EU Financial Management

I cannot give the right hon. Gentleman a direct answer, but I can attempt to find that information for him. At this stage, I am not in a position to give him a definitive answer, but I am grateful for his expression of sympathy for my responsibility in this debate. I assure him that there was not a queue of Ministers wishing to lead on these matters. There have been relative improvements in the 2004 audit, but two thirds of the EU budget does not meet acceptable standards. The sum involved is about €68 billion, or £46 billion, but honesty and transparency are required, as the true extent of the problem must be defined. Fraud has taken place—I shall comment on that—but there are also errors or irregularities. If the ECA’s audit leads it to believe that amounts calculated by member states differ in value by more than 2 per cent. from what it assesses to be the correct figure, it cannot give a positive assurance on that part of the budget. That does not mean that the whole budget sector is subject to error—it is still only a relatively small part. We must be careful, too, to distinguish between irregularities, where payments have been made in contravention of the rules, or where it was not possible to show that the correct procedures have been followed, and fraud, where money has clearly been stolen or used for entirely inappropriate purposes. Those issues are examined in detail in the ““Fight against Fraud”” report that was published by the Commission and which incorporates data from the European anti-fraud office—OLAF—to which the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) referred. For the first time, in the 2004 report, OLAF has succeeded in identifying the amount of suspected fraud reported in agriculture and the structural funds. The relevant figures were 13 per cent. of the total agriculture irregularities and 17 per cent. of the irregularities in the structural funds.