Canterbury City Council Bill
Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Christopher Chope(11 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Chope
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, as always, for his intervention, but on this occasion he is absolutely wrong.
This is the last group of amendments that we will debate on this Bill. In fact, the amendments relate not only to the Canterbury City Council Bill, but to all the Bills that we are discussing. It is right at this stage to pay tribute to everybody who has participated in these debates.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)
I have had the pleasure of listening to my hon. Friend on these subjects for a number of years. When I was the Opposition spokesman, I advocated looking at these issues on a national basis so that individual councils did not have to come forward with different Bills. Would that not be a much more sensible approach?
Mr Chope
Absolutely. We have made progress in that regard. When these Bills were first debated, the Labour Government were reluctant to do anything about it, but under the present Government we have had a new consultation paper on the whole subject. That paper makes it clear that the Government’s view is that there may be a strong case for national legislation instead of piecemeal legislation.
The Government have said that if they have to change the legislation to ensure that all the local Acts and the Bills that we are discussing today comply with the EU services directive, they will include the provisions that are put forward by each local authority before the end of the consultation period later this month in collective legislation to ensure that the provisions relating to the rights and responsibilities of pedlars are common throughout the land.
One benefit of this debate having been extended over almost a six-year period is that we have had the chance to consider the impact of the services directive, which, among other things, applies to touting for services, which is the subject of this group of Lords amendments. As my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) will remember, when we raised the issue of the services directive initially, there was much scepticism among Government Members and people like my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier) who have sponsored these Bills. They said that we were raising the services directive as a red herring in order to waste time.
We have now found out that the Government are taking the matter so seriously that they have realised that all the pedlars Acts may have to be repealed to facilitate compliance with the services directive. That implies that when the former Government first thought about the impact of the services directive on the United Kingdom, they and their advisers got it completely wrong. They should surely have understood the implications of the directive when it was being negotiated in Brussels. That is just another example of how we have lost control over our own affairs through the loss of sovereignty, which is being passed to the European Union.
All’s well that ends well in the sense that the Government now recognise that many of the services provisions in these Bills are wholly inappropriate. I suspect that even if my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury had not offered, when the Canterbury City Council Bill was before the House on Third Reading, to withdraw the touting provisions in the other place, it would have been necessary to take them out anyway because of their lack of compliance with the services directive.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
Is there not something ironic about the European Union coming to the rescue of my hon. Friend to sort this matter out?
European Union (Approvals) Bill [Lords]
Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Christopher Chope(11 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash), who does such sterling service to the House in his capacity as Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee. I think I am the first person to speak in this debate, apart from the Front Benchers, who is not a member of that Committee, and I pay tribute to its members, who have ensured that we have the opportunity to hold the Government and the European Union to account in tonight’s debate and on subsequent occasions.
I shall confine my remarks to the aspect of the Bill dealing with the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. You will remember, Mr Deputy Speaker, that when the Lisbon treaty was being discussed, our Government said that they were against the Fundamental Rights Agency because they thought it completely superfluous and unnecessary. They said that all it would do would be to duplicate the work of the Council of Europe. That is exactly what it has set out to do—to usurp the Council of Europe and duplicate its work.
I am disappointed, given that the Government are newly playing hardball in Europe, that we are not taking on the agency and saying, “Hold on a minute, why are you expanding your ambit of activity? Why have you got a substantially increased budget?” My hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) referred in his excellent contribution to the agency’s budget having risen to €21.3 million a year. Only a few years ago, it was hardly €100—it was a small, miniuscule budget. A lot of that budget is being wasted, and I will give the House an example.
About 18 months ago when I chaired the committee on migration, refugees and displaced persons at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, I was lucky enough to be invited by the Fundamental Rights Agency to address a conference in the centre of Warsaw. To my incredulity, I found that a whole 40-storey hotel in the centre of Warsaw was taken up with guests of the Fundamental Rights Agency who, on inquiry, had all had their expenses paid by that agency and had come from all over Europe, and beyond, to discuss issues relating to fundamental rights. That seemed an unnecessarily extravagant way of getting information—the Fundamental Rights Agency is to provide expert advice and support to European Union institutions and member states, not to give jollies to people from non-governmental organisations who want an outing to Warsaw at the expense of the European taxpayer.
When I read the brilliant research paper from the House of Commons Library and saw some of the background on how the Commission reached its conclusion, I was a little dubious. It states that on 13 December,
“the Commission proposed a new Multiannual Framework…and consulted the Management Board of the Fundamental Rights Agency”.
In other words, it consulted the producer interests and received a preliminary contribution. The paper went on:
“The Management Board consulted the Agency’s Fundamental Rights Platform (a network of cooperation with civil society)”.
I suspect that most of those in the hotel I described were members of the agency’s fundamental rights platform. Unsurprisingly—such people are used to receiving that sort of indulgence at the expense of the European taxpayer—they were in favour of expanding the ambit of the Fundamental Rights Agency, as set out in the revised multi-annual framework. What an extraordinary state of affairs. I am surprised that the Government have not played a harder ball on the issue, although I am sure we will have the chance to focus on it by tabling an amendment to delete that provision when we discuss the Bill in Committee or on Report.
When commenting on the results of the consultation to which I have referred, the European Parliament stated:
“One hundred and eight organisations took part in the consultation process. Most organisations support the Agency’s work in the current areas, and would like it to continue…particularly in the areas of…asylum and migration.”
There was a lot of support for extending the work of the Fundamental Rights Agency, and I am not surprised.
If we must have such an agency, it would be better if it stopped duplicating the work of the Council of Europe. All members of the European Union are also members of the Council of Europe, but the Council of Europe’s budget is not going up because its European Union members say that we cannot afford to spend more money on it. The costs of the European Court of Human Rights continue to increase, but the Council of Europe’s budget is being squeezed in all other areas, including research. Meanwhile, such research is increasingly being done by the Fundamental Rights Agency with money that should rightfully be contributed to the Council of Europe.
In a sense, I am disappointed that the Government seem to go along with the expansion of the Fundamental Rights Agency. How does that fit with the policy of this Government and this Parliament of trying to reduce the size of the European Union budget? The challenge given to those of us who want a real-terms reduction in that budget is always: “What are you going to cut?” Well, expenditure on the Fundamental Rights Agency is one thing we could cut, and we could do it by cutting that agency’s wings in the multi-annual framework that started this January and continues for the next five years. If we had not agreed to the expansion of that framework and had instead insisted on it being reduced in scope, we would have secured real savings and contributed to the genuine reduction in the European Union budget that everybody—certainly on the Government Benches—wishes to see.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
I praise my hon. Friend for his work in establishing the budget of this new organisation. Since the Council of Europe gives the European taxpayer such good value for money in having its budget reduced each year, instead of having a new agency, why not give all its functions to the Council of Europe? In that way, we could reduce the European budget.
Mr Chope
I think that is a brilliant idea, and for a long time I thought that was the policy supported by the Government. It is certainly supported by almost every member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, including many from core European Union states who regard themselves as being Europhiles in the extreme, but even they ask what the point is of duplicating the functions of the Council of Europe with those of the Fundamental Rights Agency. I hope my hon. Friend will take that idea forward.
If we are to have a Fundamental Rights Agency with a multi-annual framework, as stated in the Bill, why not concentrate on one or two areas with an obvious need for further work? At the moment, the management board mentions “thematic areas”, which include:
“Immigration and integration of migrants; visa and border control; asylum”,
and the European Union is fundamentally failing in that area at the moment.
The week before last I was in Greece where I visited the Greece-Turkey border and received briefings from Greek Ministers and the Hellenic coastguard about the problem of illegal migrants coming into Greece, mainly from Turkey. One problem in Greece that contributes to the
“racism, xenophobia and related intolerance”—
that is thematic area (j)—is that it is virtually impossible for Greece to return illegal migrants to the countries from which they came.
Let me give the House an example. When visiting a detention centre in Athens, I went up to the wire fence and asked whether anybody spoke English. To cut a long story short, I started a conversation with a person who said that he had arrived in the detention centre having set out from Afghanistan—he is an Afghan national—and that he had paid smugglers $8,000 to get across Iran and Turkey. He wanted to go from Turkey across the Aegean sea and on to the Italian eastern seaboard so that he could make his way to the United Kingdom. I inquired about that and asked why he wanted to go to London. He replied that it was because he had been there for five years until a few months ago, and that he had lots of friends in London who had paid the $8,000 for his return trip. He had been deported from the United Kingdom after playing our system for about five years, and within a few weeks of getting back to Afghanistan this wholly undeserving case was presenting himself in a Greek detention centre.
Unfortunately for that man, the boat from Turkey foundered—I suppose it is fortunate that the Greek coastguard rescued him and he was not drowned—and he found himself in the detention centre, but the Greek authorities had no way of returning him back to Afghanistan, because Afghanistan does not accept anyone in Greece who emanated from Afghanistan. If he is detained in Greece for the maximum of 18 months, he will be released and will join all those other people in Greece—this also happens in Italy—who do not belong or do not necessarily wish to stay there, which contributes to feelings of racism and xenophobia on the part of the indigenous population. Something like 60% of people in Greek prisons are non-Greek nationals.
If there is a need for the Fundamental Rights Agency, it should deal with that sort of thing rather than mess around with the other expanded areas to which hon. Members have referred. For example, if the FRA looked at the inability of people to claim asylum in Turkey because it has opted out of many Geneva convention provisions, it might help to focus attention on the need to strengthen the Turkey-EU border.
Mr Chope
I was not aware of that and am grateful to my hon. Friend for pointing it out. As hon. Members often say, it is an issue of priorities. People and organisations must be judged on the priority they give to different issues. In the light of the enormous crisis in Europe and on European borders, it is odd that that should be a priority as opposed to the problems to which I have referred.
The debate gives us an opportunity to go into many other aspects of asylum and border control, but I will not do so. I have highlighted why they are important. If the organisation has to exist, it would be better if it got on with dealing with serious issues rather than trying to expand its remit.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
To whom will the FRA be accountable? Who will set its agenda and control its budget?