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European Communities (Finance) Bill

The deal was agreed more than two years ago, and it is important that the UK honours its obligation to ratify it by the agreed deadline. The House has an opportunity today to debate the pros and cons of the agreement, and I have explained that every hon. Member has a right to accept or reject it. As for scrutiny, the hon. Gentleman will know that in response to the excellent report from the House of Lords, the Government have made a commitment to publish a consolidated statement on EU finances. He is right that the debate could benefit from greater transparency and accountability, and the Government have agreed to facilitate that. However, it is an entirely different thing to say that a long debate should be held over the course of the next year. That would amount to an attempt to unpick the 2005 agreement, which was based on three pillars. The first pillar was expenditure, or the EU budget. The second was the own resources decision, which had to do with how those funds would be raised. The third element, for which this Government pressed very strongly, was the insistence that there should be a review of the entire budget process in future. The documentation supporting the negotiation process makes it clear that nothing is agreed until everything is—in other words, that we cannot accept the bits of the negotiation that we like and reject the rest. That was how the negotiations were conducted, and it is not possible for us to go back and say, ““We like this bit but we don't like the rest.””