European Union Committee: 2012-13 (EUC Report)

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, this is a very good and very necessary time for the House to debate the work of its EU Select Committee during the previous Session. Whatever view one takes of the future role of the EU, and of the UK’s role within it, it is surely a debate worth having ahead of what is likely to become an exceptionally intense period of debate about the UK’s continued membership of that Union.

Moreover, it is a time when the role of national parliaments in shaping and influencing EU legislation is coming into sharper focus than ever before. As the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, mentioned in his contribution to this debate, the Select Committee is on the verge of undertaking an inquiry into the role of national parliaments. I suggest that we need to subject our own performance to the very closest scrutiny. I welcome particularly the contribution of our distinguished and effective chair during the period in question, the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, who moved this debate. He has made a major contribution over the period since he took up the chairmanship and I am convinced that he will continue to do so.

This debate also marks the end of the first Session after the reduction in the number of EU sub-committees, to which several previous speakers have referred. The number of sub-committees, which conduct the majority of the Select Committee’s business, was reduced from seven to six. This allowed the House to create new committee activities in other policy areas. While I, like many others, was rather unhappy with that decision, we have nevertheless done our best to make it work. The abolition of Sub-Committee G resulted in the reallocation of its remit among the remaining sub-committees, my own included, expanding their respective workloads accordingly. Despite that, the six sub-committees have taken on and discharged their new roles effectively, as is being highlighted in the contributions to this debate. However, I join the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, in saying that I think that it would be a gross error if any attempt were made to reduce further the number of sub-committees. The elastic is being stretched pretty tight and the burden on our extremely able staff has become greater in the past year. It would be frankly irresponsible to increase it further.

I will focus first on the work of the Sub-Committee on Home Affairs, Health and Education, which I have the honour to chair, and to pay tribute to its members both past and present, some of whom are here today, for their hard work and effective contributions. During the period in question, the sub-committee produced two major thematic reports, one on the EU’s global approach to migration and mobility, normally known as the GAMM, of which more later, and one on the UK’s 2014 justice and home affairs block opt-out decision, which, as the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, indicated, I will say a bit about.

This report was produced jointly with the Sub-Committee on Justice, Institutions and Consumer Protection, first under the able chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, and now under the chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Corston. Incidentally, joint work by two sub-committees of the sort that we did—every single one of our meetings and all our evidence sessions were held jointly—is an extremely unusual occurrence and is not without its logistical difficulties. I believe that its success in this instance is a testament to the flexibility and adaptability of the system and, above all, to the willingness of the members of the two sub-committees to work together as a single team. I must mention that the report that we adopted, which I think was quite influential and will continue to be so, was adopted by unanimity—by people from all three main parties and from none. This was certainly something of an achievement. That joint report appeared in April of this year. We recently reopened the inquiry following the Home Secretary’s Statement of 9 July. A supplementary report to the House will be produced by the end of October, as the Government have proposed.

A third thematic report, on the EU’s next five-year justice and home affairs programme—likely to be known as the Rome programme as it is likely to be adopted under the Italian presidency in the second half of 2014—was announced by the committee yesterday. However, as this deals with matters falling within the present Session, I will make no further reference to it in this debate.

With respect to the report The EU’s Global Approach to Migration and Mobility—the GAMM—when the sub-committee conducted its inquiry into this matter, it was conscious that debates about migration, like migration itself, are not new. However, recently the tone has sharpened and there is a risk that a rational and measured discussion of complex issues will be drowned out by cries of populist outrage, riding on the back of stress caused by the recession.

Our report sought to avoid falling into that trap. The committee’s view was that, given the current and prospective demographic challenges facing Europe, member states, in particular those with skills shortages, will need to be flexible in the operation of legal migration from third countries in order to secure the economic growth and competitiveness that they desperately need. At the same time, we also recognise, rightly in my view, that member states retain the primary decision-making responsibilities in this area, including determining the number of third-country migrants they choose to admit to their territory. We did not suggest that there should be any change to that, and nor did any of our interlocutors, including the Commission and the European Parliament.

The report also focused on a specifically UK policy choice: the Government’s inclusion of international students in their current policy objective of reducing net migration to the UK by 2015 to the tens of thousands per year. My committee was one of five Select Committees of the Lords and Commons, the chairs of which wrote to the Prime Minister last January to argue that it made no sense at all to include genuine international students within the public policy scope of the Government’s immigration policy, and that by so doing the Government were risking serious damage to what is, after all, one of the UK’s most valuable, successful and vibrant invisible exports. I have not yet heard a single convincing argument in support of that policy, and I ask the Minister to address this matter when he winds up the debate.

I agree that yesterday’s announcement of an international education strategy by the Minister for Science and the Business Secretary was a step in the right direction. However, a good deal more than warm words will be needed if the higher education sector’s contribution to our involvement in the global race is not to be undermined by the Government’s immigration policy. I noted that the Secretary of State for Business, in an interview at the weekend, said what I believe: namely, that regarding students as immigrants is absurd.

I return to the important matter of the block opt-out. I will not revisit the complex arguments for and against it, nor delve into the byzantine complexity of the issue’s component parts, which the House had ample opportunity to debate as recently as 23 July, and will no doubt return to again before the end of the Session. Instead, I will focus on the process. On parliamentary engagement and handling, the Government’s approach to the opt-out decision has thus far been notable in a number of respects—but, alas, for all wrong reasons. Since the Home Secretary made her initial statement to Parliament about the matter last October, the committee has been persistently denied official information to aid its scrutiny of this important matter. Deadlines have continually slipped, and attempts to elucidate a coherent government position and rationale have proved elusive.

As noble Lords will be aware, the situation finally improved only on 9 July, when the Home Secretary made a further Statement about the Government’s intentions in this area. However, any feeling of welcome was again undermined by the extraordinarily short period allowed to this House before we were asked to debate and vote on exercising the opt-out. I admit that we were allowed a bit longer than the House of Commons, but not much. That was compounded by the Government’s decision to respond to the committee’s April report more than a month late, and only hours before the debate that took place on 23 July. I hope that the Minister will give an assurance of more punctilious behaviour in the future handling of this matter. I ask him to undertake in particular to keep the House regularly informed of the progress of negotiations with the Commission and the other member states once they formally begin in early November.

In addition to these two major inquiries, my sub-committee also conducted enhanced scrutiny of the Commission’s proposal for a revised tobacco products directive. This involved taking oral evidence from pro and anti-smoking organisations and from Public Health Minister Anna Soubry MP, as well as receiving a large volume of written evidence. While public debate in the UK has focused on the contentious matter of plain packaging, I remind the House that provision for this does not feature in the proposed directive. It will be left as a matter for individual member states to decide.

The output of the process of enhanced scrutiny was a detailed and well received letter to the Minister, outlining the sub-committee’s position on the proposal, which was broadly supportive. This work has been followed up in the current Session with another round of enhanced scrutiny of the Commission’s related proposal for an EU cigarette-smuggling strategy, on which oral evidence has been heard from officials at the EU’s anti-fraud agency, OLAF, and at Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. I will say, in advance of our taking that further, that what the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, said about her sub-committee’s inquiry into OLAF showed again how difficult it is to co-ordinate all parts of the British Government that have an input into this area. I am sure that we will address that when we write to Ministers after the recess.

In conclusion, I turn briefly to a matter that falls outside the purview of my sub-committee, and which relates to the Government’s balance of competences review—a matter dear to the heart of the Minister who will reply to this debate. While the EU Committee as a whole, and its sub-committees, have not engaged directly with this review, my sub-committee has made recommendations relevant to the review in both its recent reports: the one on the GAMM and the one on the block opt-out. It expects these to be taken into account by the review’s current second semester, which will include a report on free movement, which was covered in our GAMM report, and in the forthcoming third semester, which will include a report on policing and criminal justice. I hope that those will both be taken on board, and I hope that the Minister will give an assurance that that will be done.

On free movement, the committee’s GAMM report, which I discussed earlier, concluded that the free movement of persons is fundamental to the structure of the EU and is an integral part of the single market, with revision of its terms in the treaty being neither desirable nor feasible. The logic of producing the review’s report on police and criminal justice matters after the Government had made their decision to opt out of a number of existing pre-Lisbon policing and criminal justice measures totally eludes me. After all, both the block opt-out decision and the decision to seek to rejoin 35 measures are precisely designed to determine the balance of competences in this area—so why on earth did we not conduct the review before attempting to take the decision?

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Advocates-General. The question of more judges is now about to come up.

On the question of students and migration, I will write to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. However, I will say now that the government line is that students who stay here for three to four years are not necessarily temporary visitors. That is one reason why the question of what role they play in the statistics is important. As the father of a student who went to the United States seven years ago and who I hope will come back to the United Kingdom one day, I am very conscious of the tensions.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

I would like to save the Minister from sending an unnecessary letter in the Recess. This is not about statistics. I have said it an awful lot of times. Others, including the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, in the debate that he initiated, also said it. It is about government policy and the impact of that policy on immigration and on our higher education sector. That was what the senior member of his party who is a member of the Cabinet referred to. I ask him to send me a letter not about statistics but about how the Government will give effect to the international education strategy that was put out by David Willetts yesterday and which, I am afraid, is not totally consistent with the Government’s immigration policy.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I guarantee that I will look at the strategy of the Minister for higher education and will consult further.

The noble Lord, Lord Bowness, asked about a Eurojust opt-in. The Government are now consulting on the new Eurojust proposal, which was published on 17 July as part of a package, alongside a proposal for a European public prosecutor’s office. We have been clear that the UK will not participate in the establishment of a European public prosecutor’s office, so we are now considering how to respond to that.

One thing that I hope the committee will focus on in the coming year is the area of European data protection. This applies to domestic legislation in Britain—we may have a data-sharing Bill in the next Session—and applies also at European level. When it comes to negotiation with the United States, data protection and data-sharing are becoming—as we all know and see from the German elections—a highly sensitive area in which the expertise and expert contribution of the Lords European Union Committee could be extremely valuable. A number of noble Lords have talked about democratic accountability—

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[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt again, but I have to tell the noble Lord that the Select Committee did, in fact, recommend that the Government opt in to the data protection directive currently under negotiation in Brussels. Mirabile dictum, the Government did opt in.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the final shape of the data protection directive is by no means clear. We are a very long way from a final text. I merely wish to insist that it needs to be kept very well under review.

I move on to democratic accountability. The role of national parliaments and closer co-operation among national parliaments, of the sort that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and others talked about, is very much a direction in which we should be moving. The yellow card mechanism is developing. I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Howell, that it is not a workable mechanism. Closer co-operation between national parliaments; better use of the Brussels office, which we have and share with others; rapid provision of Explanatory Memorandums; and, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, also said, closer co-operation with British Members of the European Parliament should help us demonstrate to our publics that we are actively engaged in scrutinising the necessary involvement of the United Kingdom in a whole range of regulations at the European level, but also to make sure that we are feeding into the Brussels bubble the active concerns about subsidiarity that we and many other publics have.

This has been a very wide debate, and I simply want to end by pointing out that Her Majesty’s Government are committed to staying within a reformed European Union. We are working with others to promote that agenda. I was very pleased yesterday to read from the Foreign Office a number of telegrams about the positive reaction of other member Governments to the first balance of competences papers. We are already talking to a number of other Governments about how we might share an agenda for reform. That, I hope, has the support of all members of party and non-party groups in this House. I very much look forward to the further valuable contributions that the European Union Committee of this House will continue to make. I will do my utmost within government to ensure that members of the Government—even the Treasury—co-operate as fully and as promptly as possible with the continuing of the committee.