend to dwell long on the Government's response to our report, which was broadly very satisfactory and supportive. However, one point requires comment. The noble Baroness, Lady Quin, referred to it and I shall do likewise, but in slightly less polite terms. In their response to paragraph 15 of our report, the Government stated flatly that national parliaments were,

“the main source of democratic legitimacy and accountability in the EU”.

That is a pretty odd remark to make, 35 years after the European Parliament became directly elected and when it has wide-ranging powers of co-decision with the Council on EU legislation. Tactically, it was aberrant to say this, since nothing is more likely to frustrate any effort to reform the role of national parliaments than it becoming a food fight between them and the European Parliament. Yes, “a main source”—national parliaments are that—but not “the main source”, which is surely getting it a bit wrong. There is no good argument that cannot be spoiled by exaggeration.

The Commission’s response to our report is a good deal less satisfactory than that of the Government and falls far short of what is needed. Fortunately, that response was made by the outgoing Barroso Commission and not the Commission that is now in office. We can therefore hope that the first Vice-President of the new Commission—Frans Timmermans, whose name has been mentioned several times in the debate and who is responsible for relationships with national parliaments—will take a more enlightened and flexible view as matters move forward.

It simply is not good enough to say, flatly, as the Commission did, that it would require treaty change to allow national parliaments more than eight weeks to submit reasoned opinions under the yellow card procedure. It is not good enough to say that to allow those reasoned opinions to contain consideration of the proportionality of the Commission's proposals is not possible without treaty change. The Commission could perfectly well take political decisions to accommodate both those reforms. Let us hope that it can be persuaded to do so.

Nor is it good enough for the Commission to duck—as it did in its response—our recommendation that it should commit itself to withdrawing or substantially amending any proposal that actually triggered a yellow card. The outgoing Commission’s response to the yellow card triggered by its proposal for a European public prosecutor’s office has been referred to already in this debate. It was, frankly, scandalously inept, amounting simply to saying that 14 national parliaments had got it wrong and the Commission, as usual, had got it right. That sort of approach simply will not do.

When the Minister replies to this debate, I hope that he will concentrate not so much on the Government’s response to our report—after all, if we have taken the trouble to read Command 8913, we know what that is—but rather on what the Government are going to do about the many ideas in the report with which they say they are in agreement. What contacts have the Government had so far with other member states about the need for these reforms? What progress have they made towards building coalitions to carry them forward? What dealings have they had with the incoming Commission to persuade it to take a more flexible approach than that of its predecessors?

Anyone reading the recent speeches by the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary could be forgiven for thinking that this part of the reform—the issue of powers for national parliaments—was as evanescent as the smile on the Cheshire Cat. If so, that would be a major error. If we are to make progress, we surely need a broad-based, positive reform agenda that takes account of the views of all member states—not one that is tailor-made to the pressures from the UK Independence Party, which, in any case, is not the slightest bit interested in anything that leaves the UK as a member of a reformed European Union—and a reformed EU is, after all, the Government’s proclaimed objective. I hope that the Minister can give us a feel for the answers to those questions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morgan of Ely (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the committee and the noble Lord, Lord Boswell in particular, for the excellent work that they have done in this report. It has been an urgent and necessary task to look at, and to try to do something about bridging, the gap between the legislatures and the public. That is certainly true in terms of EU legislation and the citizens of the European Union. The distance between elected representatives and the public is certainly a problem. It is a problem for the European Parliament. It is probably fair to say that, in general, people relate more readily to national parliaments, so how national parliaments relate to EU law is absolutely critical. It is worth taking note of the wise words of my noble friend Lord Judd in terms of how we engage people beyond the usual suspects and try to go beyond the elite when we are taking evidence. That may go some way to bridging that gap.

I served 15 years as a Member of the European Parliament. I can tell noble Lords that during that time, the Lords European Union Committee was the best example that we had of how national parliaments interacted with the process of EU legislation. Yes, there were some good examples in Holland and Denmark as well, but the fact that this House took that responsibility seriously was noted. It therefore makes sense that your Lordships’ committee is the group that comes up with practical reasons for why national parliaments perhaps find difficulty in influencing EU debates and provides some constructive suggestions about how some of those problems can be overcome.

The report recognises that national parliaments have a dual responsibility in relation to EU law, not just in scrutinising their own Government’s positions on EU policy, but in influencing more directly EU institutions and proposed laws. The authors have correctly identified that a national parliament holding its own Government to account for its EU policy positions can be done now. It is a matter of the will of parliamentarians and of their Governments to effect that will. As the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, said, the UK has to put its own house in order when it comes to this.

It is worth noting that the House of Commons Library reported that the number of laws influenced or based on EU law varies between 15% and 50%, depending on the definition. Knowing that, does Parliament have the balance correct in terms of the time and resources set aside to scrutinise these laws, given the number and quantity of laws emanating or being influenced by Brussels? Let us be clear. These laws are not decided by Brussels: they are proposed by Brussels. No EU law is passed without the UK Government having been involved in detailed discussions in terms of the outcomes. But the Government need to be held to account by Parliament on their position in relation to EU law.

A point not picked up in the report is the fact that it would be extremely difficult for some Parliaments, including the UK Parliament, to keep up with legislative scrutiny of EU laws, as we sit for only 30 weeks a year, compared with the 45 weeks a year that the European Parliament sits. That point was made by my noble friend Lord Judd. We need therefore to take seriously this point of prioritising the laws on which to focus.

Some of the major decisions that are made in the EU, which set the political direction and tone for various debates and forthcoming EU laws, are made, as has been pointed out, in the European Council meetings. The suggestion by the committee of holding pre-Council scrutiny meetings to feed into government preparations, rather than holding them afterwards, makes eminent sense. However, due to the fact that the Government are by definition entering into a negotiation, we understand the need to be sensitive to the view that requiring the Government to disclose their negotiating plan in public would not necessarily be in the interests of the UK. But that does not mean that they cannot listen, as the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, suggested.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

Is not the simple solution to this problem that these pre-decision scrutiny sessions should, where necessary or when the Government so desire, be held in private? I understand that that works in Denmark. There is no problem with leaks and the system works perfectly well as a result.

[Baroness Morgan of Ely]

That makes a lot of sense. As long as there is an understanding that sessions are held in camera, I see no problem. But accountability pre-scrutiny and pre-Council makes sense. It is something that we should perhaps take up.

In terms of influencing EU institutions more directly during the process of elaborating legislation, the process becomes more complicated. For me, one of the problems when reading the House of Lords European Committee reports as an MEP was that, despite their brilliance, they would almost invariably be published after the law had been passed. Although there were some gems in there, in terms of critiques of EU directives, they were too late to influence the debate—which is why that pre-legislative scrutiny by national parliaments would be invaluable.

Analysing the Commission’s work programme would be an obvious way of ensuring a degree of pre-scrutiny, and it should become a core task—as has been suggested—of the whole Parliament and all the relevant Select Committees, rather than the preserve of EU committees. Furthermore, will the Minister comment on how we get a degree of consistency, as referred to by my noble friend Lady Quin? How do we ensure that there is a systematic approach to thorough, ongoing analysis by subject committees?

It is also essential that policymakers have a thorough understanding of the legislative processes of the EU institutions. In my experience, that was not obvious, even—dare I say it?—when dealing with some of the UK Ministers involved. So, mainstreaming, as the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, mentioned, is critical.

The committee’s suggestions for tightening up the reasoned opinion procedure make sense, and the fact that only two yellow cards have been given since the introduction of that system suggests that the hurdles may be too high. I note, however, that the expectation that the Commission should respond within a set timeframe is possible only if resources are provided. Imagine the resources involved in giving a comprehensive response to the 2,000 written contributions made since the Barroso initiative was introduced. There were 33,000 members of staff in the Commission last year. Let us compare that with the number of staff employed in the Department for Work and Pensions: 90,000. Just imagine the extra burden on the administration in answering 28 member state parliaments within a tight timeframe. Something would have to give; something would have to be prioritised. We need to be sensitive to that when we are asking for these things.

National parliaments, however, need to learn how, and when best, to influence the EU legislative process. It is worth considering the suggestion by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, of an annual get-together, but more relevant is a real understanding of how influential individual MEPs can be, particularly those who lead and formally shadow debates and who navigate the directives through the legislative process—that is, the rapporteurs. They are extremely influential, so identifying who they are and communicating with them at the appropriate time would be as impactful as trying to convince 28 different EU member states to take up an alternative position. There is no inconsistency in saying that national parliaments, as well as the European Parliament, should be involved in developing EU laws. Like the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, I must say that I am disappointed to read that the real source of democratic legitimacy in the EU lies with national parliaments, according to the Government’s response to the report.

As the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, suggested, it is worth thinking about some of the ideas put forward. I fully endorse the point that the Conservatives have cut off their own influence in the EU by ceasing to be a member of the largest political group. It is worth considering the idea of a commissioner for national parliaments and European parliaments, but I warn that there is a danger that the job might be seen to have been done, and therefore the departmental commissioners might not take their responsibilities seriously in relating to national parliaments.

With such turmoil in the eurozone, the reality is that the public across the whole of Europe have learnt that financial and economic policy emanating from the EU is impacting on us all both directly and indirectly, whether through the massive austerity measures that have caused such savage cuts in our public services, or through reduced demand for our export goods. Therefore, national parliaments should take a more systematic approach to the surveillance of this policy area in particular.

On behalf of the Opposition, I thank the European Union Committee for its work on this report. It is essential that it is disseminated not just in our Parliament, but in parliaments throughout the European Union.