European Union (Amendment) Bill

The debate has reminded me of my 15 years as a member of both the Budget Committee and the Budgetary Control Committee in the European Parliament. It has reminded me of one of the happier moments—the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, referred to this—when the budget was rejected and we went on to provisional twelfths. It was quite remarkable how, just before the summer holidays, the rational European Parliament realised how much in pay and allowances was being stored up by provisional twelfths. I am sure that it had a salutary effect on its members to approve the budget just before the break in order to give themselves sufficient resource to go and enjoy it. That was one of the better experiences. The worst was when the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, introduced into the European budgetary debate the question of the juste retour: ““Can I have my money back?””. She completely failed to understand the importance of the non-compulsory expenditure part of the budget to European parliamentarians. That was the money that was being spent on environmental policies, where you did not get your money back but you got a decent European policy; on development assistance in the third world, where, again, you did not get the money back but you did something right and proper for trading relationships in the third world; and on the regional policy that helped countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal to equip themselves to join the European Union. Without those, how much money would we have spent on the defence of the southern flank of NATO without ever mentioning it as public expenditure? The nonsense of the juste retour was one of the worst aspects. I say with absolute clarity to the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, that no one has said in the debate that the European Union budget is insignificant. Any expenditure at that level is always significant. The European Union budget is perhaps the most examined, the most clearly scrutinised, the most pored over part of our public expenditure. If we pored over defence expenditure and got paranoid about the times when the accounts of social security and work and pensions were qualified by the Comptroller and Auditor-General in the same way as we do over this rather mythical refusal to sign off the budget, we would perhaps have a better state of public expenditure. I see the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, has had his instructions from the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, and that it is his turn to intervene.