European Union (Approvals) Bill [Lords]

Chris Heaton-Harris Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)]

I hope not to detain the House for long, but I wish to make a couple of points.

First, in answer to the hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds), we are having this debate because we foresaw, during the passage of the European Union Act 2011, issues that might or might not be controversial but that would be worthy of proper scrutiny on the Floor of the House. We rarely divided on that Bill on the Floor of the House because we wanted to ensure proper scrutiny of things being done in our name at the EU level. In today’s Bill we see the provisions of the 2011 Act coming through. On the comparison with tax credits, I understand where he is coming from, but it could be argued that previous changes to tax credits have been introduced under statutory instruments. However, we foresaw this coming, so we amended the European Union Act, as it was then, to make sure that we could scrutinise these sorts of matters on the Floor of the House. These two examples are not the world’s most exciting, but we will see more and more such measures coming forward, and we will have more and more time to talk about them.

I have visited Macedonia and I am a fan of the country. Having been a Member of the European Parliament, I have seen how a neighbouring country has done everything it can to stop the Macedonian accession to the European Union, and I have seen what Macedonia itself has achieved, taking massive strides forward towards EU membership. I am pleased that Macedonia has been able to become an observer in the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.

My only concern relating to the Bill and Macedonian entry is that the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights has come out of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, which had unbelievably difficult financial and administrative problems in the past. I would like to check with the Minister every now and again to ensure that the past problems of that organisation—which were responsible, among other things, for its name change—have been completely turned around so that the agency does what it is meant to do, without duplicating other problems.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend define “observer” for me? Does it mean the EU observes Macedonia or Macedonia observes the EU in respect of human rights, for example? I would like to know exactly what “observer” means.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

It is a bit of both. The agency has the following main tasks:

“to collect, analyse and disseminate…objective, reliable and comparative information”

related to the situation of fundamental rights in the EU;

“to formulate and publish conclusions and opinions on specific thematic topics…on its own initiative or at the request of the European Parliament, the Council or the Commission”;

and it is also about

“the promotion of dialogue with civil society…to raise public awareness of fundamental rights”.

A debate is going on in this country about where those rights should lie, what sort of legislation should exist in relation to them and who should police them. Macedonia has had that debate in its own Parliament, has applied to join this agency and is willing to pay appropriations to it. I do not see why we should step in its way. As I have said, there have been problems with the agency in the past, but it serves an important function in that member states’ voting rights could be suspended, based on the findings of any of its reports. The agency has teeth in no uncertain terms, and it has a decent operating budget of over €20 million a year. Macedonia has made its own choice, and it is right for it to go down that route if it chooses to do so.

I want to speak briefly about the draft decision on a tripartite social summit for growth and employment. There is a new Council decision, following Lisbon, that allows the number of meetings to be increased from one to two a year, and allows the President of the European Council to attend. The European Commission is allowed to host and facilitate meetings, so there should not be too much of a cost to it. My questions are more about the direction of travel of this organisation, its duplication, its purpose in being and whether we can raise questions about what it does.

This is not the European Economic and Social Committee, whose abolition I have called for in the past because of the huge costs for members belonging to one of the three groups of employers, employees and various other interests. The employers group comprises businessmen, people from certain business lobbies; the workers group comprises members from 80 trade unions mostly affiliated to the European Trade Union Confederation; while the third group is made up of lobbies from civil society. Most of those groups are paid for by the European Commission to lobby it in different ways to get the Commission to do more. Many European countries have a national version. However, the organisation I am talking about is not that. It is a separate beast.

One important question is who are the EU’s social partners? A list of social partners organisations consulted under article 154 of the treaty of the functioning of the European Union includes Business Europe. Business Europe is quite an interesting organisation. Unsurprisingly, it has a particular view on the referendum we might be having here. It gets a small sum of money, nearly €457,000, as payment under a grant received for a project running over a couple of years, of which the total budgeted cost was €1.2 million. The members of Business Europe include our CBI—it is one of the ways in which the UK CBI receives some money from the European Union. It includes other organisations such as the European Trade Union Confederation, which I mentioned previously and which received €4 million from European institutions, spending over €1 million lobbying the EU.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Given the sums that the hon. Gentleman mentions, is it not possible that these organisations will be more kindly disposed towards the EU—simply because they have received such substantial sums?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I would like to think that they would not be. If I were a leading light in the CBI or the ETUC, I would want to make sure of being in a position whereby I would not be accused of being biased in one way or the other. Receiving money from the European Commission that is then spent lobbying the EU to do things—whether it be business organisations lobbying for liberalisation or trade union organisations lobbying for workers’ rights or whatever—seems almost like manufacturing a market in this area.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Just recently, there has been something of a controversy about the BBC receiving some millions of pounds from the European Union for educational purposes—no doubt educating us all about the wonders of the EU. Does the hon. Gentleman not think that if organisations that are supposed to be independent and impartial take large sums of money from the EU, it might have some influence on them?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

Again, I would like to think not. I follow what the hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friends have been doing on the European Scrutiny Committee. There has been a long and ongoing dialogue with the BBC, as I know because I was a member of the Committee over the last five years running up to the mandate of this Parliament. I hesitate to look in the direction of my Scottish National party colleagues, because I have a feeling they might have a view on partiality and the BBC when it comes to certain matters.

[Alex Salmond (Gordon) (SNP)]

Listening to the hon. Gentleman, I am wondering whether the BBC finds it more difficult when an organisation such as the European Commission gives it money or, in respect of human rights, when money is taken away, as is being done by the UK Government?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)]

Order. In talking about the BBC, we are straying quite far from debating a narrow Bill.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

Forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker, as I did rather provoke reaction from my SNP colleagues, because I wanted to prove the point that when questions are raised about the partiality of an organisation, either through its funding or its actions, it could devalue that organisation’s input into something important, such as a European referendum.

Let me return to the point about who our EU social partners are in this dialogue that we are facilitating through the Bill. As I have said, in 2014 the European Trade Union Confederation received €4 million from EU institutions and spent more than €1 million of that money lobbying those same EU institutions on legislation. In 2013 the CEEP—the European Centre of Employers and Enterprises providing Public Services—spent €120,000 lobbying the European Union and received €155,000 from the EU’s directorate-general for employment.

I question the added value of the dialogue at the tripartite social summit for growth and employment. Like many things in the European Union, its title is motherhood and apple pie. Who could possibly be against a tripartite social summit for growth and employment? However, if it delivers very little and if the only people who attend it and talk to the European Commission are actually paid by the Commission to do so, that will be a significant issue because the conversation will simply go round in ever-decreasing circles.

The EU social partners have agreed to a number of things in the recent past, and they wish to discuss important matters. They have agreed to

“negotiate an autonomous framework agreement on active ageing and an inter-generational approach”.

That is obviously something we need to discuss at a national level, not to mention the European level. They have also agreed to

“step up efforts to improve the implementation of their autonomous framework agreements, with a specific focus on the 8-10 Member States where the implementation has been identified as insufficient”.

This group is going to lobby for more European regulation and harsher implementation of directives.

The social partners’ work programme also notes that they have agreed to

“highlight the importance of more public and private investments”—

I imagine that Labour Members would like to have a conversation about that, especially given their new leadership—

“in order to reach an optimal growth, to boost job creation and to revive EU industrial base”.

The joint working programme also wants to “prepare joint conclusions” on things that we would all wish to see, including

“promoting better reconciliation of work, private and family life and gender equality to reduce the gender pay gap”.

I cannot believe that any Member of this House would not want to achieve that. However, given that the European Commission pays indirectly for this group of people to turn up once every six months to talk about these things, and given that they have already done so for quite some time without any concrete achievements—in fact, some of those ideals may have gone into reverse during that time—perhaps we should question the validity of supporting such a social summit for growth and employment.

Another of the work programme objectives—this did not become controversial until quite recently—is to

“contribute to the efforts of the EU institutions to develop a mobility package, to address loopholes and enforcement issues on worker mobility and to promote mobility of apprenticeships.”

This country is currently having a debate about mobility and, indeed, the freedom of movement of workers and others. It is interesting that we are promoting such a debate—our European partners are also having a big debate on the very same issue—while at the same time funding a summit of the worthy and the good to discuss the same thing.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

The great constitutionalist, Walter Bagehot, said that there are two parts to the constitution: the decorative and the effective. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the body under discussion is one of the more decorative rather than effective parts of the EU constitution?

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I probably do, yes. I hate to beat around the bush: I do not think it is worth funding this organisation. It is duplication for duplication’s sake. Given the number of other direct opportunities available to the bodies that will attend the summit to influence the thinking of the European Commission, member states and others, I really do question the value of the group. Obviously, that is why I am on my feet asking the Minister why it is, when we have an opportunity to prevent duplication and to prevent some of the European budget from being spent, we do not actually take it.

I want to ask a number of questions along those lines. Article 152 of the treaty on the functioning of the European Union states that the EU will set up the social dialogue while respecting the autonomy of the organisations, but can those organisations and bodies that attend the summit truly be autonomous when they are funded by the EU? Will they not be a taxpayer-funded echo chamber?

What authority has the EU had until now if the former decision on hosting summits was based on an old article treaty? Article 152 states that the EU should respect the “diversity of national systems”. Given that our national system does not include such summits, can the Government guarantee that the outcome of the meetings will not have an effect on the European Commission’s work programme—in other words, the very programme to which the summit wants to provide input? Is there an estimate of how much the six-monthly meetings will cost, and will the UK choose to host them when it takes over the presidency of the EU in 2017?

The Commission’s directorate-general for employment, social affairs and inclusion has regular dialogue with all the parties that will attend the summit, and there are other EU bodies that do exactly the same thing. When voting on such matters, this place has been almost unanimously in favour of cutting the duplication of European spending. We need to make sure that this country’s massive contribution to the European Commission and Europe is spent more wisely. Given that I have some form in this area—I was a Member of the European Parliament for 10 years and raised many budgetary questions about the issues under discussion—I question the value of approving the Bill.