European Council — House of Lords, 2017-03-14
Topic: Defense
Natalie Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness and the noble Lord for their comments. In response to a previous Statement I repeated, the noble Lord questioned maintaining our leading role in the EU and at that time I was able to point out that we still play a leading role. In fact, the Prime Minister was key to the conclusions on the western Balkans, in particular, during this summit. We have great strengths and great relationships with Europe. There is no reason why we cannot still share expertise and experience to ensure that we play a leading role. For instance, we are leaders in cybersecurity, as the noble Baroness said. We are making our expertise available to our European partners and are using it to great effect in a number of regions. We want a strong relationship with the EU. Just because we are not in the EU does not mean we cannot maintain that. Where we have strengths, we can offer them to the EU, and where it has strengths, we can play that to our advantage. Just because we are leaving the EU does not mean we cannot have strong relationships with our European partners Particularly in relation to the western Balkans, our strategic communications support to them and to EU institutions to counter disinformation is part of our wider UK response. In February, we opened the National Cyber Security Centre, which will help to drive technological improvements and offer advice to citizens and organisations to defend against threats. We are also providing our expertise across the EU The noble Baroness asked about our commitment to NATO and I can confirm that we are completely committed to it. The UK, Estonia, Greece and Poland are the only European nations that currently spend 2% of their GDP on defence. We welcomed commitments from Latvia, Lithuania and Romania to reach that target soon. Defence spending across the continent increased by 3.8% above inflation last year, but we have a long way to go. We continue to say that NATO is the bedrock of our defence, and we encourage all our European partners to play a strong role On the questions about trade agreements with Canada and Japan, we believe that the EU continuing with them is important. We want to support them because we believe they will be crucial to our future bilateral relations with countries such as Canada and Japan. For instance, the CETA agreement estimates economic benefits to the UK of about £1.3 billion a year while we remain in the EU. We want to encourage British businesses to take advantage of their early relationships so that we can build on them. We think they will be able to help us in future in the relationships that we develop, and we are keen to keep momentum in relation to the Japanese agreement Questions were asked about our encouragement of the European Union to complete the single market in the digital economy. We believe it is great news for the EU because it will result in stronger growth and job creation, which helps us. We are very pleased with the positive trends in the European economy. We believe that part of the UK’s economic success is helping to drive success in Europe. We want a strong partnership and a strong relationship, which means we want a thriving European economy, just as we want a thriving UK economy. Finally, the noble Baroness asked a couple of questions. I can certainly reiterate that we do not want to return to the Irish borders of the past. We are very committed to working with the Irish Government to avoid that. In the White Paper we made clear that we will be bringing forward primary legislation, including on immigration, that Parliament will have the opportunity to scrutinise and to discuss in great detail. There will be a number of Bills coming forward as we start to move towards exiting the EU.