1 UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT of ORAL EVIDENCE to Be Published
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1 UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 711-vi HOUSE OF COMMONS ORAL EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE THE EUROPEAN SCRUTINY COMMITTEE EUROPEAN SCRUTINY IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS WEDNESDAY 13 FEBRUARY 2013 MS GISELA STUART MP Evidence heard in Public Questions 248 - 278 USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT 1. This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others. 2. Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings. 3. Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant. 4. Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee. 1 Oral Evidence Taken before the European Scrutiny Committee on Wednesday 13 February 2013 Members present: Mr William Cash (Chair) Michael Connarty Julie Elliott Kelvin Hopkins Chris Kelly Penny Mordaunt Jacob Rees-Mogg Henry Smith ________________ Examination of Witness Witness: Ms Gisela Stuart MP, Member, Select Committee on Defence, and Chair, PLP Departmental Group for Defence, gave evidence. Q248 Chair: Thank you very much for coming. I will ask the first questions. What, in your opinion, are the strengths and weaknesses of the scrutiny system in the House of Commons? Secondly, to park the question, if you had to choose a scrutiny system from elsewhere in the EU, what would you choose and why? Ms Stuart: I was looking up in the dictionary the word “scrutiny”, to put it in context, and it had at the bottom of it the phrase, “It rhymes with mutiny”. I thought, well, that’s the weakness of it; you can scrutinise but you cannot have a mutiny, in the sense that you can observe but your actions have no, or very little, consequences. In the parliamentary process, when a Secretary of State comes in front of you he or she will have made a decision they will have to defend—even if they are in a coalition, there is a kind of trail of their own decision making that can be challenged—whereas in the European sphere, Ministers will come in front of you having done some trading with 26 other members, and in a sense you very rarely are allowed or able to unravel those kinds of things. It is a fundamental political weakness, which has to do with the institution. As for its strength, if you believe, as I do, that democracy is a system of government by explanation, you would probably go further. Few other systems really go through things with such care and attention to explain the things for those who are willing to listen. There is a problem that there are very few people out there willing to listen, but that is quite another subject. The system I like most I do not think we could operate, and it is a kind of combination between the Finns and the Dutch. The Finns will have a determined slot, which is regular, where everybody turns up—I have been to some of their sessions—and the Dutch bring the MEPs much more into their systems as well, which I think is a weakness; it is a kind of dialogue where a major partner is missing. Most continental governments are coalition governments. We are just beginning to experience coalition government, and I speak for myself here but I do not wish this to become a particular British tradition; I am quite happy with not having coalition governments. However, countries that tend to have a history of coalition governments bring in their 2 Parliament at a much earlier stage. The only final observation I would make is that I would be very much against Parliament mandating its Ministers as they go into negotiations, for reasons I would be happy to explain. Q249 Kelvin Hopkins: Our current process begins with a sift, by this Committee, of European Union documents, according to their legal and political importance, advised by our excellent advisers. How aware are Members and others of this work, and what use is made in the House of the information in the reports and on our website? Ms Stuart: I am right in assuming that you still meet in private for those? Kelvin Hopkins: Yes. Ms Stuart: That adds to the problem: even if there were anybody out there willing to listen, they cannot observe you, and I think that is a problem. To be brutally honest, I do not think people are very much aware of the work you are doing. The evidence for that is probably best demonstrated when we have debates on the Floor of the House. We all know each other so well, those who take part, and we could probably write each other’s speeches as well. There is very little new blood coming into the debate. Just to give you one example, recently I sat on one of the EU Committees and we looked at one of the documents: it was quite clear that the Front Benchers were not even aware of how those debates really flow, so there is very little awareness and very little appreciation. Q250 Chair: Do you not think that that is the fault of those who do not take an interest? The material is there. It affects so many people in their daily lives—horsemeat might just be one example, but there are so many others—and yet you get this fantastic amount of information about the consequences, but very little engagement in the House by Members who have access to the information, through the Vote Office or whatever. We do the job, but the question is whether in fact people engage with it sufficiently. By the way, you may be interested to know that we had a similar response from the BBC last week, who said, “It is too complicated for people to understand; that is why we do not give it the priority.” Ms Stuart: If I might say so, the problem is that it lacks the drama, the processes are so drawn-out. I negotiated the opt-out of the working time directive for doctors in 1999, as a Health Minister, a process that started in 1992; the decisions and consequences of that started to hit the NHS in a way that people were complaining bitterly about in around 2008-09, 18 years later. At what stage does it hit the news? When it has political consequences. The second thing, which is a fundamental flaw within the system in which we work, is that we have a “delete” button of the political process, and it is called the general election: whenever a Government comes in, you wipe the slate clean and you start anew. The European Commission has no similar process. The only way you can ever kill anything is by negotiating it to death, until it is so diluted or nobody has an interest in it. The Prime Minister, the other day, heralded the conclusions of the patent agreement. I have not checked before, but I think that must have been negotiated for the best part of 25 years, because I remember teaching about the negotiations of the patent agreement when I was a law lecturer in the early 1990s. Chair: Very interesting. Q251 Kelvin Hopkins: I just want to take up one point, Gisela. You talked about meeting in secrecy. The reason we meet in secret, or have private meetings, is that we can take very candid advice from our specialist advisers, and we have these excellent papers prepared every week, in detail. If we did not meet in private, we could not have those papers, none of the information would come out, and we would be as confused as most other 3 Members would be. At least we have this. Is it not possible that the other Members are bemused by all the European issues and they trust us to deal with the details? Ms Stuart: I think they do trust you, but we are all elected politicians here. In all these years, I have never had a single constituent who came up to me on a particular issue that related to a European Union issue about which I could do anything in a Parliamentary context. Q252 Chair: And yet legislation is passed day in, day out here, which is based on European directives, although understandably it is presented as an Act of Parliament implementing matters under Section 2, which you of course understand. When you are asked questions about the application of it in an Act of Parliament, what is really happening is you are asked a question about the European directive, but by then it is already being implemented. Ms Stuart: Even worse, Mr Cash, whenever there is something very contentious, the way out is to delay implementation, just to make absolutely sure that anybody who made that decision is no longer politically accountable for having made it. Q253 Julie Elliott: How effective is the current scrutiny system in non-legislative policy areas, such as common foreign and security policy, and the common security and defence policy? Ms Stuart: It is a very interesting question, because it is the last remaining area of the battle between national parliaments, the European Parliament and the European Union influence.