European Union Committee: 2012-13 (EUC Report)

Lord Maclennan of Rogart Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maclennan of Rogart]

My Lords, I have had the privilege of serving on four sub-committees of the European Union Select Committee. I have listened with great interest to the current chairmen of six of the EU committees describing the work of the current Session, which is of course what this debate is primarily about, but it would be a mistake to follow their lead in going over the detailed business that these committees have engaged in.

However, I would like to say at the beginning how very much I have appreciated the leadership of the chairman of the Select Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Boswell of Aynho, and pay tribute to his fresh thinking about how these committees should work. I also feel it is appropriate to express strong gratitude to the staff who have serviced these committees. They are not large in number and they have to work extraordinarily hard to produce the advice and drafts on which we focus.

The European Union Select Committee is one of the most important functions of the House of Lords. It currently engages, I believe, 74 Members of this House. The noble Lord, Lord Boswell, indicated that Sir John Cunliffe stated how much influence we have brought to bear on Brussels and Governments. I disagree very strongly with the previous speaker, my noble friend Lord Howell, in his summation of the way in which the Union ought to operate by way of co-ordination, rather than the open legislative process and the open parliamentary process that we have. I cannot see how what he has recommended is in the least conformable with democratic thinking in a modern conglomeration of 28 nations. How could the detail be co-ordinated effectively so that the disagreements are properly vented and properly answered and consensus is arrived at? It is not a matter of modern technology; it is a matter of openness that we have to embrace if this Union of ours is to enjoy the support that it deserves having kept this continent at peace for an unprecedented length of time.

I did not mean to divert down that route, but I wanted to indicate my belief that the work of these committees is invaluable in ventilating issues that need to be raised with the Government, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council. There is not much doubt that the work of these committees has made a significant impact. It is unusual for a clash of mighty opposites to occur, such as we had over the opt-out from justice and home affairs. None the less, it ventilated the arguments and enabled many members of the public, who were certainly not as well informed as they might have been, to grasp some of the issues and it got significant coverage in the national press.

I would like to open a thought that is not entirely about the influence that we can have on government, but rather the influence that we might have with the public. It seems to me that because we are doing studies of great depth and importance, and we are engaging with witnesses who are knowledgeable, engaged and interested, we produce significantly sophisticated reports. However, despite getting our message out to many newspapers and some broadcasts—the report talks about 35 million opportunities for people to understand what is being said in dialogue—I none the less think that we might, within our terms of reference, contemplate how we could gain more public understanding of the work that we do and get the public almost to help to promote some of our studies.

We are, of course, engaged largely in scrutiny of decision-making in the process of its being decided, but the third term of reference set out in Appendix 1 to the annual report is:

“To represent the House as appropriate in interparliamentary co-operation within the European Union”.

That is a very broad mandate and we have certainly used it to engage through COSAC and other bilateral meetings with Governments and parliaments of other countries. But it seems to me that that is not enough. We have only two full meetings of COSAC in the course of the year. We do not have as many meetings as we might have with other parliamentary bodies or with our own European parliamentarians—we have three meetings a year in the House of Commons. However, that does not seem to me sufficiently to embrace the public. I should like to speculate and suggest that we might communicate with the public to find out which issues give rise to the greatest concern. A body such as YouGov, chaired by Peter Kellner, the spouse of the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, might be able to identify and prioritise the public’s real concerns and consequently we could engage in a debate. We could have a special meeting open to stakeholders who are particularly exercised by what they understand to be the problem with Europe or the way the Union is moving. We could then include these thoughts in our scrutiny and researches, however unfocused they may be, and we could answer them directly and possibly engage in a continuing dialogue.

The way in which we put out our invitations is very reasonable, but it is nearly always sparked off by a proposal from government or from the European Union. My view is that, if we are to exemplify the effectiveness of our work comprehensibly, we must endeavour to engage more directly with the public.