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Item 4 is another substantial paper on pre and post-EU council scrutiny. There is a lot of it here, which I am sure members have gone through with a fine-toothed comb.
But Mr Gallie is not here.
I would not venture to suggest that Mr Gallie usually does that for us.
I refer members to page 14 of the document. My point relates to the post-council report on the competitiveness council and to the services directive. The report reiterates the UK Government's position on the directive and reflects some of the discussion that we have had this afternoon. I do not know how we can do it, but it is important for us to get some kind of analysis of the impact of this major directive on Scotland. Perhaps the committee could in the first instance advance that by writing to request further information.
The clerks can correct me if I am wrong—I do not have all the relevant papers in front of me—but at our away day we discussed the possibility of examining the services directive in detail. Jim Wallace suggested that we could operate on a reporter basis. One member could do some research into the issue and speak to relevant organisations if the committee was not in a position to conduct a full inquiry. However, the issue is on the committee's radar screen and will be included in information on future work programmes. Even from the discussion that we have had today, it is clear that the directive will have an impact. We need to get a feel for whether we need to be concerned about that. However, if we are to become concerned about it, we will need to do so fairly quickly.
The committee can return to the matter at its next meeting, when it considers the options paper. The services directive will be included in that paper.
We also have a meeting of the European members information and liaison exchange network this week or next week.
That meeting will be on Thursday.
Members of the European Parliament will be present at the meeting. The Parliament is due to consider a first draft of its opinion on the directive, with 1,000 potential amendments. Is it too late for us to include the issue on the agenda for Thursday's meeting, so that we can discuss it?
A representative of the European Commission, Roger Liddle, who works for Peter Mandelson—
He must have some involvement.
Exactly. He will be in here somewhere—in the nicest possible way. I do not imagine that there would be any obstacle to our discussing the matter on Thursday.
Because of the recess, much of the information in the document has come to us quite late. I notice that we have still not received information from the Executive on a number of councils. Those include the general affairs and external relations council of 18 and 19 July, the agriculture and fisheries council of 20 and 21 June and the agriculture and fisheries council of 18 and 19 July. We had begun to receive reports timeously, so this seems to be a retrograde step, especially given that we are normally in a two-week cycle of meetings and it has been nearly two months since our previous meeting. Can the clerk advise us on the cause of the delays? It may be important for us to put down a marker, so that we can return to a cycle of timeous reporting.
We have raised the issue with the Executive and are pursuing it. However, we have not yet received a definitive answer.
Irene Oldfather makes a fair point. This is the mechanism that enables us to spot whether there are issues of concern on the current political agenda. The committee can reiterate the point today.
There are an awful lot of blank pages in the document. Perhaps we cannot today do justice to the issues that are raised.
As I pointed out at our previous meeting, post-council reports on agriculture and fisheries seem consistently to be the slowest to appear.
In the agriculture sector, many negotiations are under way at both the macro level, in relation to common agriculture policy reform, and at the micro level, in relation to initiatives such as single farm payments and rural development regulations, which are of concern. We will note the points that have been made and pass them on to the Executive.
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