European Union Committee: 2012-13 (EUC Report)

Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, I declare my membership of Sub-Committee A, which handles economic and financial issues in the European Union. I have been on that sub-committee for only two months and can take no credit whatever for the fine reports that my noble friend Lord Harrison has outlined. I pay tribute to him as a very effective chairman of that committee. The reports have received a good response—not just here but on the continent—and have been acknowledged by the Government as having contained early warnings, which unfortunately in many cases they decided not to take. Like others, I pay tribute to the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell. In the two months that I have been a part of the system, as it were, I have seen that he provides extremely vigorous and effective leadership to this very important structure.

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bowness. In the debate we had last week on justice and home affairs, I paid tribute to the distinguished report that he, jointly with the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, produced on the subject and which was the background to that debate. That is where I want to start because we had the most extraordinary debate last week from which it was absolutely clear that the Government had been faced with 135, or thereabouts, potential home affairs and justice measures. They looked at them all very carefully and found that not one of them was against the national interest. Some were otiose and some were obsolete, but none of them was harmful. The Government selected the 35 measures which were clearly the most valuable to us, some of which were absolutely vital to the conduct of justice in this country. They decided that we could not avoid being a part of these measures without serious damage to the country and so they decided to opt back into them.

However, they opted out of the remainder when it was not logical to do so. There was no harm in the remainder, which added up to a positive element for the national interest on the Government’s own assessment. During the debate last week I read out several quotations from the Government’s own documents on the subject. There is no doubt that the whole of the 135 measures contains greater value than simply the 35, and yet the Government decided not to opt back into about 100 of them. There was no logical reason behind that decision. What is more, it has set at risk our getting back into the 35 measures because there are always doubts about these complicated procedures and the Government are incurring additional, unnecessary administrative and other costs through this complicated procedure—not to mention the costs in terms of good will. We are exasperating our partners by this extraordinary and utterly irrational conduct.

We all know that the reason for it is that the Government had to find a sop to give to their Eurosceptics. The Tory Party is desperately worried about people voting UKIP and wants to draw back into its fold the UKIP voters. We all know what the reasons are—they are pretty squalid party politics—and they have made it impossible for the Government to come to what any rational human being would have seen as the right functional decision to take in this case.

A situation in this country where the Government cannot take rational decisions on a European subject is a very serious matter. The question arises as to what we do and to whom we look for some kind of dispassionate and thorough cost-benefit analysis of measures that come forward in an EU context so that we can be reasonably confident that we are doing the right job for the British public in the decisions that we take. There is no better or other obvious mechanism than the committee structure we have in this place. We all know that the House of Commons does not engage in a systematic way in these deep and thorough reports on European legislative proposals. We have this extremely valuable instrument, which is made even more valuable and vital by the circumstances I have just described.

There are other irrationalities. The noble Lord, Lord Bowness, has just referred to the decision to opt out of the European prosecutor’s office proposal even before it was made. That is clearly a party political decision. Was it in the interests of the country? I have no idea. I have not looked at the matter in detail or read the report of the sub-committee but, nevertheless, it is quite clear that the Government did not make a rational decision on this matter. Someone ought to tell the British public about the pluses and minuses for the country as a whole of doing that.

There are other important issues pending. My noble friend Lord Harrison referred to the issue of the European banking union. The Government decided that we should not be part of the European banking union. Is that the right decision? I do not know. I was not on the committee when it reported on that subject. It is clearly a moving feast. It was only a week or two ago that the Commission produced its second directive on the resolution and recovery aspect. It has already produced a directive on the European supervisory mechanism and we hope that it will produce the third element before too long, which is a directive on retail deposit insurance in the European banking union.

This is not a proposal which is entirely clear or concrete, but we shall have to take a decision on it. It is important that we take the right decision. I have no confidence in the ability of the Government to take a dispassionate decision on this matter, any more than on any of the other issues that I have just talked about. It is important that we look at that.

We have already had some evidence that there will be increasing costs to our not being part of the banking union. It will be increasingly difficult to protect our interests. We have had witnesses in my time on the committee over the past two months who have said, in the context of other things, that over the medium or long term it is probably inconsistent with our being the largest financial centre in the European Union for us not to be a part of the banking union. All these things have to be taken very seriously.

Another big issue that it is quite impossible to expect the Government to take a rational view on is the issue of Schengen. At first sight, there must be great advantages to this country joining Schengen—the convenience and amenity for us all in being able to travel without a passport through more than 28 countries, as some non EU members have joined Schengen. The benefit would be particularly great for two very different categories of our citizens: the very poor and some probably rather rich. With regard to the very poor, there are a lot of people in this country who have never travelled abroad. Some get to retirement age and they have still never travelled abroad and have never had a passport. They hope to visit Paris, Italy or see the Alps before the end of their lives and they are going to have only a few hundred pounds at most to finance that trip. Therefore, the cost of a passport is quite a significant factor and deterrent, and we should think about people like that.

At the other end of the income spectrum, there are the international businessmen. These people are incredibly important when it comes to taking business decisions on location—where do you place your corporate headquarters in the EU? There are international businessmen who travel quite a lot and travel outside the EU to places where they need visas. Their passports often have to be with embassies or consulates for the issuing of visas. If they suddenly want to make a trip to Brussels or Frankfurt, they cannot do it. We are one of the very few countries that provide second passports for businessmen who ask for them for that sort of reason. Therefore, that is a significant issue, although perhaps not a vital issue, in terms of business decisions on location and it is something that we all feel strongly about.

There are other arguments about Schengen. One argument for joining would be that it would involve a lot of savings and would relieve the pressure on the border agency. We know the pressures it has been under and the real problems it has been having. The Government say they are interested in making administrative savings. There would certainly be administrative savings there.

The big argument on Schengen is that we are losing hundreds of thousands at least but probably millions of tourists a year. For people from the Far East, China and elsewhere who come to Europe, mostly on organised trips, it is simply not worth the money or the time for the travel agency to apply for a second visa. They apply for a Schengen visa and they offer people a European tour which takes them to Paris, Amsterdam, down the Rhine, and then to Florence, Rome, Madrid and Seville, and they do not come to the United Kingdom at all. They do not come because they have to get an extra visa at extra cost. It is quite clear that we are now talking in terms of hundreds of thousands, but it might be millions, of lost visitors to this country every year as a result of that.

Why do we not join Schengen? On the other side of the argument, some people would say “Good God, you couldn’t possibly do such a thing. You’d have millions of people pouring across the Thracian border into Greece who a day or two later would appear in London, Birmingham and Bradford as illegal immigrants here”. We have to think about that. Is it true that the French, Germans and the Dutch have a much worse problem controlling illegal immigration than we do? Is it true that sophisticated countries such as Switzerland and Norway, which are not members of the EU, have actually chosen to join Schengen when it is so hopeless at actually filtering people through the common external frontier? We need at least to ask that sort of question.

Some people will say “It’s a principle that you must always control your frontiers. You have only your own citizens controlling the frontier”. That cannot be an absolute principle because we have officials in the Republic of Ireland taking decisions about who should come into the United Kingdom. It is certainly not an absolute principle. Some will say that it is all to do with sovereignty. People get very excited about sovereignty. Before 1914 you could go to Victoria station and buy yourself a ticket to Paris, Berlin, Rome or Madrid and go without a passport. It was not until you got to the Russian frontier, the frontier of the Russian empire, that you had to produce a passport. Whatever the nations of Europe were suffering from before 1914, I do not think that it was an insufficiency of sovereignty.

All of these arguments need to be probed. Who is going to look at them? Not the Government. If you suggested joining Schengen the Eurosceptics would go berserk. They would go barmy and get hysterical. The Eurosceptic press—the Murdoch press and the Rothermere press—would get completely hysterical as well. There is no chance of a cool, calm, measured and calculated cost-benefit analysis being done by the Government on a subject like that. It is all the more important that we have instruments of the kind we do in the form of committees in this House which are able to give the country some of that element of analysis of these issues.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard. A lifetime at the diplomatic coalface has given him analysis and perspective that I cannot hope to match, and I listened with great interest to his suggestions.

I am just an ordinary member, now of Sub-Committee E and previously of Sub-Committee F. This has given me the opportunity to study in detail four very different chairmen: my noble friends Lord Jopling and Lord Bowness, the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, and, previously, the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. Each has been extremely effective and has been able to corral their potentially recalcitrant flocks with humour and good sense. It has been a pleasure to serve under them all. The other group to whom I add my thanks are the clerks, who do such terrific preparatory work and manage to turn the meanderings of the committees into a coherent whole. In my view, the country and the House owe a great debt of gratitude to both these groups.

As a member of Sub-Committee E, I served on the joint Select Committee considering the opt-out decision but I am not proposing to cover that issue now. The House has debated it at length and I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Judd and Lord Hannay, that the delivery of the Government’s response was unacceptably late. However, we have had a good chew of that and candidly, if I am honest, I am suffering a bit from opt-out or opt-in fatigue, at least for the time being. We will no doubt return to that issue in the autumn.

Instead, I will focus first on another of Sub-Committee E’s reports: that on The Fight against Fraud on the EU’s Finances. The evidence that the sub-committee received indicated that the official figure of fraud—which, as we have been told, was £404 million—was a woeful underestimate and that the real figure could be as much as 12 times higher: around £5 billion.

We also received evidence that OLAF, the European agency charged with fighting fraud, did not always receive the full-hearted national co-operation that it deserved. In these circumstances, the Government’s participation in our inquiry, or perhaps I should say their non-participation, is disappointing. Further, the Government’s response to the sub-committee’s report, received only recently, did not seek to rebut the sub-committee’s suggestion that EU fraud could be as high as £5 billion, merely recording, as the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, said, that it was not a figure that they recognised. This smacks of a good deal of complacency. Fraud is theft—theft from the taxpayer, whose interests every Government in the EU ought to be protecting. Moreover, fraud, if not investigated and prosecuted with vigour, has an unhappy habit of spreading. I hope for a more vigorous approach by the Government on this topic in future.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. Does he agree that, given the importance of fraud—I think that the whole House will be with him on everything that he said on that—it might have been a good idea if the Government had decided to join in with the initiative of setting up a European prosecutor’s office with a specific remit of pursuing fraud cases in the EU?

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

As always, the noble Lord, Lord Davies, has a seductive tone to his voice, but of course that is a completely different issue. We are trying to ensure that OLAF, which is the European fraud investigative committee, operates effectively. That is what we need to concentrate on first rather than, as my noble friend Lord Howell has said, superimposing yet another body that will be out of touch with the reality on the ground.

I shall focus the rest of my remarks on Chapter 10, the future look. I have written to the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, to give him some advance warning of what I wish to raise and what I would like the EU Committee to look at in future: the implications for this country of the continued free movement of labour within the EU—one of the pillars, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, firmly pointed out, on which the whole EU structure rests. However, I fear that the UK, uniquely, is already facing some strains from this free movement, strains that I fear will almost certainly become more severe and increase over the next 10 to 20 years.

A couple of figures may help to illustrate the point. England, not the United Kingdom, has now overtaken the Netherlands as Europe’s most densely populated country, with some 400 people per square kilometre. By comparison, France has 125 people per square kilometre, which is one-third or one-quarter as densely populated, and Germany has 260 per square kilometre—about two-thirds as populated. That is today, but over the next 15 years to 2027, if you believe the mid-projection by the Office for National Statistics, the UK’s population—here I am talking about the UK, not England—will increase by 7 million people, from 63 million today to 70 million then. What does this mean in comparable statistics? Last year, the UK’s population grew by just short of 1,100 people per day—a small village every week; a parliamentary constituency every three months or so. By contrast, Italy’s, France’s and Germany’s populations are falling, and on present projections the UK will overtake Germany to become the most populous country in Europe by the early 2030s.

Should we worry about this? Before answering that question, one needs to make it clear that race, colour and creed play no part in the debate. Indeed the social strains, if social strains there be, are likely to be felt most harshly in the minority communities. So should we worry? Physically, we can certainly fit the people in. Bangladesh has 1,400 people per square kilometre compared to England’s 400. However, it will be up to wiser minds than mine as to whether we wish to reproduce Bangladeshi living conditions in the UK.

Concerns revolve around two specific issues. First, there is the impact on our environment—the pressure on the green belt around our cities, the impact on our countryside, especially in the south-east, and so forth. These are important to me but are not the critical issues. For me, the critical issue is the potential crowding out of our native-born population—please note that I say, and I mean, “native-born”; that is not another word for white but, rather, means anyone and everyone who was born here—and the consequences of that crowding-out on our social structure. If the default option for British industry and commerce is to call for more immigration as opposed to upskilling our own population, we run the risk of creating a sullen, disconnected, unemployed and in due course no doubt unemployable underclass—an underclass that, in the minority communities, may well find extremist activities attractive. That is not good for us as a country or as taxpayers.

I shall give the House a practical example. I have a house on the Shropshire/Herefordshire border. As I speak here today, there are about 4,000 people from eastern Europe picking fruit. They are here legally, they behave well, they work hard and at the end of the season all, or at least most, of them will go home. However, there are unemployed locals in Herefordshire and south Shropshire. Talk to the fruit farmers and they will tell you that the locals will not work hard enough, are not reliable and turn up once and do not come again. Talk to the locals and they will tell you that they cannot get the farmers to recruit them because they prefer to recruit in bulk from eastern Europe in the hundreds. Where does the truth lie? I have no idea, but there is an issue here that at some point we have to address.

An argument often advanced for increasing immigration is the need to provide additional people to look after, and compensate for, our ageing population. This has extremely superficial attractions but it ignores the inexorable laws of ageing and compound interest. Today’s increased number of young people leads inevitably to tomorrow’s increased number of old people, who will in turn require still further increases of young people to compensate. Indeed, it has been calculated that if we wish to keep the same number of workers to pensioners as at present—it is about 3.5 to 1—we will already need an extra 27 million more workers by 2050: a 40% increase in our population.

To conclude, while free movement of labour within the EU is only part of the challenge, it is an important part and one which an EU committee will be uniquely well placed to address because it can do so in the non-partisan, equable, evidence-based way at which it excels and which this subject, above all, demands. I take a fairly hard-nosed approach to this country’s relationship with the EU but I do not doubt that at root it has been of great benefit to the United Kingdom. The 900,000 or so graves in France and Belgium are mute witnesses to that fact. However, outside the M25 in particular, the apparently inexorable rise in our population is causing concern. We need to reassure any concerned people that Parliament is aware of those concerns and prepared to investigate them fully, no matter how sensitive they may be.

Martin Wolf, the FT economics commentator, wrote:

“Society cannot function without a majority willing to play by the rules, without individuals demonstrating on a minute-by-minute basis their trustworthiness, reliability, courtesy and self-reliance”.

We need to ensure that we do not stretch these qualities to breaking point.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am conscious that I now stand between noble Lords and what the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, called their buckets and spades, although in my case it is my punnet and hoe. I failed to pick rather too many of our raspberries and a large quantity of our blackcurrants last weekend, so I look forward to getting back as soon as possible to provide my wife with them to process.

I declare an interest as a former member of the House of Lords EU Committee and a former chair of one of one of its sub-committees. I had thought that perhaps when I step down from government, it would be very pleasant to sit on the committee again. However, what I have heard today suggests that it is all extremely hard work, which is the last thing my wife would want me to do when I have finished working absurdly hard in government. We appreciate how much extremely valuable work the Lords EU Committee and its sub-committees do. The Government certainly have no intention to reduce the number of sub-committees. I remind Members that the number of sub-committees and the allocation of committee resources in this House is a matter for this House and its authorities, not for the Government.

The committee will have seen the Government’s written response to this report and the Minister for Europe welcomed it.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

On the very important point of the allocation of resources to permit the committees to do their work, we have, of course, recently been subject to reductions in our travel budget. That is bizarre, because the work requires us to keep in close touch with our continental partners and in particular with the institutions in Brussels. Do the Government have a view on the matter of the resources that should be allocated or the reduction in resources that is being imposed on the committees here?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am simply not briefed on that. However, I can assure the noble Lord that as a Minister I travel with Ryanair and easyJet to various places around the outer fringes of the European Union. We also do our best to economise where we can. I remind the noble Lord that this is the leanest Government that Britain has had for many years because we have cut the government car pool very substantially—we have to walk everywhere.

This is a very timely debate. I recall our previous debate on the annual report, which took place rather later than this one, and in the Moses Room, although we are now here in the Chamber. I also recall it because the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, criticised me very sharply on that occasion for not having read every single report that the committee had produced in the previous year. I can assure her that I have read at least the summary of every report that the committee has produced this year.

There are, of course, many examples of the way in which the committee has fed into the Brussels process and the work of other Governments, as well into the debate within Britain. We are concerned at the criticisms that the committee has made of the untimely provision of Explanatory Memoranda, and in particular of the role of the Treasury. We very much take on board what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said about the importance of timeliness in terms of subsidiarity. I will take all the points back, and we will discuss them in the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office and various parliamentary branches of the relevant departments, to make sure that they are fully taken on board. I am an enthusiast for the development of the use of the yellow card mechanism. We have to make sure that we are given all the resources we can manage so that we will be able to use that to its best ability.

I have been heavily involved in the balance of competences review for six months, about which various comments have been made. Perhaps I may stress that those reports were not intended to have policy recommendations at the end. They were intended very much to feed into a better informed debate in the United Kingdom. I hope that the first six reports have done so. I look forward—although perhaps not entirely—to three more rounds of very careful assimilation of a large amount of evidence presented into another collection of reports.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that the balance of competences exercise is very much in parallel to other aspects of what is going on in government. We have welcomed his committee’s report on the justice and home affairs opt-out. The balance of competences exercise is proceeding in parallel with a whole range of other negotiations and the order of reports was drawn up some time ago, with other dimensions in mind.

We are attempting, both within the balance of competences exercise and in the work of this and other committees, to provide space for a reasoned debate within the European Union about our interaction with the European Union. We all recognise that over the next nine to 12 months that debate may be constricted in some ways as we move towards the next European elections. We are also conscious, particularly so over the past week, that the press is not always favourable to a reasoned debate. The Leveson report remarked that in press coverage of the European Union—as with press comment on women, minorities and Muslims—its attitude is that it is quite acceptable to invent stories without any source whatever.

I was very struck to see this story in the Mail the other day:

“Revealed: The shadowy lobbyists waging war to keep Britain in Europe”,

I read it with great interest, only to discover that it was actually talking about British Influence, which is an entirely public body. I think that the Mail had lifted this story from a Eurosceptic blog, which said that British Influence was a deeply dangerous organisation funded by the secretive Bilderberg Group. Oddly enough, the Mail did not include that bit.

I was also quite worried by the article by Peter Oborne in the Telegraph last week, saying that:

“The 1975 referendum was a fair poll in the same sense that the elections due to be held in Zimbabwe next Wednesday will be fair … The sense has lingered that we were hustled, against our will, by an anti-democratic elite, into an organisation whose true aims and nature were hidden from us until too late”.

The BBC, of course, was playing a role in the deceitful agenda.

On Saturday, the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Bruno Waterfield, told us that,

“the European Union is planning to ‘own and operate’ spy drones, surveillance satellites and aircraft”,

under the control of the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, in,

“a major move towards creating an independent EU military body with its own equipment and operations”.

I was therefore very pleased to receive this morning an invitation from King’s College London to a debate in October on how to ensure that we have impartial reporting on the European Union, at which Bruno Waterfield will be one of the speakers.

I say this partly to demonstrate that getting reasoned debate based on evidence about Britain’s involvement in the European Union is not easy and that this committee plays an immensely valuable role in helping to widen that debate. I hope that noble Lords have read the balance of competences review papers so far and I hope that they feel that they have drawn in evidence-based policy with which perhaps to counter the emotion-based policy, the prejudice-based policy and the conspiracy-oriented allegations which so often cloud out rational debate in Britain. All parties must contribute to this effort.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Judd, that I very much look forward to hearing a speech from the Labour leadership comparable to the speech made by the Prime Minister in January. The leader of my party, the Deputy Prime Minister, will make a major speech on the European Union in October. I very much hope that we will hear a constructive Labour contribution to an EU reform agenda that keeps Britain in the European Union. This is what the Prime Minister was talking about, and I confirm to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, that that is what the coalition Government are pursuing, rather than unilateral repatriation intended to lead to an exit, which is what the Telegraph, the Mail and a number of others on the fringes of conventional politics very much want us to pursue.

I turn to various issues that were raised in the debate. The sub-committee on foreign affairs produced a very valuable report on common security and defence policy. I have noted that on scrutiny we have shifted very often from major reports to follow-on reports and continued scrutiny. As we approach the December European Council, which will have European defence very much on its agenda, I trust that the sub-committee will continue to monitor the way in which the British Government and others approach this. As everyone knows, there is a tension between those who are interested in institution building and others who are interested in practical conflict prevention and conflict resolution under that dossier.

Similarly, on banking union, it would be immensely valuable if the sub-committee responsible for that continues to monitor the ongoing debate. Having read its report and various other—mainly German—documents, I think that I understand the various different definitions of banking union that are floating around. However, because there are so many different definitions of banking union—with maximum, minimum et cetera—clearly we need to contribute to the debate. As the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, and others rightly said, we need to think also about where in the debate the interests of Britain and of Britain’s financial centres are at stake.

On the workload of the European Court of Justice, I take on board what has been said. We have now moved on the question of—