---

Financial Management

I regret being led astray by the right hon. Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory). I fear that nothing would ever be quite Eurosceptic enough for his taste, regardless of what I or his own Front-Bench team said. This House has a duty to safeguard and champion the interests of taxpayers in the United Kingdom, who contribute to the overall budget of the European Union. Much of the money that we are discussing is spent in the individual EU member states. I take on board the points made in the previous speech about the capacity of some of those member states to have auditing or overall political processes that meet the standards that we would expect in this country, and I agree that not all the money that is misspent necessarily involves fraud. Nevertheless, member states need notify the Commission only of irregularities of more than €10,000. I am told that the estimate of the total financial impact of irregularities has increased from €804 million to €1.048 billion a year. That figure is high enough to be a cause for concern, so I would like the Minister specifically to address that growth in the estimates of fraud and to tell us what representations the British Government are making to try to address the problem. In a debate that took place upstairs, I raised with the Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the right hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Jane Kennedy), who was then a Treasury Minister, the irregularities occurring in individual member states. I suggested that she might wish to identify, and thereby name and shame, the worst offenders so that we could make some progress—after all, that tactic is favoured by the Government in other areas of policy—by putting pressure on some of those member states to raise their game. She replied:"““I am not sure that the most diplomatic thing would be to name the worst offenders, as the hon. Gentleman suggests.””—[Official Report, European Standing Committee, 28 January 2008; c. 9.]" I fear that that is indicative of a less than muscular approach taken by Treasury Ministers. They could certainly express their discontent far more stridently within the EU than they currently appear to. Total UK budget contributions to the EU between 2007 and 2013 are to be £71 billion. Even spread over six years, that is a sizeable sum of public money by anyone's reckoning, and the onus is on the House and the Government to ensure that it is spent more efficiently and effectively. We are having an interesting three-way debate on the subject of Europe. The back-to-back nature of the hour and a half that we spent discussing the financial crisis and this debate has allowed the three party positions to emerge in a way that we do not often have the advantage of seeing so clearly. The Conservative party position is to favour an inert European Union. There is a sense of fear and loathing whenever the subject of Europe comes up. To give the Conservatives credit, however, they are alert to the financial irregularities and the need to make improvements. The Labour party position is to be positive and constructive with regard to the EU, but I regret to say that, on the downside, they are insufficiently alert—indeed, somewhat complacent—when it comes to the financial irregularities in the EU. Finally, there is the Liberal Democrat position, which is to be positive and constructive towards the EU and see that it has a role to play, as I said earlier, but also to be alert to the need to address financial irregularities. Only one party has both sides of that equation right, and that is my party, the Liberal Democrats.