European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Deben Excerpts

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 26th February 2018 Lords Chamber

As my noble friend Lady Kennedy said, the European arrest warrant was used nearly 200 times between 2010 and 2016 to extradite suspected child offenders. Before the introduction of the arrest warrant, it took an average of 12 months to transfer offenders across the EU. It now takes less than two months. What assessments have been made of the UK’s need to remain part of these cross-border agencies for the purposes of safeguarding children? What assessment has been made of the impact which the loss of co-operation with such agencies would have on safeguarding children? We cannot leave children across Europe vulnerable to crime and exploitation, which can destroy young lives and divide families.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, one of the themes that has come through in the debates on many of the amendments so far is that the Government are enthusiastic about where we are, keen on continuing the links and determined that we shall not in any way fall out from those, but unwilling to commit themselves to the obvious solutions. We have heard in this debate tonight an exact repetition of what we have had before.

In other words, some of us are saying that these things were achieved with great difficulty. The European arrest warrant caused enormous argument and could be a really dangerous thing if it were not properly protected by the European Court of Justice. Like everyone else, when I became a Member of your Lordships’ House I was asked what subjects I was particularly going to speak on. The first was the environment, the second was Europe and the third was human rights. Therefore, when the legislation that we are now part of was going through in its various forms, I was very concerned that it was properly protected. However, I was very aware, as is the House, that crime does not know any borders, particularly the type of crime that the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, was talking about.

We need the protection that the warrant gives. When we were kids and we read stories of derring-do, we all knew that the first thing that people would try to do was to get across the channel because then they would be out of the reach of British law, and indeed of the law in many ways. I believe strongly that first of all we have to recognise that what we have we did not get easily and did not arrive simply. To suggest that somehow or other we can produce a different system and call it something else, because that would be convenient to the people who are ill informed enough to want to leave the EU, seems extremely dangerous. We should recognise that this took a lot of doing.

The second point, which has been made very interestingly, is about the nature of mutual recognition. Very often we are divided by not understanding the words that we use. There is an attitude in Britain that suggests that we get it right and other people do not, and therefore they had better do it our way because we know best. That has been our besetting sin throughout the period of our membership of the EU and, if we leave, we will get even worse at it. In other words, we are very keen to teach other people but not frightfully good at learning from them. One of the things that we have learned—I think by accident; certainly not by design—in having to co-operate on these issues is that we have understood much more clearly the problems, difficulties and solutions that others have had in our European home. We have to recognise that understanding mutual recognition is not easy, and the idea that we can suddenly create a different mechanism for doing it is very far-fetched.

On my third point, I have great admiration for the Prime Minister. I do not understand how every morning she wakes up and thinks, “God, I’ve got another day of this”, and deals with some of the people that she has to deal with—I will not list them but we all know which ones I mean. However, it is not good enough to have good intentions and show generalised support. My noble friend who is answering for the Government has given us a great deal of good intentions and noble views but no actual support for real policies and actual determinations. This is not something that we can pass off by merely having good intentions, because it is very hard and we have to be tough about it. We have to say to our friends, “We actually want, and will have, exactly what we have today on these matters because there is no alternative that is better and there is no way that we are going to invent one”, because crime will not wait.

This is a rather important amendment. All it says is that the Government have to move from intentions to reality before they can move. That is not an unreasonable thing for the House which is responsible for our constitution to ask.

I hope that my noble friend is not going to say how important all these things are, how valuable they are, how much the Prime Minister is in favour of them, but that just at the moment, because it is all part of the negotiation, he cannot go further than that. If he does, perhaps for all our debates he might just turn on the recording. That is evidently the answer we are going to have on everything, because that is the answer we have had so far today on everything. If it goes on like this, this House will have to ask whether the Government intend to have a debate or discussion about things that matter, about the future of our nation and our people. Are they going to have a discussion about the things that protect our people, the policing which has to cover areas beyond our borders? Above all, are they going to have a discussion about how this affects Ireland? We have for too long taken for granted the fact that the Irish situation is, at least to a large extent—much less so than the newspapers would have us believe, but still to a large extent—peaceful. We must none of us forget that.

I have to tell my noble friend that it will become increasingly difficult for the Government to uphold their position unless they are prepared to take seriously this House’s demand that they tell us what they want. How can you negotiate with people unless you can say very clearly what you want on crucial issues, and what could be a more crucial issue than this?

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, at the end of all these proceedings, some months down the road, there will be a vote in Parliament. At that time, it will be essential that we know exactly what we are voting for. That is why the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, is so important. There is a fundamental difference between good intentions and concrete policy, there to be implemented. As in our previous debate, the issues are too big; there is no room for an interregnum or period of doubt. We must be able to move from what we have to what is necessary overnight. We must have firm policies and firm decisions that follow from them.

I served on the Home Affairs Committee under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, when we were having that dry run, and very interesting it was, too. What I found very telling was that virtually every witness working in the field, when the question, “Will your work become more difficult if we leave the European Union than it is at the moment?” was put directly, said unequivocally yes, they needed the European Union to meet the challenge of the job. Forgive me if I repeat myself, but it is terribly important. Crime is international; it does not recognise frontiers. That is true of trafficking and, as my noble friend said, of drugs. It is true of terrorism. These things do not know national frontiers. Therefore, you must co-operate and work closely with others who face the same difficulties.

The other point I want to make is that, more recently, serving on the Justice Sub-Committee under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lady Kennedy, it has become very clear that we have underestimated—it is rather tragic that the British people have not understood, or begun to understand—how much British lawyers and British legal expertise have been contributing to the strength of European law, which is in all our interests. British lawyers have made a terrific contribution and they are very much respected. In taking evidence from practitioners in this sphere—the chairman is here to strike me down if I am misquoting—they told us over and over how the law is improving under the present system. The overriding authority of the European Court is crucial, however, because it provides a context in which everyone can have confidence in the necessary reciprocity. These amendments are very important, and I hope the Government will take them seriously.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I have six amendments in this group. They refer to the United Kingdom having continued access after withdrawal to passenger name records, to the Schengen Information System, to the European arrest warrant, to membership of Europol, to the European Criminal Records Information System, and to the fingerprint and DNA exchange with the EU under the Prüm Council decisions.

The questions put to the Minister by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, went to the heart of the matter—that is, given that the Prime Minister said in her Munich speech that she wishes to see a treaty replace all these elements of the existing arrangements, the Minister should simply tell us the process by which we will be negotiating the treaty. This debate, as with many others, gives the complete lie to the ridiculous assertion that no deal is better than a bad deal. Let us be clear: if there is no deal on 29 March next year, the current arrangements to which the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, referred, painstakingly negotiated over many years, for the European arrest warrant and the very high levels of engagement between the member states of the European Union—which the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, said were so important to his work as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police—all fall.

Is the Minister going to tell us that the security of this country will be as safe as it is now if all those arrangements fall? I assume that he is not, in which case the United Kingdom leaving the European Union with no deal at the end of March next year would be a complete abdication of the national interest. We need to get that firmly established. As we have more of these debates and see the precise benefits of the EU—which, after all, are the reason we went into the European Union—it becomes clearer and clearer that leaving with no deal would be a dereliction of the national interest.

[Lord Deben]

Before the noble Lord leaves that point, does he also agree that asking the Government to explain how this treaty is being discussed and by whom cannot have any effect whatever on the negotiations between the Government and the European Union? Is it not true that several of the questions asked have had nothing to do with the negotiations? We would just like to know where the Government are on matters which are unconnected with those negotiations.

[Lord Adonis]

I entirely agree, and I hope that the noble Lord will say that to the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, who is sitting right next to him. It provides a devastating response to the noble Lord’s intervention just a moment ago.

We are asking the Government simply to declare the policy of Her Majesty’s Government in the negotiations that are taking place. Since one assumes that our European partners are being told what we are seeking to negotiate—it is quite hard to negotiate something if you do not tell the other side what you are seeking to negotiate—I cannot see that there is any damage to the public interest in telling this House and the public. These are very straightforward questions. The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, says that we should not declare our hand midway. Are we or are we not in favour of keeping the European arrest warrant after 29 March next year? If we are, that is a clear negotiating objective of the Government. It will require a straightforward continuation of the current arrangements, and people like me will say all the way through that it is yet another argument as to why we would be much better off staying in the European Union in the first place and not having to go through this hugely complex and difficult process of attempting to replicate arrangements so that we do not end up with a worse situation, when there is every likelihood that we will.

The devastating response to and commentary on all these matters come from the Prime Minister herself—both in her Munich speech, in which she made it very clear that she would regard it as damaging to the national interest not to have a treaty at the end of March, and in her speech on 25 April 2016 before the referendum, in which she was even clearer on these matters. In that latter speech, in which she sought to argue why we should stay in the European Union, she went through in great detail the benefits that the European arrest warrant, the Prüm arrangements and so on gave to the security of the United Kingdom. Those are all points that the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, has raised.

The noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, seems to want to will the ends without the means. I understand that he has not had to negotiate these issues himself, but just says, on a wing and a prayer, that he wants these objectives to be secured and is sure that our negotiators in Brussels will be able to do it. If the noble Lord had had any systematic engagement with the Ministers responsible, I do not think he would necessarily have so high a degree of confidence in their capacity to negotiate his objectives.

The Prime Minister herself gave the devastating response to the question of why we should stay in the European Union in respect of these security and justice issues. In her speech of 25 April 2016, when referring to the European arrest warrant and the passenger name record directive, she said that these show,

“2 advantages of remaining inside the EU … without the kind of institutional framework offered by the European Union, a complex agreement like this could not have been struck across the whole continent, because bilateral deals between every single member state would have been impossible to reach”.

Let us be frank: that is why we are in the European Union, why it serves our national interest and why we have a very high degree of co-operation when it comes to justice and home affairs.

We are talking about very large numbers. The Prime Minister herself gave the figures, saying that in the five years prior to her speech—2011 to 2016—5,000 people had been extradited from Britain to Europe under the European arrest warrant, and 675 suspected or convicted wanted individuals were brought to Britain to face justice. She said:

“It has been used to get terror suspects out of the country and bring terrorists back here to face justice”.


Just as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, gave his extraordinary statistics about how long it used to take to get extradition proceedings under way, the Prime Minister said:

“In 2005, Hussain Osman—who tried to blow up the London Underground on 21/7—was extradited from Italy using the Arrest Warrant in just 56 days. Before the Arrest Warrant existed, it took 10 long years to extradite Rachid Ramda, another terrorist, from Britain to France”.


These issues are of the utmost gravity and we need an assurance from the Minister that, in the negotiations for the treaty that the Prime Minister referred to in Munich, we will seek to maintain arrangements that are in every respect as good as those we currently have. If we do not have those in the treaty she presents to Parliament at the end of the year, many of us will say that this whole Brexit process has seriously damaged the security of the United Kingdom.