European Council (Scottish Executive Briefings)
The next item is discussion of issues relating to pre-Council and post-Council meetings, including how the Executive reports to the committee. As we said in our report on governance, we have had an on-going discussion about that. We would like a mechanism to be set up to enable the committee to have a dialogue with ministers before Council meetings. We would also like to have some sort of report after the meetings, so that we can contribute to the debate and judge the outcome of the meetings as they relate to matters that are within the Scottish Parliament's remit.
As the paper that members have in front of them indicates, the previous First Minister was keen that the Parliament should be informed about what happens and invited officials to draw up procedures. We should discuss the detail of what should happen. The clerk has posed a few questions to the committee about how it would like to proceed.
It is important that we have a mechanism that is recognised by the Scottish Executive. In the past, when I have lodged written questions to the Executive to try to ascertain who has spoken to whom about what during preparations for European meetings at which the Scottish Parliament was to be represented by the United Kingdom, the subject has always been clouded in secrecy. The Executive has been reluctant to let us know who spoke to whom or what they spoke about, as if that was some kind of secret business. I am glad that we are now talking about a mechanism for improved communication. I would like to think that, in principle, where there are items of great interest to the people of Scotland, there might be some way in which we can make a meaningful input and have some mechanism for reporting back.
Thank you, Colin. I have a few comments, but I will let Nora Radcliffe in.
I have a couple of points to raise. First, we have seen the report that the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee receives after meetings, but I wondered what it receives before meetings. I notice that all the March meetings of the Council are close together at the beginning of the month and wonder whether that is a regular pattern. That would dictate whether we have to have weekly or monthly meetings on the issue.
Secondly, do we have to do all the work ourselves or should our job be to alert other committees of any topics that are relevant to them? To spread the load a bit, could each member of the committee shadow one of the subject committees?
Thank you, Nora. Those are important points.
The trick is to follow regularly what is happening in the various Council meetings, which occur every quarter and just crunch on. It can take a year and a half before a substantive decision is reached on a subject on the agenda. We need to track that subject through the process and work out at which point we might want to lobby MEP colleagues or stakeholders in Scotland.
Council meetings happen in a sort of run of several weeks, so we have to work out which ones we are interested in. Every now and then we perhaps have to take stock, consider the agenda of each meeting and decide what we will follow through. We could spend all our time reading the minutes, when what we should do is pick out the strategic issues. I would very much support that. It would have been useful on occasion when I was a minister to have come to a meeting of the European Committee to discuss something that we were doing. The trick is also partly about getting the Executive to see that the committee might be useful.
I would certainly be keen for the committee to scan the minutes that the UK committee receives when it is tracking Council meetings. It would be crazy for our clerks to have to replicate everything. We must use whatever information is out there, pick from it and try to track things through. We have to find the right process for doing that.
Once the mechanism is set up, we can decide whether we need to meet more frequently. If we track Council business seriously, we will pick up more issues than we do at present. That will mean that more meetings will be generated, as more discussion and scrutiny would be generated. I am not against that, but we need to achieve a balance in deciding what we want to focus on and then set ourselves an agenda.
Before Dennis Canavan comes in, I want to say a little about the system that is in place for the Committee of the Regions. As a member of that committee, I receive the briefing papers from the United Kingdom permanent representation to the European Union. Those papers are also sent to the English local authorities that are represented in Brussels. UKREP provides position papers on issues that might be of particular interest to the UK Government. The papers set out the implications of and intentions behind issues and develop the arguments involved in them. They highlight any particular problems that might arise in the UK from implementation.
We could ask the Scottish Executive for a monthly or fortnightly report, which would be produced along the same lines as the UKREP papers, but which would identify issues that are relevant to Scotland. That would mean that, when we consider those issues, we could decide whether we want to deal with them or whether we should refer them to other committees.
It is important that our committee gets reports back from Council meetings, especially the meetings that are attended by Scottish Executive ministers. I note that annexe B to paper EU/02/03/1 is a specimen report made by a Westminster minister to the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee. The report is short—one page—and I am sure that, if our clerk, convener and deputy convener were to look through such reports to identify issues on which we would want to focus, we could haul the relevant minister before us for questioning on the detail and implications for Scotland of decisions that are taken at Council meetings. That would be an improvement on the opportunities that we have at present.
Even more important than post-Council reports is the need for the committee to have pre-Council input before decisions are taken. I note in the briefing paper that the agendas of Council meetings usually come into the public domain only a few days before meetings. However, the dates of meetings are known well in advance. I suspect that the general agenda—if not the detail—is also known well in advance. Feeding into the process at the pre-Council stage would give us the opportunity to invite Scottish Executive ministers to appear before our committee so that we could hear the Executive line. It would also give us the opportunity to suggest what the Executive and UK Government line should be at Council meetings.
Dennis Canavan is right. I understand that general information is available ahead of time about the sorts of issues that might be on the agendas of Council meetings. The timetables for meetings are planned over a period of months. Sarah Boyack suggested a tracking process to monitor the business of those meetings.
Even when we do not have the detail that is available in the agendas, I am sure that it will be possible to get an indication of the subject matter that is to be discussed. That could include reform of the common agricultural policy, which is an important issue. If we know about the subject matter in advance, we can make an input or direct information to the relevant committee—the Rural Development Committee, for example, if the subject matter concerns the CAP.
Just as Sarah Boyack has experience of how the system works from the point of view of transport and the environment, I have a bit of experience on the fisheries council.
Dennis Canavan is right: the report back after the Council meeting is useful as far as it goes, but by definition it refers to history. Our job is to protect the Scottish public interest—that is what this Parliament is for. That means influencing Executive ministers and giving power to their elbow, where necessary, to ensure that they achieve what our people need.
The issue is complicated, because the nominal headline agendas of Council meetings are not the same as the detailed negotiating positions, which can evolve quickly and at the last minute. We need to devise mechanisms for expressing the opinion of members of the Parliament to ministers and civil servants before they engage in pre-Council discussions in the UK, with UKREP, for example. Further down the line, we should not make the process so complicated that we tie ministers in knots and prevent them from being effective. Negotiation is about tactics—people cannot declare their hand on everything before they start. We should seek to convey priority messages to ministers and officials well in advance of Council meetings. We must then trust ministers to get on with the job when they get there.
There are a number of different approaches that we could take. One suggestion is that we await the information from Whitehall and then do the work ourselves. Another possibility is that we ask the Scottish Executive to provide us with a list of issues that may impact on the Parliament's work.
I favour the latter option. We want to get more involved in the process. I suggest that in the first instance we ask the Scottish Executive to provide us with information fortnightly or, if that is not possible, monthly, to tie in with meetings of the committee. If the Executive identified for us in advance issues that may be included on the agendas of Council meetings and that are relevant to the work of the committee and the Parliament, we could decide whether we wanted to invite ministers to appear before us to talk about those issues and what discussions we wanted to have with other committees.
Do members want to proceed in that way? If we do not, I suspect that we will end up examining every document from Whitehall, which could be time consuming for the clerks. We should also limit our work to issues that we can influence and that fall within our remit.
I agree with a lot of what John Home Robertson said about negotiations and ministers' needing not to show their hand in advance. As Sarah Boyack said, we must be careful about what reports we get. I am not sure whether the information should come from the Scottish Executive or Whitehall. Perhaps the Scotland Office, with its new staff, could do the work. After all, the Scotland Office's role is to liaise with Whitehall and to inform us of what is happening there. The Scottish Executive has acknowledged that it is short of staff to work on European issues, so to give it another burden might not be the most efficient course either for it or for us. I suggest that we pen a letter to Helen Liddell—in French.
Given that Scottish ministers have observer status at Council meetings, it would be reasonable to ask them to say why they did or did not attend a particular meeting in Brussels and whether they sent a position paper to the relevant UK minister prior to that meeting. We want to scrutinise ministers' actions. As John Home Robertson said, it is not easy for us to scrutinise the Executive's position in advance of Council meetings, because that is part of the negotiating process.
I accept that it is not easy to scrutinise the Executive's position in advance of Council meetings, but I believe that it is important that we inform its position. In our report on governance and the future of the European Union, we decided that we would seek the opportunity to engage with ministers to inform the Scottish input into discussions at Westminster. There are ways in which we could do that.
The trick is deciding on which issues we want to intervene. We can see from the agenda that the committee has been working on for the past couple of years that it has been dealing with fishing, governance, environment legislation and Post Office liberalisation. The committee has regularly tracked a stream of issues in different ways. We need a hit list of about five or six topics.
I remember what happened when I attended Council meetings. I saw the agenda for a meeting and thought that I wanted to go to it. After getting agreement to go and getting the papers a couple of weeks before the meeting, I realised that the topic that I wanted to pursue would be dealt with in two meetings' time, but was on the agenda at an early stage of discussion.
The committee might decide to look at what is coming up at the Council meetings and kick off the discussion before the issue gets to negotiation point. Ben Wallace is right. We do not want to pile into negotiations in the last two days, but we want to be able to influence the strength of Scotland's negotiating position as part of the UK framework.
We have to decide which issues we want to follow up. Issues such as fishing will always blow up, but we know that there will be regular discussions on fishing and that quotas and decommissioning are big issues for Europe to deal with. We could probably pick a number of core issues and track them.
The problem is in trying to cover all the various Council meetings. Interesting stuff goes on in the health council, for example, but we do not have the resources to track all that. We need to decide what we want to track and get co-operation from the Executive and UKREP to allow us to do that effectively and efficiently. That will depend partly on their good will.
If ministers knew that they could be brought before the committee and asked why they did not attend a meeting or whether they informed the UK position, they would be more likely to offer the information to the committee. For example, I would have asked Sarah Boyack, as a minister, why she did not attend a meeting. If she had known that she would have to explain why she decided not to go to a meeting—perhaps the issues under discussion had nothing to do with Scotland—things would have been easier for us and her. It would be easier if ministers had constantly to respond to us and to tell us why they did or did not attend meetings.
The point that Sarah Boyack is making is that, if we were to cover every item on every agenda and ask a minister about every issue, we would be here every day of the week. The suggestion that we decide priority issues is good. The best way of doing that might be for the clerks and me to look at the agendas of meetings that are coming up. We could try to have informed discussions with and get early intelligence from UKREP and the Executive about the big issues that are to be discussed in Europe between now and the August recess. We could have a list of such issues with recommendations about areas that we might want particularly to influence.
We have had a useful discussion. The best way of proceeding is not to try to do everything. We have to get a feel for what is coming up, how we can receive intelligence on it and how we can influence the process. The clerks and I will bring a proposed structure for that to the committee as soon as we can assimilate all the information. That might not be in time for the next meeting, but we will discuss it as soon as possible. Is that agreed?
Members indicated agreement.