European Union (Approvals) Bill [Lords]

Debate between Chris Heaton-Harris and Kelvin Hopkins

Tuesday 3rd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

European Union (Finance) Bill

Debate between Chris Heaton-Harris and Kelvin Hopkins

Thursday 11th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

My hon. Friend is completely right about that, so I thought I should also share with the House the gross contribution figures given by the Office for Budget Responsibility in its March 2015 economic and fiscal outlook report. The gross contribution figures were £14.1 billion for 2013-14, £14 billion for 2014-15 and £14 billion for 2015-16. We are talking about massively significant sums and this Bill therefore needs some scrutiny, because it is the one that tells us how the EU budget is funded.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

These annual sums bear a striking similarity to the amount the Chancellor is proposing to cut from welfare spending. I would much prefer to see welfare spending increased and spending on the European budget reduced.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I hope the hon. Gentleman is able to spread that message far and wide across the Opposition Benches. What he says is true: wherever we have a cost in our finances, we make choices in other places. This is a significant sum, but it is one we have chosen to pay over. We must therefore ensure that we allow ourselves, as this decision on the own resources decision rightly does, to keep a check on how our money is being spent.

The European Union Act 2011 requires this House to give approval to own resources decisions. There has always been an Act of Parliament that does that, but the 2011 Act was a good piece of legislation—again, Labour Members came to it late in the process. It allowed greater scrutiny of how the Executive choose to act in European matters; it introduced the referendum lock on certain things; and it made sure that we get a debate on significant matters such as the one before us today. Although we have always had an Act of Parliament in place to do this, I welcome the greater scrutiny.

I should remind hon. Members of what the “own resources” of the European Union actually means. What are these figures for and where do they come from? Well, 12% of the own resources budget is comprised of customs duties, including those on agricultural products; a tiny sum, less than 1%, is sugar levies; there are contributions based on VAT, which comprises about 13%; and the remaining 74% or so is based on gross national income-based contributions. A significant mix of different things goes into our £14 billion gross contribution to the EU.

Actual European spending is set by the annual EU budget, but, as my hon. Friend the Minister said, the annual budget expenditure is governed by the ceilings set by the EU’s multi-annual financial framework. I was pleased to be reminded by him of the good job our Prime Minister did to ensure that the last MFF gave us an unprecedented real-terms cut in EU spending ceilings for 2014 to 2020, which was welcomed by Members on both sides of the House—it was eventually believed by the then Labour economic team.

Unlike the own resources decision, under EU treaties the multi-annual financial framework does not need the national approval of member states in accordance with their conditional requirements. Thus, it is already in force and this Bill deals only with the own resources decision. Alongside the agreement of the new MFF, we had this new own resources decision, which was formally adopted by unanimity by the Council in May 2014, and the Bill approves it for UK purposes. As the Minister said, the rules governing the UK rebate remain unchanged compared with the existing own resources decision. Alas, they do, however, repeat, and this answers a point mentioned earlier by the hon. Member for Luton South—

[Kelvin Hopkins]

North.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I mean the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins). They roll in the old rebate loss that the former Prime Minister Mr Blair negotiated in return for common agricultural policy reform that we never achieved.

I have a couple of questions for the Minister, one of which has been raised previously by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg). The Minister mentioned the minor additional costs that this might bring to us, because there do seem to be some compared with the existing own resources decision. He talked about their being offset by other corrections and I wonder whether he could detail what they are, because I could not find them in the explanatory notes. I also seek clarification on the answer he gave to my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset on the change in the European system of accounts. I did not quite understand the answer and I would appreciate it if he could go into a tiny bit more detail.

I welcome the Bill and the scrutiny it is giving to EU accounts, and I welcome the opportunity to talk about this in greater detail when we go into Committee next week.