European Union (Amendment) Bill

I know of the report that the hon. Gentleman mentions and I was not going to go into the detail of it. The variety of systems reflects the capacity of as well as the interest from those countries in the way they deliver their own scrutiny. I want to finish by referring to a number of the services that I believe should be considered services of special interest. That is the way Europe is going. I referred earlier to Professor Sir David Edwards, who was a European Court of Justice judge and is now a senior figure in legal and academic circles in Scotland. He made it clear—again, this was a voluntary statement; he was not pressed by a question—on Friday at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law conference that the protocol on services of special interest would, for example, have prevented the forced tender process in which Caledonian MacBrayne had to win the right to deliver a ferry service to the islands of Scotland. He saw many other examples. Health and other services should be argued for strongly by the Government to prevent any attempt to interfere. Another case was in the Netherlands, where social housing was declared to be against competition policy. That has to be challenged under the protocol on services of special interest. If it was built for a specific social purpose, it should be defended as a social service, like the ferry service to the islands. On mandating, we have the best system of the non-mandating countries. There is no doubt about that; we talk to people as we go around all 27 member states and those who aspire to come into the EU. We have a good system that is developing and improving. Departments are responding better in terms of reports. We have many suggestions on how we move forward:, possibly by taking evidence in pre-Council scrutiny; possibly by taking evidence from a Minister before they go to the Council. The Prime Minister would be outwith that, but another suggestion would be to use the draft conclusions of the Council that the Prime Minister attends as a public document for scrutiny. We can develop this a long way, but I am not sure that we need to go all the way to mandating. How do we mandate? How would the European Scrutiny Committee be mandated? Finland gives its Grand Committee the right to discuss with the Prime Minister what he will discuss in the Council, using the draft conclusions. It does not do that publicly; it does not tell the rest of Parliament—it is trusted to do that. I do not know whether any member of a future Government—that is not a Labour Government—will pick up the telephone and say to the Chairman of the ESC, ““Something has come up in the Council; do you mind if I vote for it?”” I understand, however, that at one point in the Nice treaty negotiations the Finnish Prime Minister was on the phone at 3 am to the Chair of the Grand Committee of the Finnish Parliament to ask, ““Can we agree to this or that as they are different from what we discussed in the Grand Committee?”” What would happen in such circumstances? Suspicion would fall on the ESC; some would think that, because of pressure applied by various means through the usual channels, the ESC was letting the Government get away with murder, and there would be disquiet in the House. Therefore, as the ESC is currently getting so many accolades, I am not attracted to the mandating system.