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Mr. John Wilkinson (Ruislip-Northwood): That was a truly moving account of the activities of an exceptionally brave man. Mr. Van Buitenen said that he feared for his life, and that he had to take protective measures installing security systems and employing security guards. The mafia-like reprisals that he fears are all too real. Mr. Whittingdale: I thank my hon. Friend; I understand that that is so. It is an idnication of the depth of the corruption that exists that those responsible are prepared to threaten a man like Paul Van Buitenen in such a way. I suspect that Mr. Van Buitenen's action led the European Parliament to decide that enough was enough. At the end of last year, it was given a perfect opportunity to send a clear message to the Commission with the vote on the discharge of the 1996 budget. James Elles, the European People's party budget spokesman said:
Yet, in a sign of things to come, Labour MEPs declined to vote to refuse discharge. In response to my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean), the Minister suggested that Labour MEPs had made up their own minds on how to vote. It seems that the pager system does not extend as far as Brussels. However, according to The Guardian, Europe's centre-left Governments, led by Tony Blair, put intense pressure on their MEPs to vote in that way and to
We were told that the Government were trying to protect left-wing Commissioners. Indeed, Pauline Green has now admitted that the Prime Minister wrote to her on the matter. According to reports, British Labour MEPs tried to bulldoze the socialist group into backing the Commission, causing the German socialist spokesman on the budget control committee to resign her post in disgust. Happily, some members of the socialist group from other countries were rather less supine and voted with the Conservatives and the Christian Democrats; the vote to refuse discharge was thus carried. Mr. William Cash (Stone): Would my hon. Friend understand if I were to repeat the fact that the motion of censure was moved by the group of nations and that not all Conservative voted with them? However, as my hon. Friend points out, the Labour party completely failed to carry though any effective action, which was an utter disgrace and a contempt of the parliamentary process. My hon. Friend may also be interested to know that the leader of the group of nations is a member of the European Foundation, of which I have the honour to be chairman. Mr. Whittingdale: My hon. Friend is right. I was about to speak about the vote on the censure motion. I have already mentioned the earlier vote on the discharge of the 1996 budget, although in both cases it was the Labour group that completely failed to support action, but decided instead to protect the Commission. However, in an extraordinary facade, the socialist group tabled its own motion of censure of the whole Commission to protect individual members of the Commission who had been accused of corruption or malpractice. In doing so, Pauline Green, the leader of the Labour group, made it clear that she and her supporters would vote against their own motion so as to in the words that she was reported as using
Yet by seeking to prevent the Parliament from putting pressure on the six Commissioners most closely identified with fraud and mismanagement, she left many MEPs with no choice but to vote for a motion to censure the Commission. It is hardly surprising that Mr. Paul Van Buitenen was quoted as saying that he felt let down by Pauline Green and the Labour group. As my hon. Friend the member for Stone (Mr. Cash) said earlier, the motion tabled by the group of nations was finally voted on and defeated by 232 votes to 293. All but two British Conservatives voted in favour of the motion while 53 British Labour MEPs voted against. The result is that, despite the overwhelming evidence of nepotism, corruption, mismanagement and fraud, only one person has lost his job over the issue: Paul Van Buitenen. An independent committee of experts conceived to get the Commission off the hook has now been set up, which has been given just six weeks to report. The outgoing president of the Court of Auditors, Mr. Friedmann, has said that, given its timetable, it has an impossible task; there are even doubts about its legal basis. One can have little confidence that it will do anything more than scratch the surface. Fundamental reform of all the institutions of the European Union is needed. It is high time that the Government, rather than protecting the Commission, started to support those who seek to clean it up.
11.47 amMr. Bill Rammell (Harlow): I shall make a short contribution as many other members of the Committee wish to speak. It is interesting that this is the fourth consecutive year that the Court of Auditors has qualified the accounts, but the first year that the Conservatives have registered their concern about the issue a fact that is obviously completely unrelated to their now being in opposition, not government. That leads me to the conclusion that we need a sober, realistic and proportionate debate about tackling fraud, incompetence and irregularities of expenditure in the EU. All incidents of fraud or misappropriation should undoubtedly be taken seriously. The level of errors in expenditure in EU programmes is too high. That is why the Government, once they had the opportunity to make a difference, made tackling fraud one of their priorities when they had the presidency of the EU. It is also why the European parliamentary Labour party has put forward a series of practical measures to tackle fraud, which I hope I shall have the time to explain, and why the Chancellor is rightly proposing to strengthen the independence of the head of the investigations unit. All those measures are absolutely necessary and show the seriousness with which we are treating the issue. However, I implore members of the Committee to put the debate into context. There are serious issues at stake, but we should reflect on them more closely. The auditors' report itself says that it is a report not mainly on fraud, but on irregularities in complex systems. That has not so far emerged in our debate. Mr. Cash: I acknowledge the moderation with which the hon. Gentleman is making his point, but it is not fair to say that we have played down the issue of irregularities and hyped up that of fraud. We have made it clear as the Minster accepted in her response to one of my questions that incompetence and mismanagement are, in their own ways, as bad for the public purse and the taxpayer as fraud; one is morally and legally wrong, the other is incompetent, bad and cannot be sustained. Mr. Rammell: I do not accept that defrauding the taxpayer is morally equivalent to the problems caused by people dealing with over-complex, poorly defined systems that lead to the misappropriation of funds. John Wiggins, the British member of the Court of Auditors, attended the European Scrutiny Committee early this year. In response to questioning, he agreed that it was reasonable to assume that less than 5 per cent. of the European Union budget was lost to fraud. To put that in context, the Department of Social Security estimates that £7 billion of its £100 billion is fraudulently misappropriated 7 per cent. Such fraud is not right, but putting the figures in context has led me to conclude that the reason why Opposition Members make such a disproportionate noise about such issues is not wholly unrelated to their attitude to the European Union and Britain's role in it. John Wiggins said that he thinks the problem is much more waste than fraud. As has been said, the Commission is responsible for only 20 per cent. of European expenditure; four fifths is the responsibility of nation states, which is where the problems would rightly be tackled. Nation states should tackle the problems in their own backyards. The Court of Auditors report states:
That suggests that the problem is different from fraud. The reports also states:
That has not been brought out in the debate, and it leads me to ask whether we are dealing with a generalised culture of deceit, negligence and fraud, or with an over-complex system that lacks national controls and needs reform. I would argue that, in the main, we are talking about the latter, rather than the former. When the Amsterdam treaty was debated in the House, greater powers for the Court of Auditors were proposed, as was an extension of qualified majority voting to ensure that nation states were recalcitrant in tackling fraud in their own backyard could be forced to deal with it. Yet the response of Conservative Members to those proposals was one of grudging acquiesence, if not outright hostility. During the exchanges between the hon. Member for Stone and the Minister, it became apparent that subsidiarity is an issue. If we were told that the Commission was to be given extra powers to tackle the problems in independent nation states, Opposition Members would cry out about the superstate, federalism, and commissars from the Commission tackling problems that are rightly the responsibility of the nation state. They cannot have it both ways.
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| ©Parliamentary copyright 1999 | Prepared 24 February 1999 |
