It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith). We have not reached the same conclusion, but I pay tribute to the work of his Select Committee, and indeed to the work of all the Select Committees that have provided the reports that have invaluably informed this debate. I agree with the point that has been consistently made on the critical role of parliamentary scrutiny in all of this. Whatever our view on the measures and the direction that Britain should take, the measures are clearly substantive and important.
I welcome the Government’s exercise of the block opt-out, which is critical. I am surprised by the great lengths that Opposition Members, so few of whom remain in their place, have taken to trash the opt-out that they negotiated and to highlight all its flaws. Time and again, rather than setting out their position on the substance, they are at pains to point out their failure to negotiate, and to rubbish the product of their negotiations before the previous election.
It is important that we scrutinise the substance of this area of UK-EU relations, both because of its effect on policy and because the public care about it. For all the slavish pro-EU noises that we have heard from Labour and Liberal Democrat colleagues, their argument is clearly not taking effect with the British public. A ComRes poll for Open Europe towards the end of last year found that crime and policing is the fourth most important area that the British public want renegotiated
with Europe. The top area is immigration, so two of the top four measures for renegotiation, according to the British public, who we know overwhelmingly back renegotiation, are justice and home affairs measures. If Conservative Members are just a bunch of crazies and are missing something, other Members must struggle to explain why they have failed to win over public opinion. Why do the public so strongly think that justice and home affairs is an area that needs to be reconsidered? It is important that we look at the package as a whole and at individual measures through the cold, hard lens of the British national interest.
My opening point is that the lack of proper empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of many JHA measures has been an endemic problem across successive Administrations, but particularly under the previous Government. In comparison with the way in which UK policy and legislation works, whether we are for or against the measures, we do not have a proper understanding of how the measures operate in practice. The right hon. Gentleman referred in a rather cavalier way to hundreds of criminals going free if we do not sign up to the European arrest warrant. I will take an intervention if he can explain where that figure comes from, because I do not think it is based on concrete evidence.