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3.56 pm
Simon Hughes (North Southwark and Bermondsey) (LD): I am happy to follow the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) and to say to him what Liberal Democrats have said before—that we owe him and the European Scrutiny Committee a debt for doing such a good job. We are grateful for the Committee’s consistent and wide interest in ensuring that it does an ever-better job and for making its views clear to the rest of us so that Parliament can have better processes for dealing with European legislation. I thank the hon. Gentleman very much for that.
I would also like to thank the Leader of the House and the Deputy Leader of the House for picking up a ball that has effectively been on the ground since the Modernisation Committee reported nearly three years ago in March 2005. You will recall, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that the Modernisation Committee made about 25 recommendations covering the whole gamut of scrutiny of European legislation. It is not before time that we have come to this point. We all come to it from the same general point of view—that, by definition, there are now two ways in which laws come to Parliament. They come either from the Executive—or very occasionally from a Back Bencher—or from the European Union and its processes. That is entirely understandable.
We heard the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) suggest the cock-shy assessment that 60:40 is now the balance of the volume of legislation that we deal with—60 per cent. originates from Brussels and 40 per cent. from Whitehall. I do not have accurate figures, just as the Deputy Leader of the House said that she did not have them. It is certainly the case, by definition, that a large amount of legislation comes from Brussels, so it is absolutely right to have as good a system of scrutiny of Brussels proposals—and of the Government’s attitude to matters on the European Council agenda—as we have of Whitehall legislation.
This can seem arcane, technical and anorakish for people outside Parliament, but I have a simple triangular diagram to understand legislative activity. Down one side comes Whitehall legislation to Parliament at the bottom of the triangle; down the other side comes European legislation—but of course Whitehall and Brussels keep on talking to each other, which means that the third side is in communication with the other two. We have to ensure that those two streams are well filtered so that we know what we are doing.
To try to bridge that point, we have colleagues who scrutinise secondary legislation. We all scrutinise primary legislation—now, mercifully, sometimes in draft as well as in the form of final proposals. We have colleagues who scrutinise secondary legislation and they alert us when they think that something is important. If it is important, it comes here. That is exactly the same system that we should have for European legislation. Members across the board—not whipped and dependent on their parties’ views, but doing a job on behalf of Parliament—should spot what is important so that we are alerted to it.
I have never served on the European Scrutiny Committee, but I have attended sittings of European Standing Committees on specific subjects, and in my experience the main issue is the one raised by the hon. Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois), who made his apologies for having to leave early. On occasion, Ministers have not wholly shared with us what is happening or is about to happen, or we have been given the relevant documents too late to do anything about it. I can even cap the example given by the hon. Member for Rayleigh of the monster document that was almost impossible to digest. Of course, there may be a lot of preamble and general Eurospeak to start with. I was a member of a Committee that did not have the documents in the right language, and did not have the latest versions.
Those examples are incidental, and such incidents may occur less frequently than they did, but the fact is that they should never occur. The blunt truth is not that we should be able to mandate Ministers—I understand the point that has been made about that—but that we should be able to engage in honest scrutiny of what is on the table before an Agriculture Minister goes off to talk about fishery quotas, a Trade Minister goes off to deal with patents, a Foreign Minister goes off to negotiate treaties, or the Prime Minister goes off to negotiate the most important of treaties. At a time when we do not have a proper treaty scrutiny process, it is especially important for us to be able to quiz Ministers.
Impressions of Ministers have varied. It seems that some have been very good and co-operative, while others have been much less good and apparently much less co-operative. Members of the Committee, along with others, have sometimes felt frustrated by a lack of engagement in debate. I am well aware that therein lies the issue of when a session needs to be held in secret. Of course there will be occasions when it is necessary so that we do not show our hand in public when a crucial negotiation is taking place, but that does not preclude the presumption that a session should be open to the public unless there is a good reason to the contrary. That is why I support the amendment tabled by the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May): it does not propose that all sittings should take place in public, but suggests that it should be presumed they will unless a decision is made to hold them in secret.
Mr. Clappison: The hon. Gentleman mentioned treaty negotiations. It may help him to form a view of the relationship between this country and the European Union when treaties are being negotiated, and also of the behaviour of the present Government, to know that the European Scrutiny Committee was kept completely in the dark about negotiations during the run-up to the June intergovernmental conference. Until a fortnight beforehand, we were told that nothing at all was happening. We were wasting our time even trying to scrutinise what was taking place.
Simon Hughes: I am well aware of that. I was alerted to it by a Committee colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross), and it is entirely unsatisfactory. At the top of the pyramid of importance in the current Parliament is the most important European Union document, the treaty that is the subject of the Bill currently before the House, and it really should have been possible for us to scrutinise and discuss its earlier drafts. It is nonsensical that that was not possible.
Mr. Lilley:
With the greatest respect, how can the hon. Gentleman expect to be taken seriously when he pays lip service to the importance of scrutiny and describes the European treaty as the most important issue before the House, given that although the European Scrutiny Committee has compared the treaty with the European constitution and concluded that they are fundamentally and essentially the same, he continues to engage in the pretence that they are different? When the hon. Gentleman treats the European Scrutiny Committee—and the Foreign Affairs Committee—with contempt, why should we
pay any attention to the lip service that he pays to the need to improve the prestige and authority of those Committees?
Simon Hughes: What lies behind the right hon. Gentleman’s question is a difference of view on the treaty, which I understand. I do not treat the Foreign Affairs Committee or the European Scrutiny Committee with contempt in any way. I have looked at both the original proposals for the treaty and those before us now, and in my view there is a significant and substantial difference; I have formed my own judgment about that. The first set of proposals would have replaced all the European Union treaties with a new and much larger and more expansive document, whereas the second set would not. They are, therefore, different.
It does not follow from that that there is a difference between the right hon. Gentleman and my party colleagues and me on the notion that the people of the United Kingdom should have a vote on these issues; the difference between us is simply that we believe the vote should be on the larger question, “Do you, the British people, want to be part of the EU on the terms proposed, or not?”
Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. We are now straying rather wide of the matters under discussion. May I encourage the hon. Gentleman to come back on target?
Simon Hughes: Of course, Mr. Deputy Speaker, although I was only responding to the earlier intervention.
Mr. Cash On a specific point that I think is on target as it is to do with the scrutiny processes of this country, because of majority voting there is necessarily an interaction with other countries’ voting arrangements, so it is also important for us to bear in mind what happens in those countries. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman agrees that many, if not most, of the 27 member states have a wholly inadequate scrutiny process in either their Committees or Parliament. Does he not therefore agree that there is a serious democratic gap in how this legislation is passed in Europe as a whole?
Simon Hughes: Yes, I do; my colleagues and I have argued that. Being mindful of your strictures on addressing the proposals under discussion, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I will be succinct in my comments on this matter. The two principal deficits are that the European Parliament does not have enough power and that the European Council meets behind closed doors where it can carve things up, out of the public domain. So, yes, there is inadequate scrutiny there, but we are talking today about scrutiny here.
There is an unresolved overlap or tension between the responsibilities of subject Select Committees and the European Select Committee. The most common overlap is with the Foreign Affairs Committee; it did its own work on the Lisbon treaty, for example. There is still work to be done on where the dividing lines should be drawn. The Liaison Committee has an interest in this matter as, of course, do the Committee chaired by the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk and
the departmental Select Committees. Work must be done so that we make the best use of the expertise in this House and ensure that subject-specific areas of European legislative proposal are looked at by those who take the greatest interest in them. We might need to make further changes.
It might be the case that each of the subject Select Committees has a sub-committee dealing with European affairs and has relevant expertise so an interrelationship might be of benefit. I realise that there are proposals on the Order Paper seeking to deal with that, by allowing people from the relevant Select Committee to be on the relevant European Committee when it deals with certain matters. That is an improvement, and I welcome it.
The current commentary is to the effect that the scrutiny process in the other place has become very effective and we might still have quite a way to go to catch up. The hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk and his colleagues have done very well, but there is certainly now strong scrutiny in the other place. The Modernisation Committee proposed a Joint Committee; the largest number of recommendations to it were for a Joint Committee on Europe, which would be a very strong beast.
The Minister has not responded to that proposal, and I think I am right in saying that, unusually, we have not had a Government response to this Modernisation Committee report on these issues. Usually, we get a Committee report and the Government publish their response; in this instance, the response has come in the form of this debate and the proposals made. I urge the Deputy Leader of the House to think seriously, in conjunction with colleagues and being mindful of all the sensitivities, about whether there is not merit in having a Joint Committee of both Houses on these matters, not least to do the sort of things that the Modernisation Committee suggested, for example, questioning Commissioners. We have lost that good idea in the process of moving where we have.
The Leader of the House and her deputy have consulted on these proposals, and they are generally welcome, because they are all steps in the right direction. I thank them for their courtesy in consulting. They picked up the desire for moving in a more effective direction, and that is reflected in the motion. That is good.
I am glad that the Government have accepted amendment (a), which proposes that we try this system for a period and then re-examine it. The Deputy Leader of the House says that she sees this as being the next phase and by no means more than that, and that we might need to move on relatively quickly in the light of ideas and suggestions. That is also good.
I heard the Deputy Leader of the House say that she has accepted the important principle of amendment (b), which is that the people who go on to the relevant Committee from the European Scrutiny Committee should be the people whom the European Scrutiny Committee judges are the most appropriate to do that job. Let us be absolutely honest about this. One of this bit of the system’s traditional failings has been that many nominations were made because the Committee of Selection was under pressure to fit everybody in, and
thus people who were not volunteering, who were not keen and who were not knowledgeable were chosen. People were selected because it was their turn to do this duty or because they had been naughty boys or girls and they had been selected as punishment. That approach is nonsense.
Given the issue’s seriousness, we must be serious about who does the job, hence the principle that the European Scrutiny Committee should be permanent for a Parliament to enable it to build up expertise. The three new European Committees— there is a question as to whether we need only three—should contain a core of expertise that remains.
Let us consider the example of the Committee that will deal with justice and home affairs. Such issues—terrorism, immigration and so on—are important. Even if the UK has the opt-outs under the Lisbon treaty, or even with a loss of business, that Committee will need people who know what they are talking about, who have been there before and who do not just turn up for a week or two and then leave. I think that the Deputy Leader of the House understands that.
These Committees need to contain a core of people who see such scrutiny as a main and important function. That is the feedback that I have been given, and it is the impression that I have picked up when I have been involved. We might need to have a cross-party discussion, led by the European Scrutiny Committee, about the number of Committees we require. It may be better to have four or five Committees with fewer members, where people are able to take things seriously, covering the main subject areas of European Union legislative activity.
I come to a general reform of government point, which the Deputy Leader of the House has heard me make before. We have a Government who have grown to be far too big for the legislature—there are now more than 100 Ministers, in addition to the Parliamentary Private Secretaries. If none of them can be free spirits, the number of people available to do all the Committee work is reduced. Until and unless we rein in the number of Ministers and Parliamentary Private Secretaries relative to the number of Members of Parliament, we will always struggle to get the people with the expertise to do the scrutiny job. As everybody has said, it is very difficult for the legislative to rein in the growth of the Executive. It is always difficult for Governments to deliver on that because they get tempted to do otherwise.
I have two final points to make. On amendment (c), it must be right that a motion that comes from a Committee to Parliament is the motion that the Committee agreed. We must start with the starting point. There is no point in having a Committee that is then counteracted. I shall listen carefully to what the Deputy Leader of the House says in her winding-up speech, but if I have understood her correctly, she accepts that this case should be the same as that for Opposition days, when the motion is chosen by the relevant party and then amended by the Government. For the benefit of outsiders, that would mean that the subject would come from the Committee, not the Government. That is important and would be the right way round.
An indirectly related point is the scrutiny reserve. That is another technical but hugely important
point—we all know what it means, but if we were to do an opinion poll in any of our constituencies, we would get more than the usual number of blank looks from people.
Kelvin Hopkins: And from many hon. Members too!
Simon Hughes: The hon. Gentleman, our friend from the Committee, suggests that not everybody here would know what it means, but I think that that would be unfair.
We need to get grips with that issue. Written questions are often asked about how often the scrutiny reserve has been used, and the answer is that it is used regularly. Sometimes that is understandable, but I have a clear sense that it is used far too much. There are some answers to that problem. The first, which is related to the summer holiday problem, is that the scrutiny process must go on over the summer recess if we insist on breaking over the summer. The better solution, which has been proposed by my colleagues and resisted by the Government, is to break when the school holidays start in the summer, come back when the schools go back at the beginning of September and do some work as a Parliament in September before breaking again around the party conference season. Alternatively, we could move the party conferences.
There is no justification for this Parliament going away from its business for three months when, for a large part of that time, the European Parliament sits and European business—whatever we think about holidays in Brussels for people in the Commission—goes on.
Michael Connarty: On that point, I did not mention the fact that we received correspondence as well as holding meetings. One piece of correspondence from the Deputy Leader of the House that we considered contained the suggestion that the European Scrutiny Committee should meet in the summer recess. We have already informally discussed that. In general, we agree as a Committee—although I would have loved the provision to be made by Standing Order, because it would then not have been blamed on me—that we should meet sometime in mid-September to deal with the business that would normally fall foul of the scrutiny reserve because we did not look at it in time.
Simon Hughes: If that is the view of the Committee, I am grateful. It does not trump the argument that Parliament should be here, but the scrutiny process should certainly go on.
The Deputy Leader of the House suggested that, even if there was to be no change to the Standing Orders, we should routinely have the opportunity for a gradated report back from Ministers by written statement on the least controversial issues, in Westminster Hall on the more controversial issues, or on the Floor of the House on the most controversial issues. I understand that that is what the Deputy Leader of the House proposes. It is a welcome development that will help to provide consistency. There will be a regular review of European legislation on the Council’s agenda twice a year in May and autumn.
Helen Goodman: I am sorry if the hon. Gentleman thinks that the proposals are even better than they are. We are suggesting that there should be two debates in Westminster Hall on the Commission’s work plan and legislative programme. Had hon. Members tabled amendments to the Government motion proposing reporting back in Westminster Hall, we would have been minded to view them sympathetically. However, they would have required changes to Standing Orders. At the moment, that is not on the table.
Simon Hughes: I am grateful for that honest clarification. I saw the note about the proposal that the hon. Lady circulated earlier, and it is clear that there is a bit of administration that we still need to do. She has said that the Government are willing to consider the proposition, and I hope that we can reach agreement quickly. After significant negotiations, a scheduled opportunity to hear from and question Ministers in Westminster Hall would be welcome.
Simon Hughes: I see that the right hon. Lady is going to support the proposal too.
Mrs. May: I am sorry to disappoint the hon. Gentleman, and I should probably put it on record that we have had conversations on this subject. As he said, it was in one of the earlier proposals circulated by the Deputy Leader of the House. I do not have concerns about the European dimension, although if the matters involved are so significant they should be discussed on the Floor of the House rather than in Westminster Hall. However, the possibility that oral statements could be made in Westminster Hall starts to change the nature of that forum and its relationship with this Chamber. That is why I am not comfortable with the proposal that has been made.
Simon Hughes: I understand that, and the right hon. Lady is elucidating a matter of principle, but the negotiations remain to be completed and I am sure that there is a way to ensure ministerial accountability.
I end by saying that we are asking for accountability before decisions are made, not afterwards. That is the fundamental thing that I and other colleagues are looking for. Before Ministers go to Europe, we must be able to hold them to account and express our views in a vote, free from the Whips and party pressures. We will be considering the position adopted by the UK in the 27 EU member states, so it is very important that we are seen to act honestly, openly and transparently.
We have taken a good next step today, but further work must be done if we are to regain the confidence of the British public. People must believe that what comes out of Brussels is properly scrutinised, and that requires that the UK Parliament play a full and central part in ensuring that the right decisions are made.
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