European Communities (Finance) Bill

The hon. Gentleman refers to the link or otherwise between the spending decision and the own-resources decision. I shall come to that point in a moment. To return to the result from Brussels, the limit on the cost to the UK of the reduced rebate will end in 2013. Failure to reach agreement on a budget for the period after 2013 would have a devastating effect on the UK contribution, because the rebate reduction would become uncapped. We would have no effective veto, and thus no negotiating power, during negotiations on the EU budget for the period from 2013—and our partners in Europe would know it. There is one further twist to the tale. The Prime Minister, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, put it about that he was against the deal. When it was announced, the Treasury pointedly refused to endorse it and denied all responsibility, because it was worried that the deal would force future spending cuts. According to the Treasury briefing, the current Prime Minister was ““quietly fuming””. What did he do? This April, it became known that having failed to claw back some of the rebate through negotiation, he too had caved in and agreed to accept the original deal—the deal that he had previously condemned. So much for his powers of persuasion on the international stage. That is the sorry tale behind the Bill, although, of course, that could never be discerned from reading it. We, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, whose responsibility is to our electorate and our UK taxpayers, are invited to give the Bill a Second Reading, thus giving effect to what was done—in our name, but in complete contradiction of everything promised to us in this House—at Brussels in December 2005. If we do so, by 2010 the UK taxpayer will be footing the bill for an extra £1.9 billion a year—a sum roughly equivalent, fittingly enough, to the total Foreign Office budget—as a result of the sell-out on the rebate. That is in addition to the increase in the UK contribution to the underlying budget—£1.5 billion a year on average for the period 2007 to 2013—to deal with the cost of enlargement. Taking into account the loss of the UK rebate, which will increase our share of total EU costs, and the growth in the budget during that period, the UK's net contribution will more than double, from £2.8 billion a year on average under the previous financial perspective to an estimated £7.3 billion in 2013.