Government Referendum Leaflet
Debate between Baroness Hoey and David Lidington(8 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Lidington
I return to what I said earlier: there is clear evidence from the independent polling research— its methodology has been published by the company concerned on its website—that more information is wanted by the British public. That research finding bears out what I and, I suspect, many other hon. Members on both sides of the House are finding anecdotally in conversations with constituents. I now spend time virtually every day signing replies to Members of Parliament, who have enclosed letters from constituents saying they feel they do not yet have enough information on which to make an informed decision and would like to have some more.
I hope that people will look carefully at what the Government are arguing, that they will look at the arguments put forward by the two campaign groups, once they have been designated, and that they will come to a decision about what they believe to be in the best interests of the United Kingdom as a whole. That is how the Government are approaching this matter.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
The Minister will try as hard as he can to bluster, but the reality is that the public will see through it and realise that this leaflet is deeply unfair. On one fact—
“Over 3 million UK jobs are linked to exports to the EU”—
the Government have deliberately conflated trade with countries in the EU with EU membership. He knows very well that it is not necessary to be a member of the EU to trade with the EU. With this leaflet, the public know that the Government—the Prime Minister, in particular—now realise they are on the wrong side of the argument and will lose on 23 June.
Mr Lidington
I think the hon. Lady really wishes that the Government should be neutral in this debate. The Government are not neutral. We are advocating that the British people should vote in favour of continued membership of the European Union. The Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Chancellor, other Ministers and I consistently said that, when the time came for the referendum to be held, the Government would express our view clearly and make our recommendation known, so we are delivering on what we have said to the British people.
As regards the hon. Lady’s question about one particular element in the leaflet, the footnotes that support each of the statements have themselves been published online by the Government, and she and other hon. Members are welcome to check the source material.
Referendums
Debate between Baroness Hoey and David Lidington(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Lidington
On the contrary, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister secured a deal that has brought some significant reforms to the European Union. I would advise my right hon. Friend to look at the reaction in many European capitals, in the media across Europe, and in the European Parliament, which has very largely been one of considerable surprise at the degree to which the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was able to secure reforms. In some cases, that commentary involved a fair measure of criticism of other Government leaders for conceding what was believed to be too much.
Mr Lidington
I will give way to the hon. Lady and then I must ask the House to allow me to make some progress.
Mr Lidington
First, the letter was not ignored, and we certainly took account of the views of the devolved Administrations even though we decided in the end to disagree with their recommendation. I want to come to that point at a later stage in my remarks.
The date is just one element of the order, but clearly the most important, because the remaining elements largely flow from it. I will therefore explain the Government’s thinking on the date and then turn to the rest of the order. There must be enough time for a full, serious and considered debate that allows all the issues to have a full airing, and the campaigners must have enough time to put their case to the British people. On the other hand, although this may grieve some hon. Members, the campaign cannot continue indefinitely. The vote should be timely, while the issues are live and the details fresh—and we should also be wary of testing the public’s patience. Several prominent campaign groups are already active on both sides. Following the Prime Minister’s announcement on the outcome of the renegotiation, the debate on the referendum question will now begin in earnest and is already starting to gather real momentum.
The Government selected 23 June because we needed enough time for a proper airing of the issues, and we thought that any sooner would risk curtailing that debate, but to go any later would test the patience of the British people. School holidays in Scotland begin on 24 June, and from then people will be travelling and enjoying their summer. Later than 23 June would mean, in essence, waiting until after the summer holiday period had concluded in all parts of the United Kingdom and in Gibraltar. Frankly, I think that the British people would have found it very difficult to understand if we had asked them to wait seven or eight months after the conclusion of the renegotiation before they could have their say.
Mr Lidington
Any executive decision by any public authority might be at risk of judicial review, but criteria for the Electoral Commission are set out in PPERA and they will guide the commission in making its assessment. I am sure that the commission will want to explain its verdict when it is published. There would have to be a pretty overwhelming case for a judicial review application for it to succeed, but such an option is available.
The Electoral Commission’s initial guidance for campaigners on this issue was updated on 5 February, so potential applicants have had plenty of notice. The commission has also now published the application form online. I remind the House that the lead campaigners, once designated, will receive a number of benefits, including a higher spending limit of up to £7 million, a free delivery of mailings to every household or every elector and, assuming that campaigners are designated on both sides, access to a grant of up to £600,000 and access to a broadcast.
The second additional element in the regulations is the referendum period—namely, when full financial and campaigning controls apply and, in particular, when spending limits are imposed on campaigners. The referendum period, as set out in the regulations, is a full 10 weeks and will not overlap with the designation process. That was the approach recommended by the Electoral Commission. The referendum period will, under the regulations, start on 15 April.
Mr Lidington
The limits on what the Government can do are set out in section 125 of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. The hon. Lady will recall that that provision was the subject of significant debate when the European Union Referendum Bill was going through its stages in the House. The so-called purdah restrictions remain those set out in the 2000 Act. In addition, in requiring the Government to publish particular items of information, the European Union Referendum Act states that the Government must do so at least 10 weeks before the date of the referendum. Those are the restrictions that she asked me about.
Finally, the regulations set out the periods for reporting donations and loans received by registered campaigners, and set the deadline by which the reports must be submitted to the Electoral Commission. The purpose of those arrangements is to ensure that sources of campaign finance are visible and public before the poll, so ensuring that the campaign is transparent.
The decision before us is a simple one: when should the British people have their say? We believe that 23 June strikes the right balance: it gives time for a substantial campaign, without testing public patience. There is time for campaigners and political parties to make their cases, and for the British people to decide. I commend the regulations to the House.
Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy
Debate between Baroness Hoey and David Lidington(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Lidington
I welcome the hon. Member for North West Durham to her new responsibilities. We miss her predecessor, but during her time in the House she has shown herself to be interested in and committed to European issues. I am sure that we will debate European matters across the Committee and across the Chamber on many enjoyable occasions. I will try to answer her questions briefly.
As I said in my opening comments, the plan is deliberately intended as a high-level statement of objectives and principles that should inform the whole range of external policy activity that the EU and its institutions undertake. Other documents, most obviously the annual reports on the EU’s human rights work, are worth looking at. The External Action Service will report on missions to particular countries and it will sometimes report to the European Parliament on the EU’s interaction with a specific third country. In those reports, hon. Members will see human rights issues being raised in accordance with the principles set out in the action plan. There are quite a lot of different documents, such as the EU’s human rights guidelines and a recently adopted EU framework policy on transitional justice, which add up to a more complete picture.
On the question of who will monitor this work, the EU institutions and the representatives of member states in Brussels—the permanent representations—have an important role in trying to ensure best value for money at all times. The European Court of Auditors plays a crucial role in monitoring that, as it does every other aspect of EU expenditure.
When I visited the Court of Auditors late last year, I was told that I was the first British Minister they could remember ever visiting the place, which I thought was rather a pity. What impressed me was that the Court of Auditors had a very clear objective to shift its focus from measuring inputs into particular programmes to looking at outcomes and focusing much more on whether the declared objectives of a particular EU programme have been achieved, rather than on how much money might be going into something and whether it had been spent on this particular line rather than that particular line.
I mentioned in my opening comments the European instrument for democracy and human rights as one of the external funding instruments. Precisely because human rights work is meant to be mainstreamed in everything the EU does in terms of its foreign policy, it is not possible to abstract a dedicated budget for human rights work alone. For example, what the EU does in relation to Saudi Arabia or Iran will include a human rights element, but it will include other things as well. The pre-accession funding programmes that are available to Turkey and to western Balkans countries that are moving towards membership, and some of the partnership funds to some of the eastern European countries from the former Soviet Union, will also have a human rights element as we try to encourage those countries to build functioning democracies and entrench the rule of law and human rights in their political culture.
I turn briefly to the three specific items that the hon. Lady raised. In fairness, even with the recent restrictions on legal aid, the United Kingdom’s legal aid system remains one of the most generous anywhere in Europe or the democratic world. What the EU is trying to focus on here is the fact that there are too many countries in which it is impossible for defendants to have access to an independent lawyer at all, and where everything that we take for granted in terms of such statutes as the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 or the rules of procedure in court are simply not available in the way that we would understand them. As part of the consular casework that I have dealt with, I have had British citizens, through their families, complaining that they have sometimes not had any opportunity to understand the charges being brought against them in court. That is the sort of issue that this policy is designed to address.
When it comes to anti-discrimination work, the reality is that such work has to proceed through persuasion, good practice and peer group pressure within international organisations. If, for example, we look at the way in which the United Kingdom Government first drove forward preventing sexual violence from being used as a weapon of war, placed that on the international agenda and then used our membership of the EU and of the UN to get other countries to take this issue up and make it a priority, that demonstrates one particular way in which this approach can work. We certainly see the EU’s action plan as complementing our own bilateral efforts to increase women’s political participation around the world, from the middle east to north Africa to work with indigenous groups in Latin America.
On the question of counter-terrorism, again we see the EU action plan work complementing what we seek to do under Prevent and other United Kingdom programmes. There are many countries around the world that face a genuine threat from terrorism but that also do not observe the standards in terms of human rights and due process that we would expect from our own police and judicial systems, so part of what we do bilaterally and part of what we do through EU activity is to have a dialogue with those countries and discuss how it is possible to combine effective action against terrorism with respect for the rule of law and for human rights. That is an issue that Members from all parties in the House have raised in the context of Colombia in debates in this House. It is an issue that we raise in our dialogue with Russian authorities, who face a genuine terrorist threat in the north Caucasus but who tackle it in a somewhat different way from how we might tackle terrorism here.
Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)
I apologise for being late to the Committee, Mr Rosindell. The Minister is well up on how the EU works; I know that he is an expert on all this, so it is good to hear him today. If I have missed this point, please tell me. I am interested, as was our European Scrutiny Committee, in whether he really feels that this scheme is absolutely the right way to spend the money that will be spent on it. Is he confident that that money will be well spent? That is one important issue. Secondly, within all the bodies in the various parts of the European Union that have drawn up the action plan, who actually makes the final decision that a certain amount of money will be spent on a certain part of the overall strategy?
Mr Lidington
To take the second question first, that will depend in part on which spending programme we are talking about, because the decision-making procedures may vary a bit accordingly. The senior-level people in the EEAS and the Commission would have responsibility in the first place for drawing up proposals and allocating funding from the budget agreed by member states under the various headings of the European Union annual budget and multi-annual financial framework. Those positions by the institutions are subject to oversight by the European Union Political and Security Committee ambassadors in Brussels, and ultimately by Ministers in the Foreign Affairs Council and the European Council.
Decisions on foreign policy are taken by unanimity, as the hon. Lady knows, so every member state has a veto, but what would happen is that a paper might be brought forward by the High Representative on foreign policy that would describe the European Union’s external actions in relation to a third country, let us say for the sake of example Pakistan. There would probably be a human rights element to that, and there would be an indication of the spending that would be involved to fund the programme. Then the member states could agree or disagree. There would be a process of negotiation, and then the final plan would be signed off.
Clearly, subsequent monitoring and auditing will be important. To answer the hon. Lady’s first question, I am always looking for ways to extract better value for money; that applies as much to UK domestic spending as to EU spending. It is a duty on any Minister in any Government. There are always improvements that can be made. Often, when I have had to deal with auditors’ reports on some of the common security and defence policy missions, I have said that we need to bring pressure to bear to deal with the shortcomings revealed by the auditor’s report. I think that the European Court of Auditors, at its best, acts in the same way as the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee here. That is the principle—we should always be looking for ways to improve matters—but by and large, I think that this area of EU activity amplifies the human rights work that the UK would be trying to do bilaterally.