EU Budget Surcharge

Lord Davies of Oldham Excerpts

Monday 10th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)]

My Lords, I genuinely feel sorry for the noble Lord opposite. In 10 years or so of speaking from that Dispatch Box, I now and again had awkward cases to argue but I never had a completely bankrupt one, such as the case that the noble Lord is trying to put forward. If the Chancellor had got such a good deal, why did he not go to the other place and make a Statement today instead of being dragged there by my right honourable friend the shadow Chancellor in order to answer some questions that have arisen around this issue?

Is it not clear that the Chancellor failed to reduce the UK’s net contribution by a single penny? The analogy that has been used widely is “smoke and mirrors”. I cannot see much through smoke and at the age of 75 I do not much like what I see in the mirror. I certainly do not like the Government’s smoke and mirrors on such a significant issue as this sum. What it all revolved around is the fact which the Government seek continually to deny—that they had omitted to identify the rebate to which we were entitled, a rebate that the Commission has made abundantly clear was never in the slightest doubt. On all sides, it has been made absolutely clear that Britain was going to get the rebate, and the saving that the Chancellor has made was achieved by subtracting from the bill he was presented with the rebate to which we were entitled. What a story.

[Lord Deighton]

I should just like to point out that what we have seen in the past few days is complete clarification of a situation. The reality is that the net payment is £850 million. Noble Lords may understand the situation better than me but until that point everyone assumed that the payment was £1.7 billion. The rebate was not at all clear. What officials spent the past two weeks doing was clarifying that the rebate would be available in a size that has effectively halved our payments. There are also no smoke and mirrors about the fact that the payment has now been delayed—it is in two stages. We have brought the rebate forward so that it offsets the notional second half of the payment. What we have introduced in the past few days is complete and utter clarity on the arrangement in hand.