European Union

Lord Stoddart of Swindon Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, I take this opportunity to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, on his appointment to the chairmanship of the committee, a chairmanship which I enormously enjoyed when I had the honour to hold it.

What the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, is saying today is so familiar to me it is almost like listening to “Auld Lang Syne” every New Year’s Eve. It is utterly predictable but probably less tuneful. Every year, he shows that he misunderstands the purpose of the European Union Committee. It is not to tell Brussels what to do; it is to hold the Government to account for what they do. The function of a committee of the House of Lords is to hold the Government to account, and that is precisely what it does. If it takes that number of sub-committees to examine the more than 1,000 documents that come through, so be it. You need the people and the Peers to do that.

However, the real point is this: in order to be able to advise the Government on how they should react to what comes from what the noble Lord described as the juggernaut in Brussels, you need to explore the minds of those working in Brussels and spend a lot of time examining the Green Papers and the White Papers, attending the meetings and so forth so that you can fulfil your function, which is to advise the Government on how they should react. That is what the committee is all about. It is not about telling Brussels what to do.

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

My Lords, I am afraid that the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, will now hear the second verse of “Auld Lang Syne”. Before I remark on the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, on his appointment as Chairman of Committees and the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, on his as Principal Deputy Chairman of Committees. However, I support the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, in the amendment that he has put before the House. He has been very persistent in doing so. It is right that the House should hear some alternative views about the European Union. It often does not and should do so more often.

The Select Committee has six sub-committees; it used to have seven but now it has six. However, their very existence shows the power of the European Union over matters relating to this country and how it has encroached on our national life and into the very nooks and crannies of our country.

The Select Committee on the European Union costs £2 million a year, which is not a mean sum. It is absolutely true that the benefits from its discussions, although they are erudite and make easy reading, are nevertheless not influential, so far as this House and Parliament can see, in altering the views and policies of the European Union itself. Decisions are taken in secret so that we do not even know what views are being put forward by the Government, so again we cannot see what influence our own Select Committee has on our own Government.

We spend £2 million on this committee. There is another Select Committee in the House of Commons. It does not do quite the same thing, but I wonder whether it might be worth considering a joint Select Committee of both Houses to scrutinise EU legislation and regulations. That is a matter that might be taken up by the House and the other place at some point in the future. I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I would like to say a few words on this, having been a member of your Lordships’ European Union Committee on two occasions and still currently so. There are many errors of fact in what has been said by the noble Lords, Lord Pearson of Rannoch and Lord Stoddart of Swindon, and others. Our job is to make recommendations to the British Government, and the point about the British Government not telling us what account they have taken of our recommendations is untrue. They are required to do so within two months and they always do so. They state their reaction to every single one of the recommendations. It is also untrue that the Commission does not say what it has done in reply to the recommendations. Every one of the reports is now replied to by the vice-president of the Commission responsible for relations with the national parliaments, and they are all on the website. I wish the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, good reading because there are probably several thousand replies from the Commission that he could usefully read. He might then understand a little better what is done.

My penultimate point is that we have not yet reduced the number of sub-committees to six. We are waiting for the Chairman of Committees to be allowed to put his proposal to us in order to reduce them from seven to six, but we have not yet done so. The last point that I want to make about this is that it does not always seem to be very well understood that the job done by the EU Committee and its sub-committees is that of scrutiny of EU legislation, a job that is done by the whole House on UK legislation. If it is not done properly through the EU Select Committee and its sub-committees, it will not be done at all, and that would be a real loss of influence for this country.