Criminal Justice and Data Protection (Protocol No. 36) Regulations 2014

Lord Stoddart of Swindon Excerpts

Monday 17th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharkey (LD)]

My Lords, I note that the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Bates, has been in his place since 3 pm this afternoon and that he came to this debate straight from the Second Reading of the Modern Slavery Bill. In the circumstances, he might wonder whether the definition of slavery is quite comprehensive enough.

This House has debated the Protocol 36 imbroglio many times and I do not want to revisit all the arguments made in these debates, but I want to emphasise a few points, and I want to comment on the Motions before us and to ask the Minister a couple of questions.

The Government are proposing to opt back in to the 35 measures set out in Command Paper 8897. As I said in our last debate on the subject, I very much support rejoining these measures, especially the improved European arrest warrant. The Government have chosen these rejoin measures very well, although of course they should not have had to choose at all. None of the measures that the Government are choosing not to rejoin is at all harmful to the United Kingdom’s interests. By deciding to abandon some measures and keep others, the Government have wasted their own and parliamentary time. They have unnecessarily spent political capital negotiating all this with the Council and the Commission. By trying to keep the number of rejoins low, they have rejected, at the very least, four perfectly good and valuable measures. The fact is that, very regrettably, the Government have been at best extremely clumsy in the way they have treated Parliament throughout the entire Protocol 36 debate. Others today and in previous debates have listed the delays, the absence of Explanatory Memoranda and the unsatisfactorily worded Motions.

The letter of last Wednesday from the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, notes the Government’s failure to adhere to the commitments they have made to Parliament on this matter. As he says, the Government have persisted to the very end in presenting this House with a deeply unsatisfactory and illogical Motion. The government Motion asks the House to approve the draft regulations transposing 11 measures into UK law. Ten of these are among the 35 measures that the Government are seeking to opt back in to. The Commission has advised that they need to be transposed now if we are going to be able to opt back in to them.

But what of the other 25 measures? The government Motion says that by agreeing to the transposition of 11 measures we endorse the formal application to rejoin all 35. Why do it this way? Why make endorsement of the 35 simply consequential on agreeing to transposition of 11 measures, one of which is not even a Protocol 36 measure? If it was an attempt to avoid discussion of the European arrest warrant then it has clearly failed to do that, as has again been demonstrated tonight.

I entirely agree with the conclusions of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, on this matter. It is a profoundly unsatisfactory approach to parliamentary scrutiny and oversight. The approach also raises some questions. The Government are seeking to rejoin 35 measures, 29 of which are non-Schengen. This means that the Commission is obliged to approve our application if the package is coherent and practicable. It seems clear that, provided we transpose 10 measures into UK law, that will be the case. However, that leaves six non-Schengen measures. Here, it is the Council who must decide to allow rejoin or not.

There are some confusing and worrying signals. The Minister has already mentioned Spain. The Times reported last Friday that Spain had forced a concession from the Government on the Prüm decisions. The article said that the Home Secretary, to secure Spain’s agreement to the rejoins, agreed to run a small-scale Prüm pilot. The article went on to list expressions of outrage at this agreement from Tory Eurosceptic MPs. I was surprised by this—not by the expressions of outrage so much but because I had thought, as I said in a debate on Protocol 36 on 17 July, that the Government had already committed to running a small-scale Prüm pilot anyway. I had thought that this was on the Government’s own unforced initiative. Perhaps the Minister can tell the House whether Spain, as the Times reported, had in fact demanded this concession.

Perhaps the Minister can also tell the House whether Spain, as it is rumoured, has used Gibraltar as a reason for raising objections to the opt back in. Is it just Spain? Can the Minister say if other member states have forced concessions from us in our negotiations to rejoin the six non-Schengen measures? It is worth bearing in mind that no concessions of any kind would have been necessary had we not decided to exercise, quite unnecessarily, the block opt-out. I very much hope that the Motion tonight will be the end of this sorry saga, at least in your Lordships’ House. I hope that it will allow the Government to spend their time on more productive and substantive conversations with our partners in the European Union.

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, I shall be very brief and begin with a declaration that I always make when I speak about European Union matters: I was never in favour of joining the EEC or the Common Market, as it then was, and I am now in favour of getting out as soon as we possibly can. The House will understand that I cannot support the regulations. I do not think they should be made and we should not be part of the European construct.

What I do want to say, and the reason I have risen to my feet, is to support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell. If he puts it to a vote, I shall, of course, vote for it. I really am ashamed of the Government and the way in which they have handled this whole issue. These regulations were put before the House of Commons, which expected to have a long debate on them, and if possible, to discuss individual matters contained within them. They were so disappointing that the Speaker reprimanded the Government on the way in which they handled the matter, and the House itself was completely and utterly outraged. There was chaos in the House of Commons. The Government have almost done the same here—of course, in a much more polite way. They put up a Second Reading debate with 32 speakers, interspersed with a Statement which took about an hour, before the debate on the regulations. The result is that we reached this very important debate at a quarter to nine.

As has already been pointed out on the opposition Benches, that is simply not good enough. I object very much to Parliament being treated in that sort of way. I hope they will take a lesson from the way they have handled this, and the way in which the debate has been interspersed with criticism from the opposition Benches, to ensure that when important matters of this sort are discussed in future, the House will have adequate time before 10 pm.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Faulks]

My noble friend is, of course, quite right to ask me to qualify that. I should say that there is nothing more for Parliament to do. I understand that there may or may not be a debate in relation to the European arrest warrant in the House of Commons.

I will now deal with what happened in the House of Commons. It forms part of the concern of my noble friend Lord Boswell. I came back from China this weekend, where I had been discussing the rule of law issues which, as my noble friend Lord Lamont said, are very much a matter of priority for this country. On the flight back, I had the opportunity of reading the debate in the House of Commons; it was not an edifying experience. The expectation was that the debate would focus on the European arrest warrant, but that was not one of the measures that required any legislative action, so it was not within the scope of the Motion to approve the statutory instrument.

The Home Secretary, my right honourable friend Theresa May, indicated that the debate could concern itself by “proxy” with the European arrest warrant. The party opposite would have none of this and there ensued a bad-tempered and rather uninformative debate that eventually resulted, after three votes, in the statutory instrument—the subject of the Motion—being approved and the European arrest warrant not being fully debated. This did not reflect well on Parliament. I am glad to say, albeit by an amendment, your Lordships’ House does not have the procedural impediments that the House of Commons has, and all 35 measures, insofar as it was necessary, could be debated and, indeed, have been.

The European arrest warrant has been the subject of debate—

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

The Minister said that the debate became a bad one because of the behaviour of the Opposition in the House of Commons. Surely I am right in believing that the Government were reprimanded by the Speaker, and that is something quite different. It seems to me that he has made an allegation against the Opposition that really is not true.

[Lord Faulks]

I am certainly not in a position to criticise the Speaker; it would be entirely improper for me to do so. I am entitled to comment on what transpired in the House of Commons. I did not acquit anybody of contributing to what was a thoroughly uninformative debate. The position, as far as the Opposition were concerned, was that the shadow Home Secretary felt that the scope of the debate did not permit her to discuss the European arrest warrant, and that was the view of many in the House of Commons. The Speaker gave the observations that he did, but I do not think that it is appropriate for me to criticise him or not.

The shadow Home Secretary was also asked during the debate whether the party opposite would have exercised the opt-out—and, if so, which measures it would have opted into. Her response was, “Nice try”, so I am not sure that that was a particularly dignified response to what was a serious question.