European Union

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

My Lords, I am afraid that the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, will now hear the second verse of “Auld Lang Syne”. Before I remark on the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, on his appointment as Chairman of Committees and the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, on his as Principal Deputy Chairman of Committees. However, I support the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, in the amendment that he has put before the House. He has been very persistent in doing so. It is right that the House should hear some alternative views about the European Union. It often does not and should do so more often.

The Select Committee has six sub-committees; it used to have seven but now it has six. However, their very existence shows the power of the European Union over matters relating to this country and how it has encroached on our national life and into the very nooks and crannies of our country.

The Select Committee on the European Union costs £2 million a year, which is not a mean sum. It is absolutely true that the benefits from its discussions, although they are erudite and make easy reading, are nevertheless not influential, so far as this House and Parliament can see, in altering the views and policies of the European Union itself. Decisions are taken in secret so that we do not even know what views are being put forward by the Government, so again we cannot see what influence our own Select Committee has on our own Government.

We spend £2 million on this committee. There is another Select Committee in the House of Commons. It does not do quite the same thing, but I wonder whether it might be worth considering a joint Select Committee of both Houses to scrutinise EU legislation and regulations. That is a matter that might be taken up by the House and the other place at some point in the future. I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I would like to say a few words on this, having been a member of your Lordships’ European Union Committee on two occasions and still currently so. There are many errors of fact in what has been said by the noble Lords, Lord Pearson of Rannoch and Lord Stoddart of Swindon, and others. Our job is to make recommendations to the British Government, and the point about the British Government not telling us what account they have taken of our recommendations is untrue. They are required to do so within two months and they always do so. They state their reaction to every single one of the recommendations. It is also untrue that the Commission does not say what it has done in reply to the recommendations. Every one of the reports is now replied to by the vice-president of the Commission responsible for relations with the national parliaments, and they are all on the website. I wish the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, good reading because there are probably several thousand replies from the Commission that he could usefully read. He might then understand a little better what is done.

My penultimate point is that we have not yet reduced the number of sub-committees to six. We are waiting for the Chairman of Committees to be allowed to put his proposal to us in order to reduce them from seven to six, but we have not yet done so. The last point that I want to make about this is that it does not always seem to be very well understood that the job done by the EU Committee and its sub-committees is that of scrutiny of EU legislation, a job that is done by the whole House on UK legislation. If it is not done properly through the EU Select Committee and its sub-committees, it will not be done at all, and that would be a real loss of influence for this country.

[Lord Tebbit]

My Lords, it verges upon the unbelievable to think, from the description just given to us by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that the bureaucrats of Brussels are waiting in fear of what the sub-committees in this place might say about proposed European legislation and are then devoting thousands of hours to reasoned arguments against it. I suspect that that does not actually happen.

To come back to the clear point, we have before us a proposal that these distinguished and hardworking Members of the House should consider these matters time and time again, even though there is no evidence that anything changes as a result of their consideration and recommendations. That is a fact that has been shown to be so from the answers to PNQs. Either we change what we are doing and do something to draw attention to this so that the Government might get excited about it and act in some way, or we simply say to these distinguished Members of the House, “You are wasting your time. Why not go home and dig the garden? Do something constructive”, or something like that.

These Members are simply wasting their time. If they are wasting their time, as I believe they have been in recent years, it should be brought to the notice of this House by means of a debate so that we can consider what to do about it, one way or the other: either close down the operation or require Her Majesty’s Government to do something effective. The amendment proposed today is one way of getting something moving on that front.