European Union (Amendment) Bill

moved Amendment No. 14: 14: After Clause 3, insert the following new Clause— ““Cost-benefit analysis (1) The Secretary of State shall lay before Parliament a report on— (a) the economic costs and benefits to the United Kingdom of implementing the provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon, and (b) a comparison of the economic costs and benefits of the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union before and after the implementation of the provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon. (2) Within one month of the laying of the report, a Minister of the Crown shall move a motion in each House of Parliament that the House approves the report. (3) In subsection (2), the reference to ““one month”” does not include any period of time in which the House in question is dissolved, prorogued or in recess for a period of more than four days.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, I fear that this amendment is yet another attempt to get the Government to carry out a detailed cost-benefit analysis of our membership of the European Union, and while we are at it, it would be nice to know if the Conservative Party has come round to the idea of supporting such an exercise. Noble Lords may recall that I have introduced three Bills over recent years with the same aim, which we debated on 8 June last year, 27 June 2003 and 17 March 2000. This amendment is drawn somewhat more narrowly than those Bills in that it applies only to the economic costs and benefits of our EU membership, whereas they cover the cost to our sovereignty and powers of self-government as well. The Government have always refused an official cost-benefit analysis on the wholly unjustified grounds that the benefits of our EU membership are so wondrous and obvious that it would be a waste of time. I expect that they will say the same thing tonight. However, the true and obvious reason why they refuse it is that they fear it would reveal the unacceptably high cost we bear from being in the European Union and the result would be so disastrous as to make their precious policy of staying in the EU untenable. In the absence of such an official analysis there have been several respectable private academic studies over the past five years, which put the cost of our EU membership at anything between 5 and 10 per cent of GDP, or roughly some £50 billion to £100 billion per annum. All the studies agree that the main elements of cost are the higher price we pay for food as a result of the common agricultural policy, the hard cash we hand over annually to Brussels and the effect of EU overregulation. If we accept the EU’s own figure for the latter—that is, overregulation alone—we come to some 6.5 per cent of GDP, which has been estimated by the Competition Commissioner Günter Verheugen. If we accept that, we are at the top end of the studies that I have mentioned. It probably is the dead hand of Brussels bureaucracy that causes most of the harm, especially when compared with the new free economies of the East. One thinks of such tragedies as the decimation of our fishing industry, the flight of our art market to New York and Geneva and the impending damage to the City of London caused by the EU’s financial services action plan. It is not just swivel-eyed British Eurosceptics who suggest that the EU membership is hugely expensive. Only last week in Ireland, Mr McCready, the commissioner, admitted that some 80 per cent of all legislation now affecting British businesses comes from the European Union.