Anne Main
Main Page: Anne Main (Conservative - St Albans)
Mr Speaker
Well, it is certainly a very rum business altogether. I thank the hon. Lady for giving me notice of this point of order. I mean it when I say that I understand her frustration that she is not securing clear answers to her questions. The handling of freedom of information requests by the FCA, or indeed any other public body, is not a matter for the Chair of this House to determine. However, she has made her concern explicitly clear on the record, and it will no doubt have been heard on the Treasury Bench. Indeed, I was going to say that there is an illustrious representative of Her Majesty’s Treasury on the Front Bench, but there is a veritable troika of the characters. There they sit, the three of them. I can therefore say with certainty that they have heard her grievance.
My overall advice to the hon. Lady—I hope that she will not take this in the wrong spirit as it is meant to be helpful—is to be persistent. If the hon. Lady does not secure the answers that she wants, she should keep asking questions and, in the very best and most proper sense of the term, make an absolutely parliamentary nuisance of herself. In the end, it may well be felt that it is not worth the candle so far as those resisting her inquiries thus far are concerned. She should stick at it.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. We have just had a debate about the leaflet that the Government are putting out. We were told about “facts”, and I said that the amount of legislation that comes from the European Union in Brussels was not included in there. I cited a figure of about 60%, to which the Minister for Europe responded, “No, no, it is about 13% to 14%.” I had been given that answer by the Prime Minister in March and I subsequently went to the Library to ask Vaughne Miller what the actual amount of legislation from Europe was. I asked:
“Can we still rely upon the figure quoted (from a 2010 research paper…)?”
The answer I received was:
“The 13%-15% figure…only covers EU Directives and Decisions. It does not include EU Regulations, which are numerous but implemented directly, without further UK measures. EU Directives are the detailed EU laws which require further implementation measures in the UK (almost always by S.I. but occasionally by an Act of Parliament).
I updated the 2010 paper in January 2015”.
The UK’s implementation had grown. She went on to mention a formula that she had used and then said:
“I have only calculated this figure up to 2013, but as you see, it raises the percentage to an average of 59%”.
I believe that by repeating this low figure of 13% to 15% an absolute misleading of the House, perhaps inadvertently, is taking place. That is not a figure that can be accurately relied on and if the Government are to put such figures out there, they should use the most up-to-date information, commissioned by the House, by our respected expert in the House, who said 59%. What can we do to correct that error, which the Minister has repeated after the Prime Minister gave me that figure in March? It is not to be relied on and the British public should not rely on it.
Mr Speaker
I say two things to the hon. Lady. First, as she well knows, she has found her own salvation through the ingenious use of the point of order procedure. Secondly—this is not uncommon in this place—I do not think she will seek to contradict me, and neither will anyone else, when I say that in raising her point of order she was vastly more interested in what she had to say to me and to the House than in anything I might have to say to her.