European Council

Richard Ottaway Excerpts

Monday 20th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Gentleman talks about grandstanding, but for the past couple of years we were told endlessly that we were going to be isolated in Europe, that we would have no allies in Europe and no friends in Europe, but when we put together an alliance of the three biggest countries in Europe for budget restraint, the first thing he ought to do is stand up and congratulate us.

Let me take the right hon. Gentleman’s three questions in turn. First, on the budget, he talked about some inconvenient facts. Let me give him some inconvenient facts from last year. Last year, when we had a Labour Government, a 3.8% increase was proposed by the European Council and supported by that Government. The European Parliament then came forward with a 9.8% proposed increase, and they split the difference so the budget went up by 6%. That is what happened last year, supported by Labour. The difference between that and what we achieved is hundreds of millions of pounds. That is what this Government’s actions have saved. When it comes to changing positions, I note that in her statement after the European Council the shadow Foreign Secretary said that “Labour voted against” this budget rise “from the beginning”. That is simply not true—Labour MEPs opposed our call for a freeze in the European Parliament.

Secondly, on treaty change, the right hon. Gentleman does not seem to understand that this very limited treaty change is in our interests so we should support it. We should use this opportunity to get rid of the risks of Britain being drawn further into eurozone support in the future. We are liable to that because of the weak actions of his Government before the last election. It is absolutely right that we use our negotiating capital to make sure that Britain is not liable when the new mechanism comes in. What we are doing, once again, is clearing up the mess left by Labour.

The third issue that the right hon. Gentleman raised was the economy. He says that we should call for measures that will achieve greater stability in Europe, but that is exactly what we are doing. Just imagine what stability we would get in Europe if he were sitting at the Council table saying that we should not be bothering with deficit reduction. We would be putting ourselves in the same camp as Ireland, Portugal and other countries.

Finally, the right hon. Gentleman tells me how unhappy my Back Benchers are, but I would swap their unhappiness for that of his Back Benchers any day of the week. I am sure that they will want to remember that important thing at Christmas time—always keep your receipts in case you want to exchange for something bigger.

[Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

As a happy Back Bencher, I congratulate the Prime Minister on winning the budget battle with the European Parliament, where there was clearly no splitting the difference. Enlargement was also on the agenda. On Turkey, does he agree that the problems that many predicted would have occurred by now do not seem to have materialised? However, we still seem to have deadlock, with no new chapters being opened and no progress being made on the Ankara protocol. The General Affairs and External Relations Council said last week that progress is now expected without further delay: how does he see that materialising?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is right that we should push for progress with Turkish accession—and we are. I raised this with the Hungarian Prime Minister when he came to Downing street last week, because Hungary is going to hold the future presidency of the European Union. We have to win the argument in Europe—too many are opposed to Turkish membership. I think that all the arguments are in favour and that we should push this as hard as we can and keep opening those chapters to show that we are doing so in good faith.

NATO Summit

Richard Ottaway Excerpts

Monday 22nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am a little bit more optimistic than the hon. Gentleman. The case today is that Afghanistan ground is forbidden to al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda training camps. Post-2001, there were training camps in Afghanistan, but there is none now because of the action that the allies and the Afghan security forces have taken. The question is this: if the allies withdrew now, would the Afghans be able to sustain that? The answer today is no, but the answer by 2014 should, we believe, be yes. Of course there is a lot more help to be given and a lot more capacity to build, and a lot more troops and police need to be trained up, but we can see some success already, because the number of plots that we face from that part of the world has declined, partly because of the action we have taken.

[Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

I congratulate the Prime Minister on the positive outcome of the summit and, in particular, on the fact that the United States has moved away from 2011 as the date for withdrawal, and towards 2014. However, is not Iran the elephant in the room? It does not appear in the declaration—at least not in substance. Will my right hon. Friend say what the attitude of his partners is towards Iran and, in particular, towards sanctions, which, at the end of the day, is the only weapon that we have?

[The Prime Minister]

There has been good progress on that. The UN Security Council resolution on Iranian sanctions was helpful. The European Union went beyond that and introduced further sanctions. When you look around that room, with all those NATO partners and ISAF partners, you see that there is a pretty good consensus on the need for sanctions and the need to apply them properly. There is a conversation that we go on having with allies such as Turkey about the importance of not seeing any slippage in the sanctions. There are some early signs that they are having some effect on the Iranian regime, but we have to keep that up. As my hon. Friend says, we do not have many other weapons to force a change of mind on the Iranians. The sanctions are a weapon that we have, and we should use them to the best of our ability.

European Council

Richard Ottaway Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Gentleman, who is very experienced in this House, has clearly not met my right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary. I am sure that I can arrange for them to spend some quality time together.

[Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

I congratulate the Prime Minister on playing a very difficult hand at the summit. Does he agree that seeing off the European Parliament’s budget, securing our opt-out on economic governance and ensuring that future budgets will reflect a nation’s spending cuts all adds up to a good day’s work?

[The Prime Minister]

May I thank my hon. Friend? I do think this principle that what happens in terms of the EU budget should reflect what happens to member states’ budgets is an important principle. Of course, as we speak today, it is just words in a conclusions text, but many of the things that my hon. Friends and I have worried about over the years have been words in a conclusions text—a little opening that people who want more and more of the European Union push their force through. We have now got a wedge, if you like, that we can push on at all subsequent negotiations: that the European Council has accepted that what is good for nation states is good for the European Union’s budget.

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Richard Ottaway Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

That was very ingenious: the right hon. Gentleman managed to get round your restriction on questions, Mr Speaker, and I think managed to get in at least three. As for regiments, I can confirm that no infantry regiments will be abolished or scrapped as a result of the review. The reduction in the Army numbers will be achieved by reducing the number of headquarters, particularly the divisional and regional headquarters. There may be some impact on logistics and artillery, but no infantry battalions will be altered.

On the reserves, I was personally keen that we should look widely at what other countries are doing on the balance between regular and reserve forces, and ensure that our reserve forces are properly equipped for the sort of modern wars that we have to fight and the modern services that they have to undertake. I do not think that we have done that work yet, which is why I have taken it out of the defence review and said that we should have a proper, separate look.

On Northern Ireland, I can give the right hon. Gentleman the assurance that the last Government gave a number of commitments on the devolution of policing and justice, and the funding that this required, and we will continue with those. We have had a discussion in the National Security Council about these issues and how we best tackle the threat from dissident republicans. I can give the right hon. Gentleman my word that we will continue to give the issue our highest attention, and he will have noticed in the national security strategy that we have put it down as one of the highest priorities for our country, which is right.

[Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

I welcome the Prime Minister’s statement that there will be no shrinkage in Britain’s role on the world stage. The Royal Navy has fulfilled a number of deployments around the globe for many decades. Can he reassure me that with the reduction in the number of frigates, there will be no reduction in the number of the Royal Navy’s commitments?

[The Prime Minister]

The Royal Navy has said that it is able to undertake its task with this lay down of frigates and destroyers. We obviously have the new Type 45 destroyers coming into service, which are costing something like £1 billion each, and we will have the less expensive, more flexible future frigates coming forward as well. I genuinely mean this point about no strategic shrinkage. We are having to take some difficult decisions, but when we think about how much time we spend in this House talking about natural disasters the world over, and about our role in trying to tackle them, one argument that we need to develop is about how the money that we spend through our aid budget plays a key role in ensuring that there is no strategic shrinkage.

Oral Answers to Questions

Richard Ottaway Excerpts

Wednesday 14th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

I totally understand the right hon. Gentleman’s point. That is why we have set up a group of Ministers with responsibility for the big society agenda. The first meeting of those Ministers will be chaired by the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General next week. The compact and our plans to strengthen the transparency and accountability of its implementation will be on the agenda.

[Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

8. What efficiency savings have been identified by his Department’s efficiency and reform group.

[The Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (Mr Francis Maude)]

We have identified significant scope for efficiency savings through a variety of means, including moratoriums on information and communications technology spending of more than £1 million, on consultants costing more than £20,000 a month, on advertising and marketing spend, on new websites and on new or renewed property leases. Other means include a freeze on recruitment, the procurement of goods and services for the whole Government using our aggregated scale to drive down prices, removing discrepancies such as the variation of 170% in the cost of a standard computer monitor, and renegotiating with the Government’s biggest suppliers on a portfolio basis to take out excessive cost. I met the 20 biggest suppliers to the Government last week to kick that process off. That is just the beginning; there is much more to do.

[Richard Ottaway]

In the light of that important answer, does my right hon. Friend remember the pledge given in 2006 by the previous Government to reduce dramatically the 794 websites that they ran at that time? Accordingly, was he as astonished as I was to discover just a few weeks ago that the number of websites had actually grown to 820? What is he doing to reduce that inefficient use of public resources?

[Mr Maude]

My hon. Friend is completely right that the result of the previous Government’s attempt to cut the number of websites was actually a significant increase. We will take urgent steps to cut the number of websites, particularly in relation to those that compete with each other. I discovered that the Department of Energy and Climate Change was bidding against the Carbon Trust for spots on Google, which is one indication of the lack of discipline in that field.

Treatment of Detainees

Richard Ottaway Excerpts

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

May I welcome the Prime Minister’s statement and in particular the warm and justified support that he gave to the intelligence services? In the previous Parliament, the Intelligence and Security Committee produced two reports, neither of which was published. The first was into the rendition and interrogation of Binyam Mohamed, and the second was into the guidance and treatment of detainees. Will he confirm that both reports will be made available to the inquiry? Will the guidance that he is publishing today be the same guidance that was in force for the past decade, or will it be the revised guidance to which the Home Office and Foreign Office were opposed until as recently as last April?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend served on that Committee and knows its work extremely well. To answer his questions, it is right that the reports to which he refers will be made available to the inquiry. The guidance we are publishing today is neither the past guidance nor the guidance the ISC looked at: it is indeed new, amalgamated guidance, which is public, and I urge him to read it. We are not publishing the ISC report from the previous Parliament on the last set of guidance, because that would be slightly misleading—it is a report into guidance that no longer exists. That is the right approach, and I ask him to look at the guidance to see what he thinks.

European Council

Richard Ottaway Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

We will be having a look at them too.

The right hon. and learned Lady also spoke at great length about borrowing. She mentioned the dangers of falling behind South Korea. I have to say that if we followed her advice, I think we would be falling behind North Korea, but let me say this to her about the issue of borrowing. The Council’s conclusion could not be clearer. It said:

“We reaffirm our collective determination to ensure fiscal sustainability, including by accelerating plans for fiscal consolidation where warranted”.

Where is it more warranted than in Britain, where Labour left us with a £155 billion public sector deficit?

It is interesting that, following the sovereign debt crisis and what has happened in Greece, the Labour party is completely isolated in Europe in not believing that we need to take early action on the deficit. Every other country is having to take this sort of action, including painful action. The right hon. and learned Lady does not have to talk nonsense because she is not taking part in the Labour leadership election, so she should talk some sense and recognise that we have to get our deficit in order, we have to take action and it is the right thing to do.

[Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

The Council called on the Foreign Ministers at their next meeting to implement the United Nations sanctions against Iran. Does the Prime Minister agree that that is a big step in the twin-track strategy of combining sanctions with engagement and assistance, and does he have in mind any event or date that would trigger a definitive assessment of whether or not the twin-track strategy against Iran is actually working?

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s question. The key is to try to get the maximum number of countries behind the most specific list of sanctions possible. I think that what we have had in recent years is a lot of talk about sanctions and a lot of commitments to sanctions. Now is the time for countries actually to come up with what they are specifically going to target in terms of bank accounts, trade finance, oil and gas works and the rest. That is what should happen. My hon. Friend asked for a specific date as to when this should be assessed; I think it is an ongoing process. What we are trying to do here is tip the balance in the mind of Iran in terms of making progressing with a nuclear weapon more expensive, in order to get it to think again. There is no one date for that; it should be continually assessed.

Afghanistan

Richard Ottaway Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman. I was once told that the first sign of madness is to read out one’s own speeches, but I agree very much with a lot of what he said. It is important that the military feel that they can give unvarnished, clear advice to Ministers, but it is also important that Ministers test, probe and challenge that advice. That is how policy should be developed, and that is how it should be done in future.

[Richard Ottaway (Croydon South) (Con)]

Given that one of the problems in Afghanistan in the past has been mission creep, may I thank the Prime Minister for the clarity of his statement? He pointed out that we are still in the United States military surge phase. Can he assure me that, although the US military are already beginning to talk about a future draw-down, we will keep in constant touch with them to ensure that we operate on the same timeline? Will he keep in touch with not only the US but our NATO allies on this point?