Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 4:00 pm on 3 December 2001.

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Photo of Lord Kingsland Lord Kingsland Conservative 4:00, 3 December 2001

I am in the happy position of agreeing with everything that every Member of the Committee has said, so I can be exceedingly telegraphic.

Intergovernmentalism is an admirable principle, but in practice it works very badly. The legislature under the third pillar consists of three ingredients. First, there are the senior officials who prepare measures; secondly, there are the ambassadors who convene to discuss them; and, finally, there are the Ministers in the Council of Ministers who determine them. All three layers meet in secret. There is no involvement of the European institutions, including the European Parliament, on the one hand, or of national parliaments on the other.

In Clauses 110 and 111, the Government could be described as approaching the implementation of these measures in two ways. The first is to say that they are guilty of a disingenuous act of cynicism in trying to evade parliamentary scrutiny. That has been the theme and tenor of so many speeches this afternoon. The second reason may be that the Government have concluded that whether decisions made by the Council of Ministers at the third pillar are implemented by delegated or primary legislation matters not a jot. Once the framework decision is taken, the nature of the obligation on the member state is so strict and severe that the room for national parliamentary manoeuvre is zero.

Rather than, for example, providing for the European arrest warrant under Clauses 110 and 111, the Government have offered the option of having the matter scrutinised with the full panoply of a Bill. But what difference will that make? Once a third pillar decision has been taken in secret by the Council of Ministers, what difference will it make if the matter is dealt with by primary rather than delegated legislation?

My noble friend Lord Garel-Jones, in his interesting intervention, said that the original idea behind inter-governmentalism was to replace the European institutions with the national Parliaments. But what has happened is that the European institutions have been displaced but the national parliaments have no role whatsoever. The only meaningful role that the national parliament can have in this matter must be before the decision is taken by those three layers. What role have your Lordships or those in the other place had in that decision? We have had virtually none.

Your Lordships' House should be involved much earlier in the scrutiny of third pillar matters—much earlier than at the Committee stage of a Bill. We should devise a procedure whereby we send a Minister to negotiate only when he is absolutely clear about the limits of his or her discretion. Those limits will determine the limits of our ability to make changes to what has been decided in Brussels when we implement the law.

That matter goes beyond the specifics of the Bill into the formidable territory of the relationship between our Parliament and the European institutions in the years to come. I shall be interested in the Minister's reply.