EU Council

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, I will make two points in response. First, my noble friend is right to point to a growing disaffection across Europe with the institutions and processes of the European Union. One of the things that many people are trying to work for is to bring the work of the Union more into contact with the everyday concerns of the citizens of Europe and overcome this growing democratic deficit as people call it. That is something that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister would say he is seeking to pursue by arguing against measures that would affect British businesses, choke off growth and all the rest of it.

Regarding the point about telephones, as my noble friend knows, he will not tempt me to comment in any detail on the work of our intelligence services. The leaders at the Council issued a statement after a great deal of thought in connection with the issue he raised and that has set out a way and a process in which the French and the Germans will talk to the Americans about what may or may not have gone on.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville (Con)]

My Lords, paragraph 10 of the European Council conclusions that accompanied this Statement stated that the EU was in 2011 faced with 300,000 unfilled vacancies in the ICT sector. It added that if this trend was not checked there could be 900,000 unfilled vacancies in the sector by 2015. Could my noble friend contemplate covering a domestic omission in this Statement by putting in the Library a breakdown of the UK’s statistics within these EU-wide figures?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I am afraid, my Lords, I do not know the basis for the calculation made by the EU and whether it was based on data drawn from individual member states. If there are any data I can find I will, of course, let my noble friend have them, but I cannot say with any certainty what the basis of that calculation was.