European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, this is, frankly, a rather strange little amendment. It assumes that we will have already opted in to Article 86 under the protocol on the position of the United Kingdom and Ireland. That is because if we had not opted in by that stage, the Minister would, of necessity, have no part in the adoption of the regulations under Article 86. Frankly, it is very unlikely that any Government of the United Kingdom will wish to opt in to Article 86 in the foreseeable future. Setting up an office of the European Public Prosecutor in the United Kingdom is in my view, and I think that of a large majority of Members of your Lordships’ House, neither necessary nor desirable. The European Public Prosecutor may well have a role to play in some other countries, as suggested by the witness mentioned in chapter six, paragraph 200, of the EU Committee’s report. The simplest way of excluding the European Public Prosecutor from operating in the United Kingdom is simply not to opt in. If the Government wanted to opt in, the best way to provide for parliamentary procedure would have been to require parliamentary consent to the opt-in rather than at the point at which the United Kingdom has to vote on the proposal. But your Lordships’ House has decided today not to require a parliamentary procedure in the Bill for opt-ins under Article 3 of the protocol, which covers opt-ins under Article 86 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union For the reasons given by several speakers in the debate on Amendment No. 25, which I will not repeat, I think that that decision was correct. I therefore see no justification for treating the opt-in to the European Public Prosecutor as requiring any different treatment by imposing a parliamentary process at a subsequent stage.