European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, as a member of the European Union Committee, I thank the Lord President for what she has done over the past weeks to find a solution that seems to be widely acceptable to the House. As she will know, as well as the reference in the report of the Constitution Committee, paragraph 6.275 of the report on the Lisbon treaty by the European Union Committee, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, draws attention to the lack so far of any systematic scrutiny of opt-ins or opt-outs in the House and suggests that there is a need for us to work on that. We should congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, and the Constitution Committee on tabling the amendment, because we have been able to move far faster on this as a result of that and of the consequent concentration of minds than we might otherwise have expected. We now have a set of proposals before the House, although we do not have the important scrutiny reserve resolution that we will see at a subsequent stage. I take a different view from that of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lyell, in that I see an important difference between these instruments and the passerelles. These instruments are of a special kind, on which the United Kingdom has to decide whether to opt in or opt out, but they are much closer to other instruments that come before the scrutiny committee. Here I agree strongly with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, that we want a scrutiny-plus system, as we have established here, rather than something that runs in parallel with the passerelle system, the Clause 6 provisions. It is important that we should be able to carry out scrutiny within this period of six weeks, then two weeks and 10 days, which would give us up to eight weeks, and then have an opportunity, if the European Union Committee felt it appropriate, to bring to the House the instrument that could be opted in to. I suppose that there could be occasions on which the Government would announce that they were not going to opt in, but the committee felt that noble Lords ought to be given an opportunity to consider whether or not they would want to recommend that course. The thing could work in more than one way in a debate. As the noble Baroness said in introducing her proposals, what is important is that almost every debate from the European Union Committee comes to the House on a Motion to take note—that is, the Motion is not amendable. This would be scrutiny-plus because, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, pointed out, it makes it absolutely clear that these would be amendable take-note Motions. It would be up to Members of the House—not the committee—if they so wished to table an amendment so that the House could express its view; indeed, that would be similar to the provision in another place. It would be surprising if, in those circumstances, when either or both Houses had expressed a clear view against a particular position, the Government would go ahead with it. Technically, the Government would not be bound, but there would be a significant political constraint. I believe, therefore, that we have found a satisfactory solution to this. I end by thanking the Leader of the House for the amount of time that she has spent with her officials on finding the solution. We are anxious to see the scrutiny reserve resolution and we note that it is to be amendable, so if we are not satisfied it will be possible to have a further debate and, indeed, to make a change. In the mean time, I believe that we have a satisfactory solution and that it is therefore not necessary to support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad.