European Committee, 18 Aug 1999

Meeting date: Wednesday, August 18, 1999

Official Report 232KB pdf

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Work Programme

Stephen, is there anything that you would like to say on the forward programmes of the European institutions?

Only to advise the committee that this was our first attempt at trying to collect some early intelligence on provisional agendas for future Council meetings and Commission work programmes in order to give a flavour, at this stage, of the kind of things that will be discussed.

I would be the first to recognise that the document is far from complete and is of only broad use to the committee. I would certainly be happy to have any feedback from members on the kind of thing that they are looking for. It is an attempt to summarise publicly available information to give an idea of what is coming up in the future.

May I ask—Winnie may be able to answer this—how many times a committee of the European Parliament meets on a particular subject? If we are told that the agenda in December is going to be emissions, for example—how many times would it meet on that?

Most committees meet at least once a month, usually for three days. Most are public—there are only two exceptions to that, one of which is the budgetary control committee. A committee would not yet know its agenda for December, although it would know the agenda for September, and depending how it got on with its work that would settle October and so on. Usually, when a rapporteur is appointed, the first discussion is open and without any pieces of paper. The next time the committee meets there is a piece of paper and by then a date is set for amendments and there is another discussion. That is what happens in most cases, although sometimes there is urgent legislation that is short-circuited, when everybody knows that business will be dealt with more quickly. That is all disclosed in the copy agenda, which I will certainly ensure I get whether or not the committee does, because that is where the key lies.

There is another key as well, which is each committee's proposal to the budget committee—if we can get that. It sets out what each committee is really dealing with in terms of its finance. That is where you learn the number of budget lines and where you see under which headings we could winkle in something good for Scotland.

I chaired a committee once. It had a wide remit—culture, education, sport, tourism and information—and many budget lines. When we submitted the committee's demand to the budget committee in November, all the headings and what each budget line covered were explained. That is where we can see whether there is something we could apply for for the Highlands or Dumfries, for example. That is another type of document that we will not be sent, but it gives the answer to a lot of the questions about where we go as a committee to try to ensure Scotland gets everything that is going—because I assure you, the Irish get everything that is going.

I support what Winnie is saying; the earlier we get in on this the better. It is going to be quite complicated and I wonder whether there is some system that we could work out in co-operation with others, perhaps the Scottish Executive or with Westminster, to track issues. I know that individual regions with offices in Europe try to do that themselves. It is quite a big job and it may well be that we could work in co-operation with the Scottish Executive or Scotland House to put in place some sort of tracking so that we can identify when things are coming up and how to influence them. Clearly the earlier we get in on decisions, the better.

Taking Winnie's point about the rapporteur system, perhaps trying to meet rapporteurs involved in issues relating to Scotland would be useful. Looking over some of the agendas in the briefing paper, it seems to me that there are a number of issues that we would want to be involved in. Just a cursory glance reveals issues such as the knowledge economy, e-commerce and economic and monetary union.

Given Scotland's peripheral position in Europe, e-commerce, for example, is going to be vital to us and the earlier we can get in on some of these things the better. I do not think that we should underestimate the scale of the task. The first step might be to see whether we can work in co-operation with Scotland House or the Scottish Executive to have in place some kind of tracking system, or whether other proposals on how to track these issues can be presented to us.

We need to consider how we influence a number of things, at Westminster and in Europe. Some of it will evolve. Maureen mentioned MEPs. We certainly want to meet them and set up a liaison mechanism. It might be useful to get Dermot Scott, who is the European Parliament's representative in Edinburgh, to give us a presentation and to discuss with him and others from various institutions how we might use some of their facilities. There are a number of different ways we will look at that.

I understand that the European Parliament's independent inquiry into the European Commission is due to report in September. I think we would want to see that report at an early stage.

It is inevitable that we will stray into matters of influence and early warning systems. As you said, Hugh, we will discuss that at a later date. When we discuss it, we should consider how we can influence committees of experts and the possibility of getting middle-ranking civil servants into Europe to influence the people who draft legislation.