European Union Committee: 2012-13 (EUC Report)

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market]

My Lords, I will speak on the work of Sub-Committee D which, for the uninitiated, deals with agriculture, fisheries, environment and energy. I have had the honour to chair it since the start of this Session in May, but all credit for the past year’s work must go, of course, to my predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles. I extend my thanks to him and to his committee during that session; he has set a remarkably high bar. I also note that since May, without the benefit of quotas, we now have 50% female and 50% male chairs of the EU sub-committees.

The obvious feature of the past Session for Sub-Committee D was the addition of energy policy to the remit following the reduction in the number of sub-committees. While this was a substantial new policy area, it was very well aligned with the committee’s existing responsibility for climate change policies. As one might expect, the sub-committee approached its new remit with great enthusiasm and, as we have heard, chose to focus on EU energy policy for its principal inquiry during the previous Session.

The energy report was debated only yesterday in Grand Committee, so I will not dwell on content. However, I am pleased that many noble Lords made reference to our report during the debate in Committee on the Energy Bill. It is pleasing that an EU committee report has served the House in its wider context of scrutinising UK legislation—which helps to emphasise the obvious point, that UK legislation cannot be scrutinised in isolation from EU legislation, and vice versa.

Our energy report received widespread press coverage in the UK and beyond and has been referred to by the members of the parliaments of many other member states. Our report was primarily timed to feed into discussions at EU level on its future energy and climate change policy framework. It is pleasing that the report was published in good time to do that. I know that the Commission has been drawing on some of the material and phrases from our report in its consideration of future policy options. Our phrase “the energy trilemma”, to describe the balance between affordability, sustainability and security of supply, is now coming into common parlance.

Beyond the inquiry, the sub-committee’s scrutiny focused on major reforms to the common agricultural policy and the common fisheries policies. Both have demonstrated the long-term added value of the work that we do in this House on EU scrutiny. In the case of fisheries reform, for example, the thrust of the new package very much reflected the sub-committee’s 2008 report. In the case of agricultural reform, the new rural development policy reflects several of the recommendations that the sub-committee made in its Innovation in EU Agriculture report some years ago. While EU decision-making is slow, and it is difficult sometimes to show immediate policy impact, I think that we can demonstrate the long-term beneficial effects of examining policy areas at an early stage of their development.

Not content to just leave these issues as they lie, the sub-committee is undertaking short pieces of work on how these reforms will be implemented. In fisheries, we have recently held evidence sessions to examine issues relating to the new ban on discards of over-quota fish. In agriculture, we will hold several sessions with stakeholders in the autumn to have a look at implementation issues and concerns on CAP reform.

Turning to the sub-committee’s plans for the new Session, we are about to launch a new inquiry into food waste prevention, examining how EU policies can assist rather than hinder attempts to prevent food wastage, and how local, national and EU initiatives can be harnessed most effectively. This will build on previous work that we have done on agricultural innovation and fisheries discards. We hope that this will feed into work being done by the European Commission on food waste and on waste policy more generally. In particular, it is our aim to produce a piece of work that will be helpful to the incoming European Parliament and the Commission next year; it is an attempt to build a “coalition of the willing” with other member state parliaments.

The noble Lord, Lord Carter, and I have been very fortunate to have an enthusiastic and knowledgeable committee backed by a skilled and dedicated secretariat. They absorbed the new area of energy policy with great enthusiasm. However, I flag up my strong belief that any further attempts to reduce EU scrutiny committees should be resisted. From my experience on Sub-Committee B previously and now Sub-Committee D, I do not believe that either could take on a new major policy area without the quality of the work suffering in some way.

The Minister for Europe and the Foreign Secretary have recently flagged up the importance of national parliament scrutiny of EU legislation, and they are right to do that. However, if we are to do such work, it needs to be properly resourced and supported, not just in this House. Frankly, I am dismayed at how much time my small team of three has to spend chasing up government departments which do not provide information on time and within deadlines, or which produce explanatory memoranda that are neither explanatory nor particularly helpful. Above all, we must be very cautious not to see the important issue of national parliament scrutiny of the EU obscuring the need for effective scrutiny of government action within the EU. That is a very important part of the scrutiny role of this House and it is one that we must hold on to.