EU: Reform

Lord Harrison Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, this is a coalition Government, and we work as a coalition Government. There is substantial ground in the Government on a multilateral EU reform agenda. I spent three days in Brussels last week and was encouraged to find how much support there was for the sort of reform agenda we are talking about within other Governments and with a number of senior people in the EU institutions themselves.

[Lord Harrison]

My Lords, is it possible for the Minister to be more vague and imprecise about the exact nature of the reforms that the UK would wish to propose within the European Union?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are, of course, following up the PM’s speech with some detailed work under way at present on precisely what our reform agenda should be. I will simply set out that it includes changes in the EU budget. We have already made some progress on that in the multiannual financial framework, but that needs to continue. There will be a stronger role for national Parliaments. The Lisbon treaty allows for that, and we are encouraging our own Parliament and others to work more closely together. An external trade agenda will include in some ways more European action; the Prime Minister, after all, pursued that very thing in his discussions with President Obama in Washington. There will be a deepening of the single market, such as digital single market services. Therefore there is a range of areas, including better regulation and cleaning out some of the dead aspects of the acquis.