Examination of Witnesses (question Numbers
1-19)
CHRIS BRYANT
MP, MS JANE
RUMBLE AND
MR PAUL
WILLIAMS
24 FEBRUARY 2010
Q1 Chairman: Minister, you know that
the purpose of today's evidence session is to examine the way
in which the Committee was informed about the development of government
policy on EU involvement in management of the Arctic region, as
set out in the November 2008 Commission Communication entitled
"The European Union and the Arctic Region". We would
like to divide up our questions into two parts. The first part
is the process aspects and the implications for the scrutiny of
Council Conclusions. The second part is the Government's position
on issues discussed in the Commission Communication. We welcome
you, therefore, and you may want to introduce your team to us.
Chris Bryant: On
my right, your left, I have Jane Rumble, who is head of our Polar
Regions Unit and on my left, and your right, Paul Williams, who
is head of the Europe Global Group. I guess that I am here in
both my Europe role and my Arctic role.
Q2 Chairman: A very sensible combination
that is too, to put the Arctic in the Foreign Office.
Chris Bryant: That was my joke.
That was my only joke for this afternoon!
Q3 Chairman: I missed it completely.
Chris Bryant: "Arctic role/roll"!
Q4 Chairman: I see. I am on a diet,
you see; I am not allowed these things! I do not know what they
are.
Chris Bryant: You have got it
now, have you not?
Q5 Chairman: I have got it now, despite
the fact that I do not know what it is! When you last wrote to
the Committee about this issue you expressed "sorrow"—that
was the word—that the Committee felt "so querulous"
about the level of scrutiny that had been applied to the developing
EU Arctic policy. In studying the Collins English Dictionary definition,
"querulous" is defined as "inclined to make peevish
complaints" and having "a complaining, fretful attitude
or disposition". Is that how you regard this Committee's
work?
Chris Bryant: I choose my words
precisely as I intend them.
Q6 Chairman: So you do in fact think
that we were inclined to make peevish complaints about this matter?
Chris Bryant: I think that in
this particular regard we have had a difficulty, in that we obviously
originally expected that Europe was going to go forward with a
full, new Arctic strategy, which would be a legally binding document,
which would of course then have come to you for scrutiny. In the
end, it was decided that that was not what was going to happen
and instead there would be a set of Council Conclusions. I understand
that the Committee has a very particular view about what we should
or should not be doing about Council Conclusions. I am very keen
to get as close as we possibly can to providing documents to you
that are presently not available to you, on a confidential basis.
There is a real difficulty, though, I would suggest to the Committee,
on two fronts. First that, in the process of Council Conclusions
being drafted, there will often be five, six, seven different
drafts through the iterative process, up until the point at which
the final Conclusions are agreed on. If each of those drafts is
made public, there is a real problem for the UK in how we can
actually negotiate on the UK's behalf, because we are effectively
revealing our hand in public. That is why it is really important
that we keep whatever Council Conclusion papers that we send to
you confidential, as well as the fact that, by the nature of their
being LIMITÉ, that is a requirement which is imposed
upon us anyway. The second difficulty is that if we were to send
literally every draft Conclusions paper to you, I think there
would be a real danger that you would be inundated with paperwork.
Obviously, it is entirely for you to decide what you want to do
about that, but I just want to warn you about that.
Q7 Chairman: Your history is known
to us, Minister, and your activities in part of the European Movement
before you became the European Minister maybe set you on a course
where you see the EU solution as being one that is overarching
and therefore one that should be pushed ahead. As a Committee,
we happen to think that we have a responsibility to look at whether
our Government is defending competences correctly and not giving
competences away. In particular, in the Arctic I think this was
an important and material issue for this Committee and also for
other parliaments. We will come to these questions. It is an evidence
session. I think we know where you are coming from—
Chris Bryant: You do not, do you,
to be fair, Mr Chairman? You have not asked me what my view is.
You have declared what my view is, in your view.
Q8 Chairman: I think that the view
of the Government moves across different ministers, because it
was two ministers ago that this all happened, as you know. We
will turn to that and the question of how this process came about.
Chris Bryant: Do you want me to
answer the question that you asked about competences or not?
Chairman: They will come up in the questions
we will ask, yes.
Q9 Jim Dobbin: Minister, your predecessor
but one, Caroline Flint, said in her 16 December 2008 Explanatory
Memorandum on the Communication that she looked forward to "the
more detailed EU Arctic policy which the Commission has planned
for early next year". She also told our counterparts in the
Lords that "the UK and other Member States will have an opportunity
to engage in more detailed negotiations with the Commission and
other EU bodies". Then we heard nothing more until you wrote
to us a year later about already-adopted Council Conclusions that
were, in your words, "a set of overarching principles and
actions which the Commission can begin to develop in collaboration
with Member States". The question is, how can you reconcile
this chain of events with the professions in your latest letter
to us that you have been "very conscious of the need to keep
the Committee fully informed of developments"? There appears
to be a contradiction there in what was said.
Chris Bryant: Mr Dobbin, I am
afraid that your account there is not quite true. Maybe the Clerk's
advice has not been quite right. The facts are that there was
a debate on 21 April last year in, I think, the European Committee
B; so there was not a complete gap between what was provided by
Caroline Flint and the correspondence that you had from me late
last year. However, in essence the big issue is that when Caroline
Flint wrote to you at the end of 2008 we confidently expected
that there would be a new European Communication, which would
be legally binding on us—and this is the important point.
In the end, after a protracted series of discussions in Europe,
there was a decision late in September not to go forward with
having a new Communication; so there was not anything to provide
to the Committee. Then they came forward with Council decisions;
but the Council decisions, as you know, are a very different beast,
as it were, from a Communication. They are not legally binding;
they are merely a sort of declaration of aims. Consequently, as
soon as we had that, we were able to provide it to you. It would
have been better if there had been a Communication and if the
Communication had anything of substance in it. If there had been
a Communication, we would have provided it to you for scrutiny
in the customary way.
Q10 Mr Hands: I was actually the
Committee's rapporteur at that meeting of the European Standing
Committee, on 21 April 2009. You say that you wanted to keep the
Committee fully informed. For a start, that is beyond just having
a debate in the European Standing Committee. You cannot just say,
"Because we had a debate, therefore you must have been kept
fully informed". Secondly, one has to say that debate was
wholly unsatisfactory. You are talking about Caroline Flint having
been involved in correspondence with us, but she was not the minister
who was available for scrutiny at that Committee meeting. What
your team did—and I appreciate that you were not a member
of the team at that time—was to send the regional minister
who covered the Arctic, who was quite patently not briefed on
the questions of procedure, importance, subsidiarity, and all
the other things that we wanted to question, but was merely briefed
about Arctic issues. We therefore ended up having a wholly unsatisfactory
debate. So not only has your department not kept us fully informed
of developments, but the one debate that you quote was a wholly
unsatisfactory event, which ended up being a debate about the
specifics of Arctic policy and not about what we were raising
on questions of subsidiarity.
Chris Bryant: There is a difficulty
inevitably if the responsibilities—which presently are not
split between two ministers, i.e. for Europe and for the
Arctic; they are presently in one minister—if they are split
between two ministers, you have to have one minister or the other.
Consequently, if we had just fielded Caroline Flint, I would have
thought that the Committee would have found it more difficult
to have answers on the substance rather than the process. If I
had a criticism, it would be that sometimes we in Parliament obsess
too much with process and very rarely get down to substance.
Q11 Mr Hands: It was Miss Flint's
EM for a start and it was quite clear that what we were particularly
interested in were the principles involved and not just Arctic
policies. I would have thought that it would have been obvious
that it was the Minister for Europe that we wanted to appear before
us.
Chris Bryant: Again, this is a
row about process not about substance, and which minister appears.
The truth of the matter is that there is one Government and it
is not Caroline Flint's Explanatory Memorandum, it is the Government's
Explanatory Memorandum; so any minister speaks for the Government.
Q12 Mr Hands: Yes, but the minister
should be briefed properly to be able to answer the questions
that we wanted to ask. That is the key thing.
Chris Bryant: You are making a
criticism of a minister, and I obviously do not agree with it.
Chairman: No, I do not think that is
what is being said to you. I find it incredible that a European
minister, who knows about the questions in the mind of the public,
whom we all represent and for whom the Government attempts to
legislate—the process you are talking about is the
substance in this case. If we give over competences to the European
Union that are not theirs but are in fact the nation state's,
then we are seen to be betraying the people we are representing.
Our job, in looking at the process, was to question the minister
about what had happened in that process of putting together the
Commission Communication. It is quite clear that the substance,
the very important substance, is did this Parliament have an adequate
chance to interrogate the Government, regardless of which minister
it was, as to whether what they were doing was giving away competences
that should not have been given to the EU? Clearly there is a
bid by the EU to go into the Arctic. If the Government's view
was that was how it should be done, it is not necessarily one
that people understood. If we have a debate about the state of
the Arctic in climate change or the state of the Arctic flora
and fauna, we are not discussing the important matter of substance,
namely did the Government keep this Parliament fully informed
of a process that gave away competences to the EU that should
remain with this state? That is the substance, and that is why
it should have been the minister who wrote the EM and not the
minister who wanted to discuss flora and fauna.
Q13 Kelvin Hopkins: I think the debate
between us is about process. If we get the process right, everything
else falls into place, in my view. The process should be adhered
to very strictly, because that is what our job is, and we cover
every sort of subject, minor and major. The Committee recommended
the original Commission Communication debate on the clear understanding
that there would be further, more detailed proposals during 2009,
which we assumed would take the form of another Communication—and
it has not happened. Yet we heard nothing from the FCO about the
decision instead to negotiate detailed Council Conclusions until
those negotiations had been completed. How do you respond to the
suggestion that, in doing so, the Council, and thus the Government,
deliberately chose a process that would avoid further parliamentary
scrutiny?
Chris Bryant: It is simply untrue.
Q14 Kelvin Hopkins: Say why it is
untrue.
Chris Bryant: You are suggesting
that the Government conspired with the European Union to create
a process that would deliberately exclude the British Parliament
from any discussion over our policy in the Arctic. That, I am
saying, is untrue.
Q15 Kelvin Hopkins: It has the definite
appearance of what we are suggesting by our question. We were
expecting not only a Communication but to have more debate about
it and we did not, and the European negotiations continue about
that.
Chris Bryant: Can I suggest that
if that were what we were seeking to do, namely deliberately to
circumvent Parliament so as to achieve some outcome and therefore
deliberately forcing the European Union not to have a Communication
but to go for Council Conclusions instead, then I presume that
we would have done so because we were seeking a particular outcome,
such as what has already been suggested by a couple of members
of the Committee, namely that we wanted to hand over competence
for the Arctic from Member States to the European Commission—which
we have not done. I do not think anybody has alleged that any
competences have been transferred from any Member State to the
Union in this process; so I do not think it stands up to logic
that that would be what we were trying to do. It is also absolutely
not true to say that that was what we were seeking to do. We were
trying to get a Communication. We would have preferred there to
have been a Communication, and that would then have gone through
the full scrutiny process. However, what this then hinges on in
terms of process is the matter of how we deal with Council Conclusions.
Q16 Chairman: Can I ask a simple
question? I do not think that Governments, when they make mistakes,
necessarily do so on a conspiratorial basis—not this Government;
it is more likely to be on the basis of a cock-up than a conspiracy.
Can you explain simply why we were not informed—because
we were certainly not informed in that ridiculous debate with
the wrong minister that took place in April—that the process
was moving from a Communication to a series of very fixed Council
Conclusions? We were never informed until your letter told us
that it had been done, the day after the Council Conclusions were
agreed. What went wrong in that year? Did the Foreign Office really
think that that debate—which they would have read, I presume,
or maybe the people represented there—covered the issues
that had been raised by the Committee? Why were we not told about
the change in the methodology and the seriousness of what came
out of the Council?
Chris Bryant: The Foreign Office
believed at the time of the debate in April that there would be
a Communication. Indeed, it was the declared intent of everybody
in the Commission and in the Council that there would be a new
Communication. It was not until very late in the year that it
was decided that actually there was not enough of substance to
create a new Communication and that it would be better therefore
just to have some Conclusions. If you look at the Conclusions,
it is not the most exciting document in the world. There is not
a radical set of new proposals that are coming through. I do not
know what the Committee thinks, obviously, but my own impression
is that I cannot imagine that many people in Britain would be
unhappy with those conclusions.
Q17 Kelvin Hopkins: But it is for
us to make those judgments.
Chris Bryant: Yes, indeed.
Chairman: You have not answered the question
why we were not told until after the Conclusions.
Q18 Mr Hands: You did promise, and
I quote, to "keep us fully informed of developments".
Chris Bryant: Yes. As I am trying
to explain, the difficulty is that one is going through a process
of Council Conclusions as opposed to a Communication. With a Communication,
there is a very straightforward system. There is a document that
is produced, it goes out for scrutiny, and that is pretty straightforward.
With draft Conclusions, this is a process that changes very rapidly.
Sometimes the draft can change four or five times in a day. It
is much more difficult in that environment, I think, to provide
adequate, proper scrutiny. I am entirely open about this. In Denmark,
for instance, they have a very different system. They do publish
everything to their Committee on a confidential basis; the minister
is not allowed to advance any cause unless they have had clearance
for it from the relevant parliamentary Committee; but it does
very severely limit Denmark's power to negotiate, and they have
many fewer issues on which they are so radically affected than
does the UK.
Q19 Kelvin Hopkins: But the very
least you would have done, or perhaps someone in your office should
have done, would have been to have said, "Whatever else happens,
we must report that to the European Scrutiny Committee because
the situation has changed and, at the very least, they ought to
be informed that the situation has changed and to see if they
have any comment to make"—and that did not happen.
Chris Bryant: I think there is
a fair point there, which is about when we are changing from one
process which we expect is going to lead to a formal scrutiny
process to another, I think we should try to make sure that your
Committee and Lord Draper's Committee are fully aware that effectively
we have changed tramlines.
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