Clause 6(1) makes provision for the territorial extent of the Bill. It extends to the whole of the United Kingdom. Subsection (2) indicates the intention that the Bill, should it be granted Royal Assent, will come into force immediately, and subsection (3) provides for the short title.
The purpose of the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) is to delay the entry into force of a specific clause. The amendment would require a motion in both Houses before clause 1, the element of the Bill providing approval for the Croatian accession treaty, could enter into force. I must say plainly to the Committee that in the Government’s view delaying Croatia’s accession to the EU, as proposed in the amendment, would not be helpful to the UK in securing its objectives in EU enlargement policy and it might cause some damage to our interests overall. I intend to respond in detail to the points raised about some of the outstanding questions in respect of Croatia’s progress towards meeting the Commission’s benchmarks in the various accession chapters.
I start by saying that the Government have, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) pointed out earlier, enhanced the role that Parliament has played in the approval of EU decision making through the European Union Act 2011. The Scrutiny Committees in this place and in the other place have also followed the Commission’s monitoring reports on Croatia’s progress towards accession. The Government’s judgment, on the basis both of the Commission’s successive monitoring reports and of our own bilateral engagement, is that Croatia is on track to be ready in full to accede to the EU on 1 July 2013. The Croatian Government have already responded positively to the October call for action on the remaining areas by preparing an action plan to address outstanding concerns, as they did in response to the Commission’s monitoring report in April. The treaty also includes a range of safeguard measures that could be imposed, both before and after accession, in specific areas where reforms were not complete. For example, the Commission is empowered under the accession treaty to recover all state aids paid by the Croatian Government to state-owned shipyards if Croatia does not meet EU requirements under chapter 8, on competition, by the time of accession.
As my hon. Friend said, the Government always have the option, as a final resort, in the wholly unexpected event of Croatia not being ready, of holding back from depositing the instrument of ratification. In reality, if there were such a crisis—if some new Administration in Croatia did not commit themselves to the accession process with the enthusiasm that we see from the current Croatian Government—that would not just be a matter for the United Kingdom; it would be a matter for a very large number of member states and for the EU institutions.
We do not expect to need to use those safeguards. In answer to the point made by the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David), let me say that I have talked to Commissioner Füle about Croatian accession as well as to members of his team in the Commission. We need to emphasise that while the Commission is doing its job in going through the fine print of what Croatia has done and checking to what extent it has met the benchmarks laid down for it, Commissioner Füle personally and the accession team he leads remain very confident that
although more needs to be done between now and July, Croatia is on track to be ready for accession at the date set down for it to join the European Union.
The hon. Gentleman also mentioned Štefan Füle’s comments about regional issues. As he knows—this came up on Second Reading—there are some outstanding issues with Slovenia, in particular, but the solution does not lie wholly in Croatia’s hands. A long-standing banking dispute going back to the break-up of the former Yugoslavia is still unresolved and the UK continues to urge both Slovenia and Croatia to find a way forward to settle that bilateral dispute in a way that respects the relevant international agreements. We have also said—this applies not only to Croatia but to other accessions—that bilateral disputes should not be used as an excuse to block progress when a candidate country is meeting its accession benchmarks.
We agree with Commissioner Füle that there is more work to be done. We have supported him in urging the Croatian leadership at the most senior levels to keep up its work to complete the outstanding tasks. The Croatian Government assured Commissioner Füle when he visited Croatia on 25 and 26 November that of the 10 key issues that the Commission had highlighted, work on seven would be completed by the end of 2012 and on the remaining three by the end of January 2013. Those assurances and the knowledge of how far Croatia has come and how committed its Government are to delivering in full on their obligations cause both Commissioner Füle and the UK Government to be confident that Croatia is in the right place to have crossed those hurdles by July 2013.
As a number of hon. Members have said, the accession process has been much more rigorous for Croatia than it was for Bulgaria and Romania, and because of that Croatia is better prepared for membership than those two countries were before their accession. The level of transparency and accountability in the Croatian judiciary has increased significantly over the reform period, institutions have been established and continue to develop to verify assets and conflicts of interest, and noteworthy progress has been made on investigations of and convictions for high-level corruption, most recently with the conviction of the former Prime Minister, Ivo Sanader, who was convicted of corruption and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. There could be little more by way of a clear demonstration of the independence of the Croatian courts and of Croatia’s determination to show clearly to her future partners that no one is exempt from an independent judicial process and rigorous laws against corruption.
My hon. Friends raised a number of more detailed questions about Croatia’s readiness for membership. I want to try to respond to them, as they all involved serious matters. Let me first take the question of the police, to which my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset referred. In the run-up to the December 2011 general election in Croatia, one of the last acts of the outgoing Government was to approve a package of amendments to the police Act, which was seen as allowing for political influence in the promotion of officers. Following the election of the current Government, the new Interior Minister attempted to introduce changes to the amendments, drawing on his own experience as a previous police director general, to create a system that was demonstrably based on merit and transparency.
However, the European Commission expressed concern with certain details of the new law, and the United Kingdom raised the need for consultation with the Commission to ensure that Croatia embedded reforms and conformed with the EU acquis. The Croatian Government therefore delayed their domestic legislation process to take account of the Commission’s recommendations and to bring their own reforms into line with EU best practice.
The Commission has now approved proposed amendments to Croatia’s police law and we understand that these will be finalised and adopted by the end of the year, but already on the basis of the police Act in Croatia, further byelaws have been adopted, including a code of ethics for officers, the appointment of a director general of the police, and various ordinances on the conduct of officers and procedures.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North spoke about the pressures on the Croatian system of civil justice, and he is right to say that between December 2011 and June 2012 the number of unresolved cases in the civil justice system rose by 0.6% from 827,102 to 832,919, but it would be a mistake for the Committee to look at those totals and make the assumption that nothing had changed. Those are aggregate figures that conceal very significant changes and significant improvements.
What happened overall was that more new cases came into the Croatian civil justice system than were resolved by the Croatian civil justice system, but if we look at the old cases, we see that during that six-month period the number of cases that were more than 10 years old fell by nearly 5%, and the number of cases that were more than three years old fell by more than 4%, so we can honestly say that Croatia made good progress. The Croatian Government have introduced measures such as a new enforcement Act, new powers for their financial agency to recover fines, a new courts Act, new civil procedure and penal procedure codes to improve case management within the Croatian court system, and modern IT systems to help the courts transact their business more efficiently.
Finally, on budgets, it is true that the Commission has said that it wants €15 billion more in the multi-annual financial framework compared with its original proposals, and that that €15 billion includes €10 billion supposedly earmarked for Croatia. Our position all along has been that although Croatia should be entitled to funding on the same basis as other member states once it joins the EU, the EU budget must look for priorities and savings have to be found to accommodate additional expenditure. The position set out by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister remains as he expressed it yesterday: we are going into these negotiations determined that the outcome we will accept will be a cut or at most a real-terms freeze in the EU budget.
I believe that further enlargement of the EU will help to promote the security, stability and prosperity of Europe and of the United Kingdom; that the expansion of the single market will benefit this country by bringing increased trade opportunities to a wider market; and that bringing Croatia into that single market will benefit the opportunities for UK business.