European Union (Amendment) Bill

I made a declaration of interest at the start of the Committee stage and I do not think I need to repeat it now. I know that the noble Lord who moved this amendment is a bold noble Lord, and it is certainly very bold indeed to strike out of the Bill the entire budgetary powers of an elected parliament, which would be the consequence of the amendment, although he has spoken on some other matters. The European Parliament has had powers over the setting of the budget for many years, and I am one of those who believe that the changes proposed are an improvement. Part of the problem in the past has been that agriculture expenditure is too high. It has been under the control of the Council, and over many years agriculture Ministers have determined a very large part of that expenditure. In the amended system, they will not be able to do that on their own. I think that that is very satisfactory. The budgetary role of the Parliament is only part of the steady increase in the democratically elected Parliament’s control of legislation and the budget over many years. Originally it was largely advisory, and the role in setting the budget, as the noble Lord pointed out, was strictly limited by the exclusion of the so-called obligatory expenditure, principally on agriculture and largely out of the control of the European Parliament. In earlier treaties the European Parliament increased its responsibility as co-decider on legislation over a much wider range of matters. I would say that those changes have now been largely completed, and if the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified, almost all legislation and the budget will be decided jointly by the elected representatives of the people in the Parliament and the representatives of the member states in the Council. Over a period of time that is likely to lead to a greater sense of financial discipline and the allocation of resources in a better way. In my view, for democratic reasons it is surely right to support the change in the decision-making procedure on the EU budget, and it is worth noting that when the Ministers controlled it, we all said that expenditure on agriculture was far too high. That will be changed by a change in procedure. While we know that agriculture takes over 40 per cent of the budget, I would like to stress that the figure does not really paint a complete picture of the budget of the European Union as part of the total public expenditure of the member states in their national budgets. The figures are striking and I think that they should be brought out. Certainly for the past 20 years, the European Union budget, which we are discussing in this amendment, has represented about 2 per cent of the public expenditure of the member states of the Union. The published figure for 2006 showed that the EU budget represented 2.1 per cent of member states’ general government expenditure, the remaining 97.9 per cent being spent by member states on education, health, welfare, defence and the many other elements of public expenditure that we know all about. In the Lisbon treaty, as I said earlier, the European Parliament will take over responsibility jointly with the member states and the Council for European Union agricultural expenditure. This is important and I think it is an improvement, but I would like to make it clear that what we are talking about represents only around 1 per cent of member states’ total public expenditure. I do not think that we should delete from the Bill, as proposed in this amendment, the budgetary responsibilities of the European Parliament.