The
Chairman: I can assure the hon. Member for Teignbridge
that the correct procedure is being
followed.
Richard
Younger-Ross: On a point of order, Mr. Russell.
The procedure that this Committee has usually followed is the official
Opposition and other parties taking turns to ask
questions.
The
Chairman: I call Mr. Younger-Ross, as you
persist.
Richard
Younger-Ross: Thank you. Coming back to the credit crisis,
the documents from the Commission state that it wishes to see a gradual
increase in per capita levels in Turkey and other countries. Are the
targets that the Commission has set for growth likely to be
met?
Mr.
Foster: I certainly do not envisage any changes to the
targets set by the Commission. It is important to maintain certainty
for the pre-accession countries, so, if they enter into the process,
they do so knowing that the funding will be there. It would be entirely
wrong for the Commission to reduce, and for the UK to argue for
reducing, expenditure in that area, because it would send a bad message
about how serious we are about continuous
engagement.
The
Chairman: Mr. Dunne, I understand that you have
two more
questions.
Mr.
Dunne: I am grateful to you for indulging me,
Mr.
Russell. The
Minister said in his opening remarks that not a lot of progress was
made on monitoring in 2007. Throughout the bundle it is clear that
there has been little, if any, formal monitoring of the current IPA
programme. On page 6, I read that DFID has four offices in the western
Balkans and has created a new post, based in Brussels, devoted to
monitoring the IPA. Will the Minister kindly outline what assessments
those offices have made of the IPA programme so far? Is the €5
million allocated solely for monitoring, audit and evaluation for IPA
projects, or for all the Commission’s technical assistance
work?
Mr.
Foster: Perhaps it will help the Committee if I go into
more detail about the DFID offices in that part of the world. We have
an office in Albania, where our programme ends in March this year. We
anticipate coming to the end of our bilateral programmes in Serbia and
Bosnia in 2010-11, as the countries become wealthier. As far as we are
concerned, it is a success if countries graduate towards middle-income
status and we leave the offices.
We have
decided to make DFID’s time monitoring the spending of
taxpayers’ pounds—or euros in this case—more
effective. DFID’s bilateral spend in the area in 2009-10 will be
about £17 million. EC funding is around €2 billion a
year, which is 120 times more than the DFID spend. By appointing
“our man in Brussels”, we are getting a greater impact on
a far bigger chunk of taxpayers’ cash, and are, therefore,
spending it more effectively. In countries where we do not have an
office, such as Croatia, and in countries that we have left, we
anticipate that the DFID-Foreign and Commonwealth Office relationship
is strong enough so that EC spending is monitored as part of the
in-country plans. We think that we have a better hit and more influence
over all the IPA programmes across the region than we would have had
through particular country
offices.
Mr.
Dunne: I have a final question: will the Minister tell the
Committee how much of the money guaranteed to each candidate and
pre-candidate country has been delivered so far? I recognise that he
might need to take guidance on that, but perhaps he could address it at
some point before we conclude.
Mr.
Foster: The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right regarding
specific amounts, although I can give him the projected allocations for
2009-10 by country in millions of euros, if that helps. I will have to
write to him in detail about what has been spent. I can do that for the
courtesy of the Committee, rather than read out a table of numbers and
countries.
Mr.
Borrow: Will my hon. Friend confirm that the
Government’s position on accession is that provided the criteria
have been met, they will make an objective rather than a subjective
assessment of the criteria, and they will not allow politics to
intervene in a decision between Croatia and Turkey? Perhaps the more
interesting part of my question is whether the Minister can enlighten
the Committee on the extent to which other member states are likely to
take the same approach in respect of the accession of Croatia and
Turkey. Do other member states feel inclined to ignore the objective
criteria and delay Turkish membership, or push Croatian membership more
speedily than is
appropriate?
Mr.
Foster: I am not sure whether the question was entirely
rhetorical. Did my hon. Friend merely want a restatement of UK policy?
My Department has accounting responsibility for pre-accession funds.
The politics of engagement is a matter for the FCO, representatives of
which sat before a Committee earlier this year to deal with exactly
such questions. To be on message, I do not see why we would have
changed our criteria for assessing which countries should accede to the
EU.
The
Chairman: No other Members have indicated that they wish
to put questions to the
Minister. Motion
made, and Question
proposed, That
the Committee takes note of European Union Documents No. 15620/08,
Commission Communication: Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance
(IPA): Multi-annual Indicative Financial Framework for 2010-2012
and No. 17210/08 and Addendum, Commission Report: The 2007
Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance Annual Report; notes the
current progress towards further EU enlargement; and urges the
Commission to learn lessons from previous experience and ensure that
its resources are effectively managed and
delivered.—(Mr. Michael
Foster.)
4.53
pm
Mr.
Dunne: In a European Committee in December, the Minister
of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the hon. Member for Harlow
(Bill Rammell),
said: “If
one looks at the historical development of the accession process within
the European Union, one sees that we used to work collectively on the
basis of target dates for countries to come into membership, whereas
the approach is now very much conditions-based...we are now
rightly saying that the conditions for entry must be met before
countries can come into membership”.—[Official Report,
European Committee B, 16 December 2008; c.
11.] I agree
with the sentiment that before a country becomes a member of the
European Union, it should be required to meet a strict set of
conditions. By setting conditions of entry for all candidate and
pre-candidate countries, we will limit the recurrence of the problems
that we are experiencing with recently joined member states, most
notably Bulgaria. That can be achieved only if lessons are learned from
the
past. I
welcome the centralisation of the candidate and pre-candidate
pre-accession assistance and programme mechanism from ISPA, PHARE and
SAPARD to the single IPA programme. Centralising pre-accession funding
under one roof should enable more effective monitoring of progress by
IPA-funded projects in candidate and pre-candidate countries. Although
the IPA demonstrates a clear determination from the European Union to
move in the right direction on its future enlargement, I believe that
it has not learned from some past
failures. The
instrument for pre-accession assistance came into existence on 1
January 2007. As one of the new instruments available to EU external
assistance, its principal aim was to enable states neighbouring the EU
to develop sufficiently to join the Union on a level playing field.
That not only demonstrates to EU member states that the EU has
recognised its past failings and is trying to rectify them, but offers
candidate and pre-candidate countries milestones for which they can
strive, even in these turbulent economic
times. Despite
the promising direction in which the IPA is pointing, more could be
done to ensure that British aid money—almost a sixth of the DFID
budget—is not misspent on, or wrongly invested in, projects that
do not meet the aims of the IPA.
After reading
this very large bundle, I have three main concerns, and I hope the
Minister will be able to give an assurance that they are being looked
into, or—to be more optimistic—that they have already
been rectified. We touched on some of them during the question
session.
The first
concern is about staffing levels. In a brief explanatory memorandum on
11 November discussing Croatia’s IPA financing, the Minister of
State, Department for International Development,
said: “once
the new structure was fully staffed, the remaining projects should be
implemented
quickly.” There
is evidence throughout the bundle that a lack of adequately skilled
staff, combined with high staff turnover, has led to project documents
being held up considerably, not being fully understood and therefore
rushed through scrutiny, or, at worst, not being checked at
all. To
take Croatia as an example, the European Scrutiny Committee’s
ninth report, which looked into EU pre-accession funding for Croatia,
stated:
“Above
all the Implementing Agency has suffered from a lack of suitably
experienced staff and poor management. In addition the Agency was
reorganised during the year and the new structure has not been fully
staffed as
yet.” If
this is added to over-bureaucratic Croat procedures to manage and
monitor the project implementation, there is inevitably concern that EU
aid money—again, almost a sixth of Britain’s aid
budget—is failing to achieve what it was designated for, due to
a lack of staff to carry out the required work. I would welcome
assurances that the problems of understaffing, or of staff being
unqualified to carry out work central to the smooth operation of IPA
programmes, has been rectified.
Secondly, I
was happy to learn from reading the bundle that through the winding up
of ISPA, PHARE and SAPARD and the introduction of the IPA in January
2007, future membership of the European Union will be granted only once
a strict set of conditions has been achieved. I understand that the IPA
is based around conditions of accession. However, does the
Under-Secretary agree that quotations such as that on page 157 of the
bundle from his Department’s Minister of State, which we touched
on earlier, saying that
“Croatia...could
reach the final phase of negotiations for accession to the EU by the
end of
2009” could
make it appear that, despite the rhetoric of conditions, a timetable of
accession has been drawn up for each of the candidate and pre-candidate
countries? It worries me that despite ministerial acknowledgment that
Croatia’s performance on managing funds has fallen well short of
what is required, we are being given a timetable for accession from a
DFID Minister. I hope that, when summing up, the Under-Secretary can
prove that Croatia’s prophesied accession in late 2009 is to do
with a dramatic improvement in the efficiency with which it carries out
projects, not an EU accession
timetable. Lastly,
I would like to highlight my concerns about the monitoring of the IPA
and the projects that it funds within the candidate and pre-candidate
countries. I reiterate that my party and I support the move to IPA. We
have continued to champion the fact that success should be monitored by
not inputs but outputs. This can be done only by effective and timely
monitoring and scrutiny. I am glad that the three candidate countries
benefiting from IPA assistance have already established monitoring
programmes but, as Croatia has demonstrated, the lack of appropriate
staffing and documentation from these monitoring programmes is a worry.
I am more concerned by the lack of monitoring for the five
pre-candidate countries. In all but Kosovo, it has been stipulated
that
“No
monitoring of IPA projects was carried out in 2007 as the IPA 2007
programmes were only adopted at the end of the year and actually
implementation only started in
2008.” It
is simply not good enough that the IPA programme began in 2007 and went
an entire year without monitoring in the majority of countries to which
its funds flow. To monitor the five components of the IPA effectively,
it is right that each is monitored separately by specialists in each
area. However, I am less sure that there is an overarching set of
conditions that must be met by each candidate and pre-candidate country
in each of the component parts. Without set guidelines for each of the
specialist monitoring groups, a country joining the EU might excel in
some of the component parts of the IPA, but not all. I hope that the
Under-Secretary will guarantee
that there are guidelines for each of the monitoring bodies and that he
will assure us that a country will meet every condition before
accession can
occur. In
conclusion, the introduction of the IPA is a positive step in the right
direction. The difference between the majority of current EU states and
those states that want to join the EU is, in some cases, extreme, and
it is right that we promote the IPA projects within the eight candidate
and pre-candidate countries to help them to develop to a point where
they can join the EU on an even keel.
I also
welcome the rhetorical move away from timetable accession to
conditional accession, and I will be happy to give my support if the
Under-Secretary can assure me that the pre-determined accession of
Croatia in late 2009 was more of a speculative approximation based on
the progress of Croatia to meet the conditions that have been
set.
From the
bundle, I have assumed that more must be done to improve staff
retention and staff training to cope with the complexities of the new
IPA system. I am sure that that will come in time. However, considering
that monitoring is around a year behind schedule, perhaps this area of
work should be a priority.
I am still
slightly concerned that, until we receive hard-copy documentation of
monitoring of project progress in IPA recipient countries, we cannot
guarantee that our aid budget is being spent most effectively. I hope
that when the monitoring documents come to this House, I will be proved
wrong. The IPA is a positive and intelligent step forward in
streamlining future EU expansion. I hope that the teething problems
from which it currently suffers from can be overcome quickly for the
good of the EU and, more importantly, the good of the candidate and
pre-candidate countries.
5.1
pm
Richard
Younger-Ross: I am aware that there will almost certainly
be a vote after the statement in the main Chamber and also that the
hon. Member for Ludlow has very well and succinctly summarised the
concerns and fears of the European Scrutiny Committee. I will therefore
not repeat what has been said, and if I speak without hesitation and do
so within a minute, we might even have the start of a new kind of radio
game. To
take out just one element of what the hon. Gentleman said, the key
point is the build-up towards the accession stage. The real concern of
the European Scrutiny Committee has been that countries were allowed in
without meeting the criteria, as with the cases of Bulgaria and
Romania. In the case of Cyprus, we allowed a country in without
resolving its problems between the south and the north. In the case of
Turkey, there are concerns about whether the criteria would have to be
met when we get to accession, which is still a long way off. In terms
of the western Balkans, we have a whole series—a
hotch-potch—of countries with very difficult relationships
between each other. Our opportunity to resolve those problems and
to get compliance is between now and accession. After accession, as
Bulgaria and Romania have proved, that becomes very
difficult. The Minister
here and FCO Ministers are therefore duty-bound to ensure that we do
not allow the EU again to walk into a situation in which it ends up
allowing countries to accede into the Union when they have not met the
criteria, because that is damaging for those countries, damaging for
the EU and ultimately damaging for any further expansion. If we cannot
get further expansion right, we should not do it—it is important
that we get it right.
5.3
pm
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