THE WEEK THAT WAS... (Apr. 22, 2013)

When the European Parliament last week, in its plenary Strasbourg session, voted on discharging the 2011 accounts of a string of European institutions (including the Commission, the Parliament itself and a string of agencies) Conservative MEP’s have, as they call it themselves, ‘once again fought to defend the interests of Europe's taxpayers’ by refusing to agree to the formal signing off of the annual accounts.

When the Court of Auditors released its annual report on the 2011 accounts last year, the European Commission's official response was that the report showed the situation was "stable". In fact the audit showed that the overall error rate - the money mis-spent, misappropriated or inadequately accounted-for - had risen for the third year in a row and now stood 3.9 per cent: the amount of money the Commission considers being at risk across the EU budget as a whole has quintupled from €0.4 billion in 2010 to €2 billion in 2011.

"If the Commission thinks that this is a stable situation we have part of the explanation for that rising error rate: complacency is breeding contempt for the public purse”, Philip Bradbourn, Conservative spokesman on budgetary control.

As expected the Conservative MEP’s were overruled by a majority of the Parliament. But they won a significant victory by gaining majority support for their amendment calling for a dedicated EU Commissioner to be responsible full time for budgetary control.

A day after the vote in the EP, the House of Lords EU Committee published its report on the EU's finances. It concludes that the amount of fraud acknowledged by the European Commission at €404 million offers "only a glimpse" of the true level. The real figure is close to a staggering €5 billion, states the report.

I am afraid that British enthusiasm for Europe is not in the lift…