European Union Committee on 2014–15 (EUC Report)

Lord Boswell of Aynho Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2015 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Boswell of Aynho]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report of the European Union Committee on 2014–15 (1st Report, HL Paper 11).

[Lord Boswell of Aynho (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am delighted to introduce this debate on the European Union Committee’s annual report for the previous Session. European scrutiny is one of the key activities of the House. During the previous Session, the EU Committee, together with its six sub-committees, involved at any one time 74 Members of the House, who are supported by 24 members of staff. The levels of expertise and helpfulness among those staff are truly remarkable. Together, this constitutes one of the most exhaustive systems of national parliamentary scrutiny of European legislation throughout the European Union. The former President of the Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, said:

“The House of Lords is one of the best in Europe in terms of analysis. Very, very competent analysis of the legislation”.

I should like also to take this opportunity to put on record my thanks to the chairman and members of the six sub-committees, and in particular the contribution of the many members who have just stepped down from the committees, including three sub-committee chairs: the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, and the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, who has just recently addressed the Grand Committee.

The report considers the work of the committee and its sub-committees in a thematic way. First, our core business is to scrutinise proposals emanating from the European Union institutions, together with our Government’s policies towards them. During the previous Session, the committee scrutinised almost 150 European legislative proposals, together with other significant documents. These covered a broad range of issues, including: the climate and energy policy framework; occupational retirement provision; a single market for telecoms; structural reform of European credit institutions; the European Police College; data protection; and the handling of asylum applications. The committee also conducted detailed scrutiny of key issues and processes, including: the Commission work programme for 2015; the draft budget of the European Union; and, as was referred to in the earlier debate, the United Kingdom’s block opt-out from justice and home affairs measures.

While there has been an improvement in the performance of some government departments in meeting their obligations to the scrutiny process, the Government’s handling of scrutiny came under pressure in some cases. I regret that there was an increase in the number of avoidable overrides in 2014-15, so I ask the Minister, who I welcome to her place, what she can tell us about the steps that are being taken to prevent such occurrences and to spread best practice in the handling of scrutiny across government departments. I emphasise to the Committee that we draw what I think is a reasonable and practical distinction between scrutiny overrides that are essential because of the exigencies of times and those which are avoidable and should be a matter of concern to Ministers.

Our committee has also been extremely active in its inquiry work. Across the Session, we heard oral evidence from 180 witnesses and received 161 written submissions. We examined a number of issues of central and current concern, including: the impact of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office on the United Kingdom; the post-crisis European financial regulatory framework; the European Union and Russia; the civilian use of drones in the European Union; a new European alcohol strategy; the UK’s opt-in protocol, as already mentioned; regional marine co-operation in the North Sea; the capital markets union; and the coalition Government’s review of the balance of competences between the United Kingdom and the European Union. We have also undertaken follow-up work in relation to a number of previous inquiries. Our experience across this Session has demonstrated to us that, as well as the traditional model of long and fully detailed inquiries, there is considerable value in such follow-up work and in issuing shorter reports when there is a need to respond quickly.

Another significant innovation was the introduction of pre-European Council evidence sessions with the Minister for Europe, giving the committee an opportunity to examine publicly and influence the Government’s negotiating position on key issues before the event. Although I think it is fair to say that there was some initial resistance from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, two such pre-Council sessions were held in the second half of last year and one in March this year. We recommend that the practice should continue in the new Parliament, and I invite the Minister to confirm the Government’s commitment to doing this.

We have also taken steps to enhance our communication of the work of the committee. When I had the honour of taking the chair of the committee some three years ago, some concern was expressed about our communication. We took on board a very strong message that we should work hard on this area, which is one reason why this report is submitted for debate. The committee’s work was featured in nearly 400 broadcast features and print articles. Some of our reports, notably the one on EU-Russia relations, gained national, European and even international media coverage.

I am sure that your Lordships will be interested to know that in October 2013 a dedicated Twitter account for the committee was launched: @LordsEUCom. The account is used—by my staff, not by me—to communicate our scrutiny and inquiry work, as well as news about events such as international conferences, debates in the House and other relevant matters. The account has gained followers from EU institutions, other national parliaments, think tanks, commentators, commercial organisations and members of the general public. It has helped to raise the profile of the committee, particularly outside the UK. We will seek to build upon our recent involvement in social media but I emphasise that we also take seriously our responsibility to communicate our work effectively to Members of the House. We have a joint commitment—to communicate inwards to colleagues here and to continue to seek innovative ways of communicating our work to a wider audience.

The committee’s terms of reference require it,

“to represent the House as appropriate in interparliamentary cooperation within the EU”.

We have attended 19 interparliamentary conferences and have also worked hard to enhance our working relationship with colleagues from the House of Commons, the devolved legislatures and the European Parliament.

One of our major priorities during the Session has been to take forward the recommendations of the report we issued in April 2014 on the role of national parliaments in the European Union. In October, we met the incoming Commission First Vice-President for Better Regulation, and also for relations with national parliaments, Frans Timmermans, and we used the meeting to put forward our proposals for reform of the reasoned opinion procedure. We welcome the fact that the streamlined Commission work programme for 2015 suggests that the Commission is seeking to avoid the clashes over subsidiarity which have occurred in the past. We also warmly welcome Mr Timmermans’ emphasis on the Commission engaging with national parliaments and taking their views seriously. We have been pleased to meet a number of commissioners already this Session. In fact, two have been in London before our committee this very week.

The committee has also worked hard to promote the establishment of a green card mechanism whereby national parliaments can, as well as scrutinising and giving their opinion or caveat on European proposals, play a positive, constructive role in setting priorities for collective EU action where that is appropriate. The committee has proposed a pilot green card, urging the Commission to take action to tackle food waste, building on the report on that important subject produced by our Energy and Environment Sub-Committee. The pilot initiative has gained the support of more than one-third of the varying chambers of national parliaments. Other parliaments would have signed up to this, but have various constitutional or procedural reservations, although their political commitment is clear. Accordingly, I will shortly be writing to President Juncker to urge the Commission to respond to this proposal.

The role of national parliaments is, of course, a key element of the Government’s proposals for reform of the European Union ahead of a referendum by the end of 2017. Although I stress that it is not the committee’s task to advocate a yes vote or a no vote, which is a decision for the British people, nor is it technically our responsibility to scrutinise the European Union Referendum Bill shortly to arrive before your Lordships’ House, because that is domestic legislation, although it bears on Europe, I can assure noble Lords that the committee will be scrutinising the reform and referendum process closely and, as I hope we always have done, objectively and impartially. In this Session, we have already taken helpful evidence from the Minister for Europe on the subject and plan to publish a short report on the renegotiation process before the end of July with, probably, follow-up reports as appropriate either on specific areas or thematic issues.

In that climate, and in the context of other pressing current issues, such as the Greek financial crisis, the Mediterranean migrant crisis and the continuing difficulties in relations between the European Union and Russia, I submit that the work of the European Union Committee is more important than ever. I am grateful for this opportunity to bring forward and discuss its work. I am looking forward to the Minister’s reply and to contributions from Members from all parts of the House. I beg to move.

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[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I am somewhat of an interloper here this afternoon as I think I am the only person who is neither a Front Bench spokesperson for foreign affairs nor a member of the committee or any of its sub-committees, whether rotated on or off. I am coming to this not with any experience of having served on the committee, but from the other side of the fence, having followed the work of the European Union Committee as an academic. The reference by the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, just now to the work on EU enlargement reminded me that I have been reading House of Lords reports for more than 20 years. When I was a graduate student in Oxford, if you wanted to know what was going on with EU enlargement, the place to look was House of Lords reports which you always had sitting in hard copy in EU depositories and libraries. That was a very effective way of doing research 20 years ago, and the work of your Lordships’ committee remains outstanding. As the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, noted in his opening remarks, the fact that the former President of the European Commission has pointed out the excellence of the work is testament to the importance of the work that the European Union Committee has done.

However, there is a paradox. We are an unelected Chamber, yet the role of the EU Committee is recognised across the European Union. I was picked up on that when I gave a lecture a few months ago in Leuven. I was talking about national parliaments and Europe generally, but I said a little about the role of the House of Lords. I was taken to task during questions when somebody said, “It’s all very well for you to say what a good thing the House of Lords is, but it is not elected. How on earth can the House of Lords help improve democracy and legitimacy in the European Union?”. That was an important point, and wearing my academic hat I have to go away and think about it. The report on the committee’s work for 2014-15 and the programme of work for 2015-16 absolutely make the case for how important the committee’s role has been and how it is becoming more important. The decision to invite the Minister for Europe before Council meetings is hugely important. I seem to recall that in Governments up until 2010, the Prime Minister used to give pre-Council statements. We do not have that at the moment, but pre-scrutiny or holding the Government to account before Ministers go off to negotiate is very sensible.

The report was incredibly useful in raising some of the issues that perhaps go undiscussed and unannounced to most people, including interparliamentary co-operation, which has the danger of sounding as if it is about people just wanting to go and travel for the sake of it and have a nice lunch in a nice location or about who goes to which place and why. One academic colleague who follows interparliamentary conferences was greeted like an old friend at a conference that we held on national parliaments in Europe by none other than Sir William Cash, the very long-standing chair of the European Scrutiny Committee in the other place, which does not seem to have quite the same crop rotation or chair and membership rotation.

We discovered that if you keep talking to people, the discussions and the informal communications, thanks to interparliamentary conferences and interparliamentary co-operation, are incredibly important precisely because they give the opportunity not just for academics and practitioners to talk to each other but, far more importantly, for members of national parliaments and the European Parliament to meet on a regular basis and exchange ideas. Therefore, when it comes to issues such as the current yellow and orange cards and the prospect of the green card, the fact that members of parliaments know each other and can say, “Look, how about doing this?” is hugely important.

The fact that this report outlines the number of activities that Members of your Lordships’ House have attended is incredibly helpful. Even more interesting would be to have a sense of what the other place is doing as well—I realise this is heresy, and that this report was about only the work of the House of Lords EU Committee—because clearly it is engaged in many issues. It is disappointing that there is not more engagement between the two Chambers. Clearly, each Chamber is sovereign. We talk about interparliamentary co-operation in a general sense but there is not a huge amount of exchange between the two Chambers. Although both the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, and the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, talked about the House of Commons, we have not yet found ways of creating effective synergies. At the moment there is still a danger of overlap or duplication—everyone wants to do a report on the role of national parliaments or on EU-Russia—or you get lacunae: between the two Chambers, we do not cover everything. If we could find ways of greater co-operation between the two ends of Westminster, that would be most welcome.

I would like to pick up on a couple of other things in the report. The balance of competences review, which has already been mentioned, ran to very many weighty tomes—I think it was 32 different reports—and the Minister for Europe and the former Minister, my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire, spent many hours going through them. The balance of competences review is mentioned in the annual report with a suggestion of the analysis being important, and there is a criticism of the failure of the Government to produce a synthesis of the reports. An overall analysis is vital if the review is to have an impact on the wider public debate on the UK-EU relationship. I am rather sceptical because the previous Government tried to keep the debate off the agenda rather than putting it on to the agenda, and I think that that was a lost opportunity. There is a wealth of information in the balance of competences review which has tended to go under-reported, with the exception of the expert communications that the committee has achieved, as the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, pointed out: a lot of coverage for the report on the balance of competences review and the frustration of Members of your Lordships’ House at precisely the fact that it had gone under-reported and under-debated. So I congratulate the committee on its work and the traction it has got in the media.

There is a great similarity between committee chairs, who are obviously being told that they need more visibility, and academics, who are told to have impact and to engage more with practitioners. I think most academics working on the European Union would be incredibly grateful to welcome Members of your Lordships’ House to any of our academic conferences on co-operation between national parliaments and other EU institutions. There is clearly an opportunity for co-operation and co-ordination. A report has just gone to the Economic and Social Research Council a year after the project I was involved with was completed, where I was supposed to demonstrate impact so I stressed the fact that my colleagues and I had talked to the EU Committee and vice versa. I hope there is at least a half-life to such engagements between academics and practitioners so that the exchanges can continue.

My final point is about the future. I very much welcome the point that was made in the report about the upcoming referendum and the fact that the committee will be looking at ways of engaging with the renegotiation, considering how best to scrutinise both the renegotiation process and its outcome effectively and proportionately. The noble Lord, Lord Boswell, has suggested that the work will be done objectively and impartially. It is hugely important that such work is done, because it is not done by the media and it is not done effectively by Members of the other place. Academics may try to do it, but the more that it can be done by Members of your Lordships’ House, the better. Although my reading of the report is that it is down to the committee to engage in this way, I suggest that it is down to all Members of your Lordships’ House to ensure that there is a well-informed debate ahead of the referendum.

In light of the comments about following up reports, could there be further work on the eurozone and the potential of Grexit or associated issues which are already having a significant impact on the debate in the UK? This is being pushed particularly by Eurosceptics saying that the way Greece is being treated is clearly a reason for us to campaign for no, but there is a real danger that even among pro-Europeans, people are saying that the EU does not seem to be delivering, that there is no support for a country such as Greece. That is increasing the possibility of a no vote. While your Lordships may need to be objective and impartial on your committee and in its reports, I do not feel the need to be so impartial right now.

[Lord Boswell of Aynho]

Before the noble Baroness sits down, she will want to know that although there is no current representative of the EU Financial Affairs Sub-Committee with us, it held a very interesting evidence session today with some extremely big hitters on the specific current issue of the Greek situation. We are keeping a very close eye on that matter.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

I am very grateful for that. I was drawing towards my final point, so I shall not detain your Lordships any further.

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[Lord Boswell of Aynho]

My Lords, in conclusion, this has been a fascinating and constructive debate. I thank all those who have participated, including the Minister for her comments and her positive tone. I also thank noble Lords for the extremely generous and somewhat unmerited tributes that have been paid to my own involvement in this. If I accept them, I do so entirely in the name of the committee and all those who have worked so hard. If we have been vitiated at all, it is an endemic problem in that we do not always get those of the sceptical tendency to come and join in. However, they remain welcome, because there is no future in putting your head in the sand and resisting a challenge. We have to face and answer those challenges where they occur.

I will depart from my normal practice of not thanking individual members, because that is self-evident. To select one, if I may, without being invidious, I will mention the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, not only because she leads the Energy and Environment Sub-Committee with such distinction, as others have said, but because she has been very much directly involved in the path-breaking work on food waste and how it should be avoided, and we are taking that forward into the wider European agenda. However, I am sure she will feel that that is only exemplary of the work of the other sub-committees.

In my own office I look at more than 40 years of annual reports and at the remarkable wisdom of those who set up the structure in the 1970s, when we joined the European Union, providing for detailed, specialist scrutiny in sub-committees under the umbrella of an overall EU Select Committee, which enables us both to be specialists and generalists, and to draw those lessons together. That has been so valuable in the way it has worked.

In that context—I will reply only briefly to some points raised—I will say a word or two about relations with the scrutiny committee in another place. I assure noble Lords that it is good; at a personal level it is excellent. It occurred to me at one point, when the chairman of the other committee was being referred to—his appointment may or may not take place very shortly—that we had both played cricket in Corfu 50 years ago. That arose not because we were travelling to a cricket match but because we were travelling to a Greek parliamentary gathering on the Greek coast. We work well but, much more seriously, there is a huge interchange at professional and official level the whole time. That works extremely well and applies also to government departments. When, frankly, we beat the Government up on particular issues and failures of scrutiny process or other difficulties, we should all remember that that is the exception rather than the rule. It is a job that we have to do, but it sits on top of a great deal of constructive work. I also pay tribute to the work of the national parliament representatives in Brussels, who, again, work very well, because they are both located within the official structure and work very closely with officials there. We are always grateful, as indeed we were last week, for our exchanges with the official representation within Brussels, which is of such high quality and needs to be, given the challenges ahead.

I will also single out another area with regard to personalities—namely, our relationship with the European Parliament, which has been referred to, and other national parliaments. In putting forward these ideas regarding the green card, I have been at great pains, but rightly so, to acknowledge the role that has been played by other national parliaments. We did not start this, but we have somehow found ourselves in the driving seat, not by assassination, execution or rotation, but simply because people have had to move on to other responsibilities, including ministerial ones. However, it does not work if you go on an ego trip, saying how good we are and how nobody else counts. Equally, it would be unwise indeed and would be fruitless if we were to see ourselves as in any way in enmity or tension with the European Parliament. I can report to the Committee that I had an extremely positive and constructive meeting with President Schulz only last week. I think we are beginning to understand how we can do more together than if we put ourselves at enmity.

Very briefly, in winding this up, I say first that I am very conscious of the honour that is bestowed on me by the House by my appointment as one of its officers, which is the way the structure works. All those involved in Select Committee work will remember their obligations to this House, which creates them and provides the vehicle for these extraordinary, interesting developments and the inquiries and the scrutiny that we do. We need to bear in mind that obligation. We need to be self-critical about it and make sure that we do it properly.

What has come out—it has been touched on by a number of contributors today—is that there is a wider obligation, albeit that we do not have a direct democratic mandate. Nevertheless we have what might be called a democratic obligation to the citizens of the United Kingdom, particularly in a time of considerable test or responsibility in a referendum. The challenges I conclude on in terms of our committee are, first—and it applies to the Government, other national parliaments and our Parliament—that it is quite easy to say we are in favour of an enhanced role for national parliaments, but you have to think long and hard about how you are going to effect that and how you are going to work with others to make sure it takes place in a way that is helpful to the process of European reform rather than otherwise.

Secondly, and I think this is the cardinal point, I am tempted to quote “If”:

“If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs”.

We are going to have a period of stress, comment, pseudo-comment, excitement, doubt and perplexity, and we are going to ask the electorate a big ask to make a mature decision. I think that in a modest way our committee may, by continuing to fly the flag of objectivity, scrutiny, and fair comment, contribute to the education of people in that process, and so we will do our best.

Motion agreed.