European Union (Amendment) Bill

This is an important amendment, based on the report from the Constitution Committee, which those of us on the European Union Committee read with great interest. Indeed, we have listened today with interest to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad. As the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, said, last week we were able to get useful evidence from the Lord President. We were most grateful to her for what she said on that occasion. However, it is important to look carefully at these instruments on which the Government will be deciding to opt in. In some respects, they are like any other European Union instruments and it will therefore be appropriate for them to go through the scrutiny process like any other instrument on any other area of European Union policy before a decision is made in the Council. The particularity of these instruments, however, is that the UK will participate in negotiations only if it decides to opt into them. The question is, therefore, what arrangements should be made to deal with them. Noble Lords may have seen on page 165 of its impact assessment report that the European Union Committee suggested that we needed to think of a more systematic approach to deal with opt-ins than had been undertaken in the past—we have had opt-ins for some time, of course. That was the subject of our discussions with the Lord President last week. The Lord President agreed that it would be important for us to begin scrutiny as soon as possible after the arrival of the instrument. I hope that that process, whereby the European Union Committee would carry out its own inquiry and give its conclusions to the Government, would contribute to their decision on whether to opt in. We would be making a contribution at that stage of an important parliamentary kind. It would also be possible, as always, for the committee to make a report for debate in the House, either at that stage or after the Government had made their decision on whether to opt in. There are various options available to Parliament in considering how to deal with these European instruments, which will come to us in the future as they have in the past. One option—this may be to misinterpret the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad—would be an affirmative resolution procedure alone. An alternative would be a scrutiny process, which could be either the normal scrutiny process, as is the case with every other instrument, or a scrutiny process followed by some other form of parliamentary procedure. That is for the House to consider with some care. However, from my experience of European Union Committee work, I believe that it would be a great pity if the House were to make its decision purely on the basis of a relatively short debate, either in the House or in Grand Committee, without having had the scrutiny process. Therefore, I hope that we will hear from the noble Lord, Lord Goodland, that that was not his intention in the amendment. We would also be interested to hear from the Lord President how the Government see these matters and how far they feel that it is possible for us to involve Parliament effectively in the consideration of these important instruments.