European Union Committee: Report on 2013-14 (EUC Report)

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

My Lords, I wish to focus my remarks on the work of Sub-Committee D, which I have had the honour to chair since May last year. This is not in any way to downplay the important work undertaken by the Select Committee itself. Our report into the role of national parliaments is a timely and valuable contribution to a growing debate across Europe and reflects the leadership shown by my noble friend Lord Boswell, whom I thank for his personal support for my work. In my work on the sub-committee, I try very hard to reflect the principles outlined in the report on the role of national parliaments —namely, that of engagement with counterparts and officials from across the EU and looking at policy before it reaches its final legislative form.

Our work this year was dominated by the topic of food waste, to which I shall return in a moment. Some of our scrutiny work followed up on the excellent work undertaken by my predecessors, the noble Lords, Lord Carter of Coles and Lord Sewel, and it shows, I believe, the value of well considered inquiries undertaken early in the policy-making process. This is a hallmark of much of the work across the sub-committees and it is something that we do well.

In 2008, the committee published a report on reform of the common fisheries policy. Five years down the line, I am delighted to say that the work came to fruition. Regulations to reform the CFP were adopted that strongly reflected the key themes of our committee’s 2008 report, including the decentralisation of decision-making and the introduction of a discard ban. Last summer, when the deal was done, the committee turned to the practical implementation of these policies, particularly the discard ban. It remains one that we should be watching.

The second major dossier that reached its end point last year was the reform of the common agricultural policy—although, of course, it never reaches an end; it is like painting the Forth Bridge. Under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, the sub-committee had undertaken an inquiry into innovation in EU agriculture. Redirecting the juggernaut of the CAP is no small task, but incremental steps have been taken along the lines proposed by the committee in its report, and I am pleased to say that the committee continues to press the important themes of research and knowledge transfer as the process of implementation returns. It has also clearly become more of a priority for the Government because this week they have announced new investment in agricultural research.

One way in which we pressed those themes was through our recent report into the prevention of food waste in the EU. On-farm innovation is a very important element of tackling food waste at the initial stages of the food chain. The press and public interest that our report drew surprised even us; the press office tells me that it received more coverage than any House of Lords report it could ever remember. I want to trade anecdotes with my noble friend Lady O’Cathain and the noble Lord, Lord Boswell. The Independent described our committee as a “true adornment” of your Lordships’ House.

It is very important now for us to follow up this work. The European Commission recently produced amendments to its waste legislation that very strongly reflect the recommendations that we made in our report to have an aspirational food waste reduction target—not legislatively binding—and to work on standard definitions across the EU. We are awaiting more information from the Commission and a non-legislative communication from it in the autumn. We will also hold a seminar to look at the practical barriers to redistribution of surplus food. I am now constantly being briefed by organisations and businesses across the country and, indeed, Europe on the work that it is doing to reduce food waste. I think that demonstrates that we are regarded as leaders in this thinking.

I turn briefly to some other work. We are currently in the midst of a very intensive period of work, within the EU and internationally, on future approaches to energy and climate policy. It was very pleasing that messages in our report last year with regard to EU energy policy have been reflected in the Commission's proposed policy for energy and climate change through to 2030. This relates particularly to the importance of creating a stable environment to support long-term investment. I am also very pleased that, as the Energy Bill was making its way through this House, noble Lords made a number of references to the work that we had done in our committee. This shows that there is a crossover between the work that we do in the European scrutiny context and in the wider work of the House. Work on energy and climate change will be at the headlines of our next inquiry, into EU regional marine co-operation, which we launched at the beginning of this week. We are trying to bring a number of these things together, such as fisheries, energy interconnectivity and knowledge transfer. I hope that what I have said gives a sense of the work that we have been doing and that we plan to do, and demonstrates that we continue to seek to build and follow up on previous work.

There is a further point that I wish to make. It is a matter not for the Government but for this House. The new rotation rules that have now been introduced for the European committees will result in a two-thirds change of membership of my committee and that of a number of others next year. I suggest that a two-thirds change really runs completely counter to the principles of gathering experience and ensuring the effective running of the committee. As if that were not bad enough, after I had thought about it, I realised that the changes will mean that, every third year, two-thirds of the committee will disappear. I hope that the House will rethink that because it will make our work very difficult indeed.

I am grateful to all members of my committee, who are a joy to work with. They contribute a huge amount of their time, their experience, their expertise and, above all, their enthusiasm to make us successful. I should like to pay particular tribute this evening to Lord Lewis of Newnham, who died earlier this month after a long illness. His interest in all aspects of our work, coupled with his immense knowledge of chemistry, made his contribution invaluable. We miss his deceptively gentle, incisive questioning and his kindness.

Finally, we would not be so effective if it were not for the work of our staff. I put on record my thanks to our committee assistant Mark Gladwell, our clerk Patrick Milner, his predecessor Aaron Speer and our policy analyst Alistair Dillon, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of the range of work we cover is always truly astonishing.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I think this is the third time we have had an annual debate on the work of this extremely important committee. I regret that we are very much at the last hour of a Thursday evening and keeping the staff here, and that we are rather thinly staffed on the Benches at the moment, because this is an extremely important committee. When the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, introduced this debate I thought about how long this committee has gone on and how closely many of us have been involved with it. When I first became a Member of this House, the then Clerk of the Parliaments, Michael Wheeler-Booth, enjoyed entertaining people in front of me by saying that when he was the first clerk to the committee one of its first witnesses was a rather nervous young woman academic. He gave her a double gin and tonic before she gave evidence to the committee to steady her nerves. The young academic was Helen Wallace, my wife.

Shortly after I joined the House, I was posted to Sub-Committee F and, because the chair resigned unexpectedly, I became its chair. I had an experienced clerk to train me and then found myself with an entirely newly appointed and totally inexperienced clerk called Christopher Johnson, whom I was expected to train. I think he has done quite well since then and I hope the committee is happy with the highly experienced clerk he now is.

We all need calm and reasoned debate on matters European and we all realise how enormously difficult it is amid the cacophony of ignorant prejudice all around us to hold to a highly reasoned and calm debate, often on highly technical issues, set out in highly technical language which, nevertheless, can touch on major UK interests and dilemmas. As some noble Lords may know, I have been involved very closely in the balance of competences reports. I hope noble Lords have followed these with increasing confidence because we have attempted to see them very much as a parallel process of evidence-based consideration of British interests in European co-operation and of how far the current balance of competences suits British economic, social and political bodies engaged with European policy.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Bach, that the reason some reports have only just been given to the committee is that the third round of this four-round exercise was completed only some weeks ago, and the 11 reports were published on Tuesday of this week. These included the delayed report on the free movement of persons and the single market report on financial services and capital, which was mentioned in last evening’s debate and provides a high-quality analysis of some of those complicated issues.

The fourth round is now in process. We hope to complete that before the end of the year. It will include a report on subsidiarity and proportionality, a matter of active interest to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, among others. The fourth round has only seven papers, but because they are on complicated, cross-cutting issues, these will be some of the most difficult. I hope that this will all feed back into the work of your Lordships’ European Union Committee.

There is another report coming up on enlargement. The noble Lord, Lord Bowness, touched on how complex and delicate a subject that has now become. There is another on citizenship, voting and the related issues of individual rights within the European Union.

In the process of negotiating the balance of competences papers through three rounds now, I have discovered how much overlap and interaction there is between UK engagement with the European Union and with other multilateral organisations through which the UK pursues and negotiates its economic security, regulatory and political interests: the OECD, the OSCE, the WHO—within which the EU operates as a regional body for certain purposes, which I did not know until I read the balance of competences health report—the IMF, the Bank for International Settlements, the Food and Agriculture Organization and so on. There is a case for this House to consider in the new Parliament whether it should not at least experiment with one or two more committee inquiries that will look at how the UK works through other technical and specialised international organisations.

The need for calm and reasoned debate, particularly on questions such as Russia and Europe, came home to me as I picked up my Daily Mail this morning and saw the full-page article by Stephen Glover which explains that it is the EU’s fault that the Dutch aircraft was shot down over eastern Ukraine. One need not go through the various stages through which he demonstrates that it is entirely the EU’s fault. There is no mention of the pressure from within Ukraine itself for closer relations with the European Union. In December 1991, I spoke at a conference in Kiev, when Ukraine had been independent for three weeks, at which the Prime Minister announced that among the two strategic aims of the state’s foreign policy was to join the EU within three years. I was then asked to explain why that might be a little more difficult than he expected. There was no mention in the article of the Bush Administration’s encouragement of Ukraine and other states to join NATO—“No, it is the European Union’s fault. President Putin is a splendid man and everything that is wrong with the country is the fault of those dreadful people in Brussels”. That means that we absolutely need detailed arguments demonstrating where British interests are better pursued at an EU level or better pursued at the national level, and thus to unpick, one by one, some of the arguments that are produced in the other direction.

The noble Lord, Lord Harrison, asked me a specific point about whether the Government had been invited to engage with the euro group and whether we have declined or not. I do not know the answer to that. I will draw it to the attention of my Treasury colleagues and promise that we will respond to the committee as soon as we can.

The noble Lord, Lord Bach touched on the extent to which the Foreign Office co-operates with the committee. As a Foreign Office Minister, I am impressed by the quality of FCO officials working on European issues, the balance of competences and a number of other areas. We are keen to co-operate as far as possible with the committee; that, of course, is part of the strategy of wanting to strengthen the role of national parliaments. Mr Lidington appearing before the committee before the June Council was seen as an experiment, but it is certainly something that we might well take further.

I would merely mention, in terms of what I understand are the Labour Party’s intentions for the other place, that the Commons European Scrutiny Committee proposals—to which the Government have now also responded—suggest that it would be more useful in the other place for departmental Select Committees to become more directly engaged with European issues themselves, rolling the European dimension in with the regular spread of sectoral policy in the United Kingdom.

Extending the role of national parliaments is one of the targets of the coalition Government’s EU reform agenda, which requires active engagement with the Brussels institutions and other national parliaments, with the National Parliament Office, which we maintain in Brussels, and with COSAC. I note the slightly mixed message about COSAC from the noble Lord, Lord Boswell. I am sure that it is much better than when I used to go to COSAC.

We are experimenting with reasoned opinions and yellow cards. Some other parliaments have already produced more reasoned opinions and yellow cards than either of the two Houses of the British Parliament; that is something that we clearly need to take further.

I take the various critical points that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, made—that there is a shortage of time, which we need to discuss again at the Commission, that there has been resistance from within the Commission to reasoned opinions and that we need to strengthen links also between national parliaments and the new European Parliament, which is an issue to which we must all return.

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market]

Would my noble friend accept that a particular role for government departments in all this is the speed with which Explanatory Memoranda are issued. Certainly on my committee, we have had problems when the clock is ticking on the reasoned opinion taxi meter and we are still waiting for the Government’s Explanatory Memorandum.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

We all understand that that is part of the problem and the pressure, and we are doing our utmost to look at that as well. I also take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that effective scrutiny necessitates the earliest possible engagement with developing areas of policy, looking at work programmes and strategic views.

I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, feels that the Government’s scrutiny performance has improved somewhat in the last year. It is one of those things on which we all have to maintain the pressure. Civil servants are always very busy and Ministers always have too many things in their in-tray, but we have to keep up the pressure on all that.

The noble Lord, Lord Bach, asked whether the Government’s evidence on the abuse of free movement rights could be shared with the House. Much of that is in the free movement of persons paper that was published on Tuesday. Having been very closely involved in negotiations over that paper, I might say that the evidence is not always entirely clear; that is part of the problem in discussing questions of free movement of persons and labour and the abuse of free movement rights. That is partly because we do not have exit controls in this country and partly because we do not collect all the central evidence. For example, I questioned at one stage an academic study that suggested that there were 40,000 British citizens receiving benefits in other states in the EU. That is an academic estimate, but nobody is entirely sure whether that is an exact figure. So there are many problems in addressing that very complicated issue.

The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, asked whether the UK had been diffident in its approach to the financial transaction tax. The Government have been very closely engaged with this issue since publication and, indeed, took a case to the European Court of Justice on that issue to raise the question of how far it would be appropriate for the European Union to move on that subject. We remain actively engaged.

The noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, talked about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. That will be a central but extremely difficult issue for the coming year; we know that there will be lobbies not just in France and elsewhere but in this country that will want to raise negative issues about TTIP. That is something that we will clearly have to follow.

May I say, as spokesperson for the Cabinet Office and therefore dealing with a lot of data sharing issues, that I would welcome the European Union Committee looking further at aspects of the digital single market as well as data sharing and data protection? Some months ago, I asked for a briefing within Whitehall on the digital single market and officials from five different departments came to brief me, demonstrating just how complicated an issue it is. After all, this is all one issue in a complex, multi-levelled set of issues for government that is driven by the speed of technological change. I am constantly struck by how much faster technology is taking us down the road to online, cross-border transactions than we previously understood. The digital single market is a major priority in the Government’s drive for EU reform and it is part of the extension of the single market to services, as services and manufacturing intertwine and overlap. It will be a difficult issue also in TTIP, as data regulation, the cloud and the role of the US service providers hit the issue of data protection.

I am conscious of the time. I hope that I have answered most of the issues, but I see that there are one or two questions still to come.