I am not going to get drawn into a further debate about the 2014 opt-in, opt-out decision on justice and home affairs. As the Government have pledged, there will be ample opportunities to debate that at length in the House.
I think that everybody in the House shares the concerns of my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North about the need to ensure the appropriate management of potential labour market risks, particularly at a time when there are serious tensions in the UK labour market. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the principle of freedom of movement has given enormous opportunities to British citizens. Roughly 1 million British people live and/or work in other member states of the European Union at present.
1.45 pm
The Government have been clear from the start that we intend, as a matter of course, to impose transitional controls on workers from any new member state. In the
case of Croatia, we have concluded that these restrictions should be as rigorous as the terms of the accession treaty allow and should provide no greater level of access than that already enjoyed by Croatian workers prior to their joining the European Union. That would put Croatian citizens on a par with workers from Romania and Bulgaria, who are subject to such vigorous control already.
Let me be clear about what the existing provisions make possible. The powers in the treaty provide for member states to apply transitional control to workers for at least five years, with a review after the first two years, at which time member states are required to notify the Commission whether they intend to maintain transitional restrictions beyond the first two-year period. After five years, those controls may be extended by a further two years in the event of serious labour market disturbance or threat thereof, bringing the total to seven years. The powers in the treaty provide controls that can be imposed robustly and meet the UK’s stated commitment to impose transitional controls for an appropriate period without undermining our long-standing and principled support for EU enlargement. These controls cannot be extended beyond the seven-year period.
I am afraid that it will disappoint my hon. Friend that the provisions for transitional restrictions on migration from Croatia in annexe V(2) of Croatia’s accession treaty make it very clear that the controls are derogations from the articles in the treaty on the functioning of the European Union, which provide for the free movement of people between different member states in order to exercise treaty rights under European law.
My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) asks what could happen if the Committee agrees the amendment. The United Kingdom could be in breach of the free movement principles in the EU treaties, which could lead to the UK being infracted by the European Commission. The accession treaty would stand, provided that we and other member states went on to ratify it, but the UK would be in breach of it.
The Irish protocol, to which my hon. Friend alluded, was a different beast. It is important to recall that Ireland’s ratification of the Lisbon treaty awaited the outcome of their second referendum, which in turn followed the negotiation of the Irish protocol by EU Heads of State and Government, but the text of the treaty did not change by one word between the first and second Irish referendum. Ireland went on to ratify the Lisbon treaty as it had originally been agreed before the Irish protocol was finalised and had been through the Brussels process, and, as is happening here and elsewhere in Europe, before its ratification by the 27 member states according to their respective national procedures. The Irish protocol is a very different question.