European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Deben and Lord Rooker

Wednesday 7th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben]

I am so pleased to have been supported by the noble Lord. I was rather afraid that he was going to find something that I had got wrong in the law and I would not like to argue with him, although I have done on occasions, as he knows, because I do not like lawyers to be left to themselves. But he has, with legal elegance, expressed what seems so obvious for anybody who has dealt with European law.

I say to my noble friend is that one of the problems we all have is that those of us who have worked in the European Union, who have argued these laws line by line, and who have worked with our neighbours to do this wonderful thing of bringing countries together to have common laws, encounter the constant difficulty that those who do not like the European Union do not understand the way it is done. Very often, the reason they are opposed to it is because they have never understood the brilliance of the mechanisms that we have there. We may lose them—I say “may”—but we do not want to lose the environmental protection that they have given us.

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

The last time I checked, the environmental directorate of the EU had taken 34 cases against the UK Government, of which it had won 30. I did not want to interrupt the noble Lord, who was an absolutely first-class Environment Secretary. I know that because later I worked in planning with John Prescott, as he was then, and we were always referring back to the good work that he had done.

I would have asked the noble Lord: when he was Environment Secretary, how often was he assisted, in his dealings with the Treasury in delivering on our legal obligations, by the threat of infraction? The power to fine the Government that the Commission has does not exist anywhere in the UK. The Supreme Court does not fine the Government. I discovered, when I was at MAFF for two years, Defra for two years and the Northern Ireland environment office for a year, that the threat of infraction was a powerful sanction to the Treasury. When you were arguing about the money to do something—which we were required to do anyway but resources were short—the case to the Treasury was, “Enable us to do this, we will do a deal with our budget and everything else, because paying a fine is an absolute waste of public resources”, and that is what happened.

Most of our environmental protection today is as a result of being in the EU. Ministers wanting to deliver have been helped to do so by the threat of infraction. So the thing that is missing from all this—although the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, touched on it—is the governance and delivery of the sanction. If it is not delivered, what is the sanction? If it is not money, it will not work. The evidence is there. It has to be money. It cannot be the chair or board of whatever is set up saying to the Minister, “We don’t like what you’re doing. You’ve got to do something different”. The first time they use the nuclear option, they will not be on the board the following year unless their independence is locked in solid in legislation. The threat of a sanction of money is pretty important. Without that, the principles cannot be delivered.