European Union Bill

I will call the noble Lord my noble friend because he is that. He will recall how we went around and around this debate. It is perfectly true that when the Lisbon treaty was brought forward, its drafters had taken care to change the basis so that it could not be packaged or described as a constitution, but there was an awful weight of evidence, supported by the similarity of wording and by many European leaders such as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. I do not think I am misquoting his words when he said that it was, ““identical down to the last comma””. We could argue about that, but let us please not do so again tonight because I seem to remember that we spent many evenings on it. That is the fact of the matter. In short, including the simplified revision procedure in the scope of the referendum conditions would not unleash frequent trivial referendums. In the same way, we do not accept that there are likely to be regular treaty changes in the future under the ordinary provision procedure. That is one set of reasons why there will be nothing very different from these large treaties coming along on which there is a basic division of view. We say that these things should be put to the British people. Others disagree, including my noble friend sitting further along the Bench. They think that somehow Parliament can continue to be relied upon to be the safeguard to prevent the further ceding of powers and competences. We have considerable doubts about that, and of course the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, has even greater and stronger doubts than the Government. However, we recognise that the simplified revision procedure has been set up to allow for amendments to specific parts of the treaty to be made in a more streamlined way, which is the point just made by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. We recognise that on occasion an Article 48(6) decision might be used to agree a change that might involve a small transfer of power but on which it would not be appropriate to hold a referendum. We have therefore gone one stage further and proposed a mechanism to assess whether certain types of transfer of powers under the simplified revision procedure should be put to a referendum. This is known as the significance test, which we will no doubt debate in further groups of amendments. It applies to any decision that falls under the criteria of either Clause 4(1)(i) or (j), both of which I have mentioned. If the decision is deemed not to have a significant impact, a referendum need not be held, although an Act of Parliament—and this is a considerable addition to what went on in the past—would still need to be passed in all cases before the UK could approve any treaty change. We have built in this mechanism, the scope of which we will return to, to provide a further safeguard to prevent referendums being held on trivial matters. For example—I am asked for examples all the time—a new power under a future use of the simplified revision procedure that compelled Governments to provide annual statistics to the European Commission would not necessarily be considered significant enough to warrant a referendum, but a new power to compel UK businesses to adhere to further regulation might well be deemed significant and might turn up in some package or treaty that we would have to deal with in a better way than we dealt with the Lisbon treaty when that went rushing through. This is a further example of how the Government have considered the scope of the referendum lock carefully in the light of the conclusions of the Constitution Committee’s inquiry. We think therefore that Clause 3 presents the British people with a clear, consistent approach to all types of future EU treaty change while maintaining a proportionate approach to the future use of referendums. As in other countries, referendums will occur only for major transfers, or groups of transfers, of competence or power from this country and Parliament—which would obviously be of constitutional significance. That is a summary of the reasons why we think that this amendment is misplaced and seems to be based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the Bill, of the procedures by which treaties come about and are dealt with by this country, and of the politics of how, if we want to secure trust and support for the European Union as a whole, we should be going down this path. The amendment represents a clear attempt to dismantle the provisions in Clause 3. As I have explained, we feel that it is important that decisions under the simplified revision procedure are subject to the same provisions of the Bill as treaty changes under the ordinary revision procedure—which are massive and cumbersome as I have described—including the assessment of whether a change would constitute a transfer of power. Although these matters are of concern and your Lordships have applied great assiduity and care to looking at them, I think that I have said enough to justify the Government’s assertion that Article 48(6) decisions should be treated in the same way as any other type of treaty change. If Article 48(6) decisions that transfer power or competence from the UK are deemed insignificant, there will be no referendum, although, significantly, there would be an Act of Parliament. If the decisions are larger and more important and form part of great treaties that come before this nation and are slowly processed through all member states, in several instances—including from now on in this country—through a referendum as we believe is proper, we think that that is a healthy and democratic development. On that basis, I ask noble Lords not to press their amendments.