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Subsidiarity Assessment: Food Distribution (EUC Report)

My Lords, I support the arguments that have been put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Carter, who chairs the European Sub-Committee of the European Union Committee dealing with agriculture, fisheries and the environment and who prepared the report that we are considering today. This is an important issue and one of the occasions on which this House has the opportunity to argue why subsidiarity matters and why some things ought to be done at a national level, not at a European level. As the noble Lord said, the food distribution programme made sense when there were significant European surpluses. However, in the 24 years since the programme was introduced, probably at the time when the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, was responsible for these matters, things have changed. There are no longer surpluses that it is perfectly legitimate for the European Union to distribute to member states where there are needy people. The argument has therefore changed. That is why, despite the fact that the European Commission, in preparing its proposals for this document, modified them from the document on which this House gave an opinion about a year ago and suggested that there was a reasoned opinion against subsidiarity over the old proposal, in our view there is no longer a satisfactory situation. We do not believe that any European value-added is produced by producing €500 million on buying things from the open market to give to needy people. Member states should do that—there are lots of reasons why they should—but that is a decision for the 27 member states of the European Union. That is why this report has been produced and why, although the earlier proposal has been withdrawn as a result of a judgment by the Court of Justice of the European Union, we still believe that this is a serious error. As we say in our report, neither the proposal nor the Commission’s Explanatory Memorandum produces an explicit subsidiarity justification as required by Article 5 of the Protocol on the application of the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. However, it seems clear from the summary of the impact assessment that accompanied the original proposal of three years ago that the Commission sees three reasons for this. These include the view that the programme addresses problems of hunger, deprivation, poverty and social exclusion in the spirit of the treaty and that it supports the objective of strengthening the Union’s social cohesion. Our report sets out our consideration of those justifications. I will not repeat them at length. The nub of our assessment, this year as last, is that the spirit of the treaties can be respected without the European Union acting in this respect. Moreover, we consider that member states are capable of acting individually to fulfil those objectives if they so wish, and in any case the failure of European member states to act is not in itself a reason why the EU should act. In conclusion, we again take the view that there is no compelling argument to suggest that the Union is better placed than its member states to ensure a food supply to its most deprived citizens. We know that the Government share our view on this proposal—indeed, I believe that it is also the view of the opposition Front Bench—and in their Explanatory Memorandum they have stated their belief that, "““measures of this type are better and more effectively delivered by individual Member States through their own social programmes””." The Scottish Parliament has taken a similar view and the Swedish Parliament, the Riksdag, has also issued a reasoned opinion sharing our view. Other member states such as Denmark and the Netherlands share our concerns, though we are not yet sure whether they have issued reasoned opinions. The Government have told us that, unfortunately, agreement in principle on this measure has been reached following a decision by Germany to accept a time-limited extension of the scheme to the end of 2013. There appears to have been movement at the political level but certainly not, in our eyes, at the level of the underlying policy. While the European Commission has made changes to the proposal that we considered a year ago, we think that those changes make no difference to our assessment of whether the proposal is in compliance with the principle of subsidiarity. We consider that it is not compliant with that principle and therefore recommend that the House should issue a reasoned opinion on the latest proposal.