EU Financial Management

While I speak on behalf of the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru, I want to make a number of points not yet raised from the perspective of the European Scrutiny Committee, on which I sit. Notwithstanding the sensible point made by the Minister about much of the problem that we have discussed being the fault of the member states, and notwithstanding the excellent point made by the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr. Taylor) about the scale of fraud being less than that of benefit fraud in the United Kingdom, we agree across the House that some serious issues need to be dealt with when we consider the situation, warts and all. The context of the fraud should not be overlooked. A series of senior officials involved in audit and financial management have suffered personally—a point I made to the Minister earlier in an intervention. Those are people who brought maladministration and financial mismanagement to light, and they cannot all be publicity seeking cranks. There are serious questions about the governance of OLAF, which was, as hon. Members will recall, instrumental in bringing about the arrest and detention of one Mr. Hans-Martin Tillack, a Stern journalist who had published articles critical of financial management in the Commission. According to evidence given to our sister Committee in the Lords in 2004 by the chairman of the OLAF supervisory committee, that raid was triggered by hearsay evidence from one informant in the public relations office of the Commission, and a witness thought that any normal person would have to say that OLAF was"““probably trying to get back at this man””." That is not an isolated case, because similar events have occurred in a series of cases. The fraud issue is serious and improvements need to be made. The financial changes outlined by the Minister are supposed to be integral to the Commission’s reform programme. That matter was discussed in the European Scrutiny Committee only last week, when the Government’s reaction was described as ““supine and unquestioning””, which is a serious comment. The hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) has said that he is content with the standard of benchmarking, but the Committee does not think that the Commission’s benchmarking proposals on the reform programme are adequate. In particular, the Committee has noted"““the almost complete absence of any quantification of the results said to have been achieved, and even of any kind of external independent evaluation.””" The Government need to raise that serious shortcoming in the Council of Ministers. On the budget being qualified for 11 consecutive years, it is ludicrous that the Commission aspires to becoming ““a leader”” in the field of public sector financial management, because it has a long way to go. The situation is unacceptable and it must be addressed. In the previous Parliament, the European Scrutiny Committee pointed out the weaknesses in protection in the revised EC staff regulations for officials bringing maladministration and wrongdoing to the attention of EU institutions and the public. The Minister would be right to say that the situation in the EU institutions compares unfavourably with the rule in the civil service in the UK, where a protected disclosure could be made by any Minister of the Crown. The UK Government can and should do something in the Council of Ministers, and they should not respond to such documents in a way that Committee members from both sides of the political divide have described as ““supine and unquestioning””. I am not Eurosceptic—I believe passionately in the European Union, I am in favour of the reform of the European Union and my position on the common fisheries policy is well known in this House. However, unless we examine the challenges, describe them for what they are and do something about them, we will have the same debate for another 11 years, in which case trust in the EU institutions, which are worthy, will continue to plummet.