Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy

Liam Fox Excerpts

Monday 25th January 2016 General Committees

[Mr Lidington]

If my hon. Friend looks at the track record of the current Government and their predecessor coalition Government, she will see that many more debates on documents referred by the European Scrutiny Committee have been held on the Floor of the House than was the case under predecessor Governments. It is always a difficult balance for the Government to strike in terms of the allocation of parliamentary time and we feel that we are granting a fair share of the Committee’s requests for debates on the Floor of the House. I can remember a previous Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee saying to me that he could remember being told informally by the Whips in the life of a previous Government that he could have two Floor debates a year and that he should decide which two he wanted out of the many documents that came through his Committee. We have had a lot more than two.

Any Member of the House of Commons is entitled to attend and speak at the European Committees. I take my hon. Friend’s point that a lot of Members, one would think, might be interested in human rights questions, especially given the number of lobbying campaigns to which we are all subjected by different pressure groups on behalf of human rights defenders of various countries, but our colleagues do not turn up in those numbers. The opportunity is there for hon. Members to take part if they wish to avail themselves of it.

[Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)]

I would like to press my right hon. Friend on one issue. The debate is obviously not just about human rights but strays into the whole area of EU competence. I would like to concentrate on value for money. I am clear from what he said about who determines how much money the EU wants and the mechanism by which the money is allocated. Would he say a little bit more about the audit trail? Exactly how is the money audited, by whom and when, to ensure that we, in this House, are able to trace where our taxpayers’ money has gone, what it has been used for and whether we might have been able to use it better ourselves were we not encumbered by this excessive bureaucratic EU cost?

[Mr Lidington]

Of course we will account, as the second biggest net contributor to the EU, for roughly 15% pro rata of spending on every EU programme. The judgment that the Government have to make—and that all voters will have to make at the forthcoming referendum—is, among other things, whether it is better and more greatly to our advantage in national terms to have some activities carried out collectively at a European level, rather than trying to do that bilaterally. A related question is whether, in the event of the United Kingdom leaving the EU, we would get all of that contribution back or whether, as with Norway and Switzerland, a considerable proportion would still need to be paid to the EU budget in the course of a subsequent relationship.

I am never satisfied with value for money. From the various Court of Auditors reports that I have looked at, more could and should be done at the EU level. I do not think that the EU institutions have adopted the culture that has been forced on this country and on many other EU member states of having to cut the coat to fit the cloth and having to engage in some painful reprioritisation as a consequence of dealing with limited resources.

The procedural reality is that the funds are subject to EU internal audit processes, which are monitored by the EU Court of Auditors. It is up to the Court of Auditors, as with the National Audit Office here, to decide where it wants to focus its attention. The mid-term review of the action plan to assess progress will take place next year. That will give us the opportunity to look more deeply into whether we have secured the value for money and the outcomes that we seek from this expenditure.

My own view is that it does provide a net benefit for the United Kingdom when we are able to speak not just as one country, or even perhaps with France and Germany as three significant European countries, but when we are able to work effectively as a bloc of 28. The reality is that, precisely because of the United Kingdom’s diplomatic weight and strength and because we have a global diplomatic network and a global reach to our diplomacy, we, like France, are able to exercise a disproportionate influence upon how EU-level foreign policy positions, including on human rights, are developed. In that sense, we get benefit where we are prepared to be active and where we fight hard to try to ensure that our priorities and objectives are taken up as European priorities and objectives. It is not perfect—I completely accept that—and my right hon. Friend is absolutely correct to warn of the need to be vigilant about competence because there is always a risk of the envelope being pushed by the Brussels institutions, but on balance I think we gain from the amplification of national diplomacy by effective EU action.