European Union Bill

Henry Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 26th January 2011 Commons Chamber

First, let me repeat that the Government believe that, in future, measures such as the European investigation order should be dealt with by way of a parliamentary debate with the opportunity for a vote. Indeed, they would have been dealt with in that way had these arrangements applied earlier. We have made an explicit commitment to a parliamentary debate and vote on the decision on the mass opt-in or opt-out which must be determined by 2014, as set out in my written statement.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

Would my right hon. Friend not consider including that in the Bill?

[Mr Lidington]

We are due to debate the measures later.

The Government will have three options. They can decide to opt in to all the measures en bloc, or they can decide to opt out of them en bloc. The judgment that Ministers will have to make—I emphasise that no decision has yet been made, and that we are nowhere near making one or making a recommendation—is that these are measures in which the United Kingdom freely decided that it wanted to participate, because it served our national interest to do so, during the “third pillar” process that existed before the Lisbon treaty.

The Government of the time—Labour or Conservative—decided that each measure was right and that it was in the British national interest to participate; but, of course, that decision was made on the basis that those were intergovernmental matters which did not fall within the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. That is a material difference. If we opt in to all these measures in 2014, we must accept that we are opting in to matters all of which will, from that point, be subject to ECJ jurisdiction.