European Union (Approvals) Bill

John Redwood Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

Absolutely, and again I am grateful to my hon. Friend. The situation makes the Government’s position on these matters unjustifiable and completely ridiculous. If the Government do not support all this, why on earth are we in this situation? If we are in this situation because the Minister is utterly powerless to do anything about it because he has no influence whatsoever, I hope he will admit that. When our referendum comes, in 2017 or thereabouts, it will be another argument for why we should leave the European Union.

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the whole idea of an EU quango to lecture member states on how we should behave on human rights is nonsense? This is a group of democratic states, so surely it is the job of the Parliaments of the individual member states to decide on and uphold the human rights in their countries, rather than to be instructed by EU quangos.

[Philip Davies]

My right hon. Friend, as ever, is absolutely right. We certainly need no lectures from other countries in the EU about how to protect people’s freedoms; this country has a far better track record than member states of the EU will ever have. I suspect that the Minister will be trying to defend the indefensible, but it is a sad state of affairs when it appears that we in this House are powerless to do anything about these sorts of bureaucracies. We all know what happens with these types of bureaucracies: they grow and grow, and they empire build. They will grow their influence and they will try to do things that they are not supposed to do—things they were not set up to do. They will grow the number of staff and grow their budget, and it appears from what I have heard so far that we are utterly powerless to do anything about it. If the Minister can give me some comfort that we can and will do something about it, fair enough, but it seems to me that either the Government approve of all this nonsense, which would be a terrible state of affairs, or we are powerless to do anything about it, which in my view is equally unacceptable. I look forward to the Minister explaining which it is, but whichever it is, my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is right to draw the matter to the attention of the Committee and to pursue his amendment, which I support with gusto.

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[Michael Connarty]

No, I do not want to continue with the Council of Europe. I have spoken at length in the House in debates on the functions of the Parliamentary Assembly, which I think is an excellent organisation that brings people back to why we come to Parliament. It is about the application of human rights. We often get tied up in playing our parties off against each other, but if we look through the lens of human rights we can very quickly see where the breaches are. There were huge outcries under the previous Government when we were locking up people for long periods without trial, which I objected to. Many of these things come back to the fundamentals.

The EU is adding its weight. It has more power than the Council of Europe to deliver judgments and make those judgments stick, because penalties apply to things that the EU gets involved in. If we decided to break away from a European directive, we could, as a country, be fined. When, for example, Bulgaria refused to come up to scratch with its legal system, it had all its EU finances frozen until it brought itself up to a standard that was acceptable.

The EU might attract many criticisms, and at times I find it greatly irritating, but I am pleased that it is adding its weight to the need to look at things on a human rights basis and to report on that. That is what the proposal is about.

[Mr Redwood]

Does the hon. Gentleman not accept, in retrospect, that when so many powers were given away by the House under the Labour Government, it would have been much better if they had asked the British people’s permission? The British people feel cheated now.

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[Mr Nuttall]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely good point. The question arises what would happen in a situation which has partly happened now and will certainly happen in the next multi-annual framework, where the agency straddles two financial periods. How can an agency properly budget when its framework straddles two budgetary periods? It does not make sense. That is just another example of muddled thinking in Europe, and of an organisation that has no intention of being transparent or open to the people whom it seeks to serve.

[Mr Redwood]

I am sure my hon. Friend has noticed that in the supporting documentation it is asserted that there will be no impact on public sector manpower or cost. Having to deal with yet another one of these fiddly agencies means huge legal bills, on top of the ones that we have for the European Court of Human Rights and on top of our domestic ones. Is that not an awful lot of extra money?

[Mr Nuttall]

Yes. My right hon. Friend again makes an excellent point. We will find that someone who is concerned about a particular right in this country is faced with a plethora of bodies, and those involved in this field in this country have an extra body to liaise with on the European front. Whereas in the past they would just have looked to the contents of the European convention on human rights and the findings of the European Court of Human Rights, they now have to think, “I wonder what the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights will think about all this. I wonder what it has said about it.”

I will not go down that road, as we have other amendments to consider and there is a further debate afterwards. I doubt whether we need that body at all. That is why I will support my hon. Friend’s amendments tonight. The body is unnecessary and it adds confusion to what is already a very crowded playing field in the area of human rights. I simply ask the Minister how the agency will benefit my constituents in Bury, North. How would they notice if it were simply abolished? That is what I think should happen.

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[The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) provoked a very wide-ranging debate covering a large number of issues, some of which are to do with the Bill and a few of which are even to do with the amendments. They include the question of whether the Fundamental Rights Agency represents value for money and concern about the potential for duplication with the work of the Council of Europe, about which my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Mr Walter) spoke so eloquently.

The Bill is limited to seeking parliamentary approval for an EU decision to agree the agency’s new five-year work programme. The programme simply identifies the thematic areas under which the agency will undertake its tasks. The amendments—my main contribution to the debate, Mr Evans, will be to talk about the amendments—have as their common purpose a desire to remove clause 1(2)(b) from the Bill, the effect of which would be to withhold parliamentary approval of the draft decision that seeks to establish the next five-year work programme for the agency. Without that parliamentary approval, the UK cannot vote in favour of this measure at EU level. I do not believe that withholding such approval is the right course of action. I urge my hon. Friend to withdraw the amendment, or the Committee to vote against it, for the following reasons.

The work programme is agreed by the Council. Agreeing the work programme provides member states—including, of course, us—with the opportunity to define the focus for the agency’s work for the next five years, encouraging it to concentrate its resources on a limited number of areas and to undertake targeted, in-depth research within the boundaries defined by the framework. The UK has participated actively in the negotiations that have led to the new draft programme being drawn up and is satisfied with the results. It is important for the Committee to be clear that the agreement of a new work programme does not alter the core tasks of the agency, nor does it change the agency’s role. The work programme does not set out or define these elements. They are set out in a completely different instrument—the agency’s establishing regulation, which is not under review in the Bill or in the amendments. I hear the views of many of my hon. Friends about the merits of the agency’s work, but neither this Bill nor the draft decision that it approves can do anything to bring about changes in those areas.

[Mr Redwood]

I think that we have all been entirely in order and that the Minister should reconsider. We are saying that we want this thing to do a lot less and to do it much more cheaply. That is entirely in order, and it is our one opportunity to say it. We in this Government are meant to be looking for cuts. This would be an exceedingly popular one, so will the Minister cut the thing?

[Damian Green]

I was not suggesting for a moment that my right hon. Friend, my hon. Friends or anyone else who has contributed to this debate were out of order; I was merely making the point that I want to address the amendments. My right hon. Friend has expressed his views with characteristic force, but I have to disappoint him by saying that the amendments would not achieve what he hopes they would.

Let me be clear about the consequences of the UK not approving the draft decision. Failure to agree the work programme would deprive the Council of the opportunity to set the direction of the agency by defining the themes. However, the absence of a work programme would not mean that the agency would go away or down tools. My right hon. and hon. Friends should bear that important point in mind when considering whether or not to support the amendment. If there was no draft framework, the agency would still be able to carry out its role. However, its focus would shift to answering requests for work from other EU institutions. Not supporting the framework therefore means that member states, including the UK, would have less influence on the work that the agency does. I do not think that that would be a good result for the UK and I suspect that my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch would agree with that.

The themes set out in the work programme continue those in the current one, and I welcome the European Scrutiny Committee’s analysis that the proposed work programme can indeed be considered to be equivalent to the former one. Although there are some adjustments between the two work programmes with regard to terminology, the changes will not alter the work that the agency has been doing.

During negotiations the UK Government were successful in ensuring that the themes set out in the work programme should continue to be limited to Community law. Other member states proposed the inclusion of themes on police co-operation and judicial co-operation in criminal matters. That would have been an extension of the agency’s work and it was successfully resisted by the UK Government. The draft decision records that we were successful. Agreeing to the draft decision will ensure that that is a binding decision of the EU institutions. That is why we are asking Parliament to approve it.

Moving on to some of the specific points that have been raised, the issue of duplication of the work of the Council of Europe has been a feature of this debate. The agency’s role is to provide the EU institutions and member states with independent evidence on how fundamental rights are respected. It does so through undertaking research and producing comparative data of the situation of rights across those member states, and through producing indicators that can be applied across the EU. Some of my hon. Friends were treating it as though it were an alternative to either the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights. It is, in essence, a data collection and dissemination agency that does not do any of the work of the ECJ or the ECHR. I agree that that would be unnecessary duplication. The same point applies to those in this country who, quite reasonably, would not want to lectured by the Fundamental Rights Agency about our performance on human rights. It does not do that sort of thing—that is not the work that it does.

There has been much discussion and concern expressed about money. This, of course, has to be set in the context of the statement made by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister earlier today. As he made clear—I think this was widely welcomed by all parties—the Government will continue to push for a good deal for UK taxpayers through agreement on the next multi-annual financial framework. The agency’s budget for the period covered by the next MAFF will form part of our negotiations following the agreement of that framework.

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[Mr Chope]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Minister for responding so frankly. What he has said illustrates the farce we are in. As a result of the commendable passing of the European Union Act 2011, we are being asked to approve, among other things, the work programme of the Fundamental Rights Agency for the next five years. If we do not approve the programme, we have been told, “Don’t worry—they’re going to go ahead with it anyway and choose their own programme.” Similarly, as the Prime Minister told us earlier with regard to the multi-annual financial framework—the next seven-year budget for the European Union—if a real-terms reduction had not been agreed, it would have carried on spending more than had been agreed anyway. That shows the extent to which we have been tied up in knots by the European Union and its institutions. The evidence coming out of this debate will be prayed in aid by people such as me when we get into the hard issues of debating whether or not it would be better to stay in or leave the European Union. I see this as part of that debate.

This debate has raised a number of interesting points beyond the Minister’s insight into what our powers amount to in this case. My hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Mr Walter) undertakes with extreme diligence his job as leader of the UK parliamentary group in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. He raised a number of serious issues. Such issues are being raised not just by him as leader of the UK delegation, but by a lot of other delegations. One such issue is that, at a time when the European Court of Human Rights and the Council of Europe are being starved of resources, we can see with our own eyes that the 27 member countries of the European Union feel that they can throw money at the gravy train that is the Fundamental Rights Agency. Sadly, I did not hear an assurance from my right hon. Friend the Minister about what the Government are doing to stop that. They may be powerless to do anything about it, for the reasons given in his speech.

I do not think that that is good enough. We now have a situation in which we know that a lot of that money is being wasted. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley referred in his excellent speech to undocumented migrants in Europe having access to health care. That was the very subject on the agenda at the Warsaw conference that I attended and on which I expounded on Second Reading. What a waste of money that was.

The hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) was concerned about the five-year delays in getting judgments. The European Court of Human Rights needs more money if it is to increase the speed with which it deals with its casework. It is not getting extra money because the 27 members of the European Union would prefer to spend their money on the Fundamental Rights Agency.

[Mr Redwood]

Does my hon. Friend not mean to say that the work load of the European Court of Human Rights should be severely reduced to leave more matters in the power of democratic member states? Surely he does not want more money to be spent at that level.

[Mr Chope]

As a lawyer—[Laughter.] As a non-practising lawyer, I believe that if somebody starts a case before the courts under the rule of law, it should reach a conclusion within a reasonable space of time. It is incumbent upon any organisation that operates a legal system to ensure that sufficient resources are available for the judges to reach decisions reasonably quickly.

[Mr Redwood]

Does my hon. Friend not agree with the Government’s very wise argument that we do not want so many appeals to the European Court of Human Rights and that individual litigants should be able to appeal only to our Supreme Court?

[Mr Chope]

I certainly agree with that in relation to our particular case. I look forward to debating that issue when we discuss the draft Voting Eligibility (Prisoners) Bill. Two months have gone by since the draft Bill was published and the Committee still has not been set up to consider it. However, that is another story.