EUC Report: EU External Action Service

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Monday 3rd June 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, I must apologise to the Grand Committee because, for unavoidable personal reasons, I probably have to commit the unpardonable sin of leaving the Committee before the Minister has concluded. I am very sorry about that, but I cannot avoid it. I will be very brief. First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for the work that he has done and for the many reports that this Committee has produced. This again shows the value of the work that our Select Committee does.

Secondly, I join the tributes to the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, for the role that she has played in helping partly to settle the Serbia-Kosovo dispute. I would like to make clear, on behalf of the Labour Party, that we support the External Action Service and that we want to see its role developed, obviously as a supplement to British foreign policy and to magnify that policy’s impact.

The fact is, as the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has explained, that what went before was dysfunctional, and the EAS is a great improvement. There is one point that I would like to ask the Minister about, and that is the role of Britain in this service. I agree with the comments of the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Kerr, about the hope that the Government would not be so reserved in their approach. One of the real worries that I have is about the proportion of British officials working in the EAS. The noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, raised this point. The service gave me figures showing that only 7.6% of the people working in the service are British, as opposed to our 12.5% share of the population. This is particularly true of member state diplomats: British diplomats make up only 2.3% of the numbers in the service as opposed to 4% for France. As a lot of the national diplomats occupy senior positions in policymaking in the service in Brussels, this is a demonstration of a lack of adequate British influence that I would like the Minister to address in his reply.