EU: Personal Data

Lord Lester of Herne Hill Excerpts

Wednesday 20th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who spoke to my Motion. I have two or three brief comments. First, the noble Lord, Lord Lester, opined that the procedure in the House of Commons on this matter was adequate. All I can say is that I have read Hansard as I am sure he has, and that was clearly not the opinion of the chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee, Bill Cash.

A number of noble Lords have said that—

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

I am not clear about the attitude of the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, to parliamentary sovereignty. The other House, the elected Chamber, has voted overwhelmingly in the Government's favour. Why is that not more significant than the view of Mr Cash as chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee?

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

I accept that the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly to opt into this measure, but it was the scrutiny procedure that came under discussion in the House of Commons. Who knows? Perhaps if the scrutiny procedure had been adequate, the result might have been slightly different. Of course I agree that the House of Commons was always going to vote this sort of thing through. That is one of the troubles with our democracy.

A number of noble Lords said that we might as well sign up to all this because if we did not have it we would have to have alternative arrangements. It would all be very complicated and there will be more administration and so forth. I am indebted to a thought on this point from the Open Europe think tank, which is a mildly Eurosceptic organisation. It makes this point, which is important because the noble Lord, Lord Wills, and many noble Lords mentioned it in our debate:

“There are various international agreements in place outside the EU’s legal framework, mostly Council of Europe conventions, including one on extradition, which the UK could continue to use should it cease to apply EU crime and policing law post-2014. Although they do not cover all areas, and are often more cumbersome than the EU measures, the fact that the UK has a fall-back option means there is no need to ‘rush … ’”,

to opt in.