What the balance of competences review has done has been to give us a comprehensive, thorough and balanced analysis of how the EU affects this country. Through analysing in detail 32 areas of policy in a systematic way, looking clearly to see if the principle of subsidiarity has been breached, the balance of competences review has given pro-Europeans valuable ammunition to tackle the sceptics with facts and figures. Labour will, of course, take these into account in its development of future EU policy when it is in government after May.
The publication of this study was one of the last gifts from William Hague to the country in his role as Foreign Secretary. When he took up the post he was not exactly known for his Euroenthusiasm but I am aware that the noble Lord opposite has steered the ship on this issue. We are grateful for his attention to detail on so many of these important issues. The European Union Committee under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, is undertaking a review of the whole process relating to this review. We look forward to hearing the results of its deliberations.
While the reports on the various discrete areas of policy are thorough and give both positive and negative assessments of the relationship and its value to the UK, it is notable that there is no overall assessment or conclusion as to whether the EU as a whole is good for the UK or not. For example, there are no recommendations and no clear guidance on the possible repatriation of powers. The result is that there has been little or no coverage of the review which has been perceived by many as a dull, technical exercise. This is a shame because there are some important and clear lessons for the UK to learn. It would probably be overoptimistic of us to expect anything other than that when the facts do not chime with the views of many British newspapers. The Leveson inquiry made
it clear that the UK media often make up stories about the EU. Debate on this issue would have caused further ructions within the Conservative Party.
I should like to ask the Minister what his department or, indeed, any other department has done to publish and publicise the review reports and their findings. How much money has been put aside for this? If no money has been put aside, can the Minister explain how the Government intend to engage with the public on these issues if there is no effort to publicise the results of the review?
What have we found out as a result of the review? I should like to pick out three points. One issue which the review has highlighted is how Europeanisation is often a reflection of the globalised pressures on the UK or takes on board the wider, western multilateral efforts in relation to trade and foreign affairs. It is also clear that universities in the UK are particularly enthusiastic about EU membership and what they have gained through the various research programmes where they have notably punched well above their weight.
The report on the single market focuses on article 114 of the EU treaty and concludes very clearly that our markets are so closely integrated that it is not possible to establish a clear division between member state and EU competences in the single market area. In the opinion of most, if not all, observers, integration has brought appreciable economic benefits to the EU and hence to the UK. It has also spread the UK’s liberal model of policy-making more widely across the EU. But there is a recognition that it has brought with it constraints on policy-making of varying kinds and a regulatory framework which some industries handle better than others. There is recognition that the EU could strengthen its own enforcement efforts, as could member states.
It is impossible here to list all the benefits and disbenefits of the single market. It is worth noting that, in 2005, Her Majesty’s Treasury estimated that trade between member states was boosted by 38% through membership of the EU and by a further 9% because of the single market programme, with only 5% of trade diverted from non-member countries.
What was the point of the review? It was partly to paper over divisions on Europe within the coalition—to kick the European issue into the long grass. It was also surely in part to inform a possible renegotiation relationship between the UK and the EU, one that reflects the UK’s national interest. The report provides a very good base from which to work in any renegotiation discussion.
Labour has a very clear view on what we would like to see in that renegotiation. We will seek to reform the EU budget and will initiate a zero-based review of spending on EU agencies. We will seek to reform welfare so that people who come to work in our country have to contribute before they are eligible for benefits such as jobseeker’s allowance. We will close loopholes in rules for agency workers so that they do not allow unscrupulous employers to undercut wages and conditions. We will work with Europe to give national parliaments more of a say in EU policy-making as part of bigger reforms of the way Brussels operates and the way Parliament scrutinises EU business.
Where, however, is the detail from the Conservative Party? It is worth asking why the review was published so near the election and therefore cannot fulfil one of the original purposes of the review, which was to promote a calm and informed debate on the EU. The balance of competences review stands in stark contrast to the ill informed, populist nonsense spouted by UKIP and Tory Eurosceptics. It might have been just as useful to have had a competences review of the coalition’s relationship with the EU over the past five years. The mixed messages, the tantrums, the vetoes, and the failure to build alliances have all done little to endear us to our closest allies in the EU. There was the 2011 veto, which achieved nothing, but which upset our fellow EU member states; Cameron’s failure to see that an increased bill from the EU was coming; his utter humiliation over the nomination of Jean-Claude Juncker; his insistence on pulling the Conservatives out of the EPP and reducing their political influence; his failure to present a comprehensive and clear view of what he wants to see in a reformed European Union. If this exercise was an attempt to pacify Tory Back-Benchers, it has back-fired. They do not want an objective assessment of the usefulness of EU— they want out, irrespective of the damage to our economy.
The question is: will the public and political parties be swayed by fact or emotion on the EU issue? If the public can be persuaded by fact, this will be a useful report. My hunch, however, is that, as Gordon Brown suggested yesterday, we need to appeal not just to the head but to the heart on the EU, and we need to make the emotional and patriotic case to remain a part of that great institution.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for his work as Minister during this period and for injecting a note of sanity into the issue of the EU within the coalition.
8.58 pm
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD): My Lords, it is very good to hear a number of complimentary remarks at the outset of this debate. However, it sounded rather as if I was about to retire from the House and everything else as well. I do not intend to retire yet, thank you. Perhaps, like others, I hope to do so when I reach my 80th birthday—that is a hint to various other people who are not here.
This was a coalition exercise. It was agreed in the coalition agreement, and it was no secret that the two parties disagreed and had different approaches to Europe. This was set up as a means to find some common ground in the detailed evidence as to what stakeholders thought. We agreed that we would not produce policy recommendations at the end, because that would have been difficult—the two parties have widely differing approaches, or at least we do from the right wing of the Conservative Party. We therefore set out to provide an evidence basis for a more informed debate on the European Union. In that respect I think that we have been successful. I pay tribute to my Conservative colleagues in this exercise—David Lidington, who chaired the ministerial Star Chamber throughout, and Mark Hoban and then Mark Harper, who also
took part. I thank the good-quality teams from the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office who supported us throughout.
I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, that we did not leave publication until the last minute. The reports came out in four groups at six-monthly intervals, so this has been a two-year process. We are grateful that the weight of evidence has grown as we have gone on. Interest among stakeholders has therefore been sustained throughout that two-year period. There were some 2,300 submissions, and we held a whole range of meetings and seminars—across the United Kingdom, in Brussels and elsewhere—with substantial participation from the Community institutions, and other member states and governments.
Sadly, we heard rather little from the Eurosceptic side. I must, as I always do, pay a real compliment to the quality of the evidence produced by Open Europe throughout the whole process. The TaxPayers’ Alliance loyally put in a large amount of evidence, which was not, I think, always as expert as it hoped it would be. I said to one of my Conservative colleagues at one stage, “Why do we not have more evidence from the committed Eurosceptic side?”, to which he replied, “For heaven’s sake, William, these people are not really interested in evidence. It’s belief; it’s faith; it’s prejudice”.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine: My noble friend will, of course, be aware that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, was meant to speak in this debate, but then decided he was not going to. I made the effort to go through almost all the reports, including the parts on those people’s pet subjects—agriculture, the budget, fisheries and so on. Does my noble friend agree that they did not contribute a shred of evidence on the issues that they continue to go on about in this House and outside?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire: That is exactly the point. We have heard the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, being, it seems to me, cavalier with the evidence on many occasions in this House in recent years. I am sorry that he is not here, but I am not entirely surprised that he is not prepared to stand up and argue the evidence carefully with others when a lot of careful evidence is in place.
Following the slightly partisan speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, I can tell her that one of my roles as this process went on was to keep the Labour leadership informed of what we were doing and encourage them to engage. I have to say that most of my interlocutors in the Labour Party were hiding in the long grass themselves. I welcome the Labour Party’s final commitment to the importance of staying in the European Union. It has been a certain time coming over the past three years, but it is very good that the Labour position is now clear. We look forward to the Labour Party spelling out its approach in rather more detail.
This exercise provides the basis for a reform agenda. We have the contributions of a wide range of businesses and business organisations, academics and various other bodies. It was interesting to me that the most negative evidence from business came from small business
associations few of whose members export—those who therefore, obviously, have the least interest in the European single market. Some seem to have the impression that if we got rid of European regulation we would have no regulation at all, without understanding that we would then need to have national regulation, or to accept other international frameworks for regulation.
We have all learned a great deal from this process. Of the consistent themes that have come out of it, the first was the idea that although we talk about completing the single market, we shall never do that, because the single market changes as we go along. We did not have to worry about a digital single market 20 years ago, whereas now it is one of the central issues with which we are concerned. As new technologies and new services develop, clearly we must continue to move on.
Secondly, the European Union is not just the international body to which we belong and do not want to belong to, it is embedded in an intricate network of international organisations such as the OECD, the Bank for International Settlements and the World Health Organization, of which the European Union is almost a regional organisation. If Britain were to leave the European Union, that network of international organisations would still constrain us. Globalisation means that Britain has to pool a great deal of its sovereignty, and the European Union provides a very good way of sharing that within a relatively transparent and friendly network.
We also discovered—this was a common theme across many of the reports—that the Commission has often been much too enthusiastic in proposing legislation without being sufficiently concerned about its impact, implementation or enforcement. I am happy to say that that is beginning to change. I hope that we have contributed to that. Impact assessments are the flavour of the year in Brussels, both in the European Parliament and the Commission, and Frans Timmermans and others are very clear that the Commission should be careful about the weight of the new proposals it puts through.
Another common theme concerned the tendency of the Court of Justice of the European Union to support integrationist cases and to pay insufficient attention to subsidiarity and proportionality. I think that is also changing, although I may say that, of the 32 reports, the report on subsidiarity and proportionality is, I suspect, the most widely read in other countries as this is a key topic which many of us do not fully understand the European Union has to take fully on board.
The reports stand by themselves. We did not intend to have policy conclusions; they are to be dug out to inform the debate and to make sure that those who deny the situation as we have found it are properly corrected in debate. We found that the review feeds into the domestic debate, but it is bounded by time. In two or three years’ time, attitudes will be different because the policy priorities will be different. Therefore, I am not sure that we necessarily want to embed all this in stone. However, we hope that it provides a basis for what may or may not be a referendum debate in 2017.
One report—the fisheries report—provided an alternative model that might be used on competence, involving European regulation or less European regulation. Perhaps we might have tried that out in one or two other reports, but the evidence that came in did not support it.
I think that the least anticipated outcome of the review was the rising level of interest and engagement across other member states. It has been very impressive. For example, I am told that the French department of transport is now using the transport report and that it is one of the things new recruits read. There are a whole set of discussions. On various occasions I was detailed to phone Ministers in other Governments and was happily surprised to discover that senior Ministers in other Governments had at least read the summaries of the reports. There have been contributions from a number of other Governments. The French parliament’s Senate committee is now conducting its own review. I could go on at length about how many other Governments have drawn lessons from what they see as a particularly valuable and detailed review of the current state of competences, which feeds into the British Government’s reform agenda.
I stress that the reform agenda is a continuing process. Reform is not something that you start and then finish. As we have operated over the last three years, the fisheries regime has been changed quite substantially. The budget has continued to change in emphasis, with more going to scientific research and less going to agriculture. We are in no doubt that we will continue to press that reform agenda.
The Foreign Secretary has so far visited 24 of the other 27 capitals and he is discussing the UK’s reform ideas and finding a lot of like-minded Governments who have similar approaches to strengthening the role of national Parliaments, making sure that new regulations are entirely justified and investigating the subsidiarity and proportionality issues. They ask: do we need to do this at the European level or can we leave sufficient flexibility at the national level? This has fed into the British debate, the wider European debate and the Commission’s agenda in terms of the need for better consultation, more attention to impact assessment and all of that area.
I am clear that this has been an extremely valuable exercise. I will say in passing to the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, that the relationship between the European Union and the Council of Europe is a matter for another time. The Council of Europe, which includes Russia, is not at the moment in the easiest state to deal with peacekeeping issues and other such matters. The EU itself, for security reasons, is becoming even more valuable for the UK than before.
What we have done, over the last year and more, as these reports have been absorbed in other national capitals, is to make progress on our continuing reform agenda. We look forward to doing that, whoever becomes the next Government—whichever parties form the next Government. I have said to some of my Conservative friends that I expect we might have to be a caretaker Government for some time in May, while the Conservatives and the SNP negotiate.
There is a basis here for an intelligent discussion. We have made an impression, not only on the debate here, on the readiness of Whitehall and on the willingness and expertise of the various business associations that have fed in, but we have also affected the debate in
Brussels and around the European Union. That seems to me to be a great success and worth doing in itself. I am very glad that the European Affairs Committee will take this on from here.