European and External Relations Committee, 16 Jun 2009

Meeting date: Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Official Report 150KB pdf

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Presidency of the Council of the European Union

The third item on the agenda is consideration of our report on the European Union presidency. I invite the members of the committee who visited Stockholm to comment on their report. It will be ladies first, so I ask Patricia Fergusson whether she would like to draw our attention to anything in the report.

The area that I focused on was justice, as that was the area in which I was leading—if I can call it that—while we were there. I thought that the meeting was very important. A number of themes came out of it that, although the committee may not want to engage with them, are nonetheless important in so far as they alerted our Justice Committee—and perhaps the Scottish Government—to the elements on which the Swedish plan to focus during their presidency. Some of those themes tie in well with other aspects of the broader justice agenda that the Government is pursuing.

Overall, the visit was worth while. We had just about the right amount of time for the meetings that we planned and the organisation of the visit was particularly good. The ambassador kindly gave us lunch, but it was very much a working lunch. He had invited an interesting cross-section of people to pursue with us issues around the economy and the environment, which others will want to speak about more fully. It was useful to meet those people, and it was handled well by the ambassador.

There is not much to add, other than to say that the exercise was useful and demonstrated the merit of the committee's approach to early engagement. We will discuss that later, so I will confine my remarks for now. Like Patricia Ferguson, I will speak about the meeting in which I took the lead, which was the meeting with the deputy minister on European Union issues. That interesting experience demonstrated in many ways that the Swedes are just as much in the dark as we are in relation to the EU budget. I suppose that it was useful to find that out. The Swedish are also eagerly awaiting the outcome of the referendum in Ireland.

I led in the climate change and financial crisis meeting. As Patricia Ferguson said, a good mixture of people attended the meeting, which is a compliment to the ambassador and his staff. I thank our clerks for their good work—everything netted in well.

Interestingly, the Swedish do not seem to be as badly affected by the financial crisis as everybody else, but they are aware of the crisis in the whole of Europe, which seems to be at the top of their agenda. They are also keeping climate change on the agenda and their green credentials would put most of us to shame.

Another aspect of the meeting was the common agricultural policy, which I must note every time. Reform of the CAP is not top of the Swedes' agenda by any means, but it was interesting to see in the Ministry for Agriculture banners that said something like, "Do you think it's right that 40 per cent of the EU budget is spent on the CAP?" It is obvious that it is within their culture to have a bit of an issue with the CAP—perhaps because Sweden is so heavily forested and not farmed. It is definitely not part of their agenda to do anything radical about the CAP in their six-month presidency. They feel that there will be slow reform of the CAP rather than revolution.

In broad terms, I thought that the visit was excellently organised, for which I congratulate the clerks. The people whom we met were at the right level and extremely informative. The meetings were far better than those we had in Prague with the Czechs, particularly because we got in early, rather than, as we did with the Czechs, when the presidency was well under way. There are still things that we can learn from the Swedes and possibly influence.

In that respect, I assume that we are now looking forward to visiting Madrid six months hence to engage early with the Spanish on the common fisheries policy, which was the subject on which I led in Stockholm. Nothing particularly new came up, because the Commission is conducting its own investigation into the CFP this year. The Swedes were more interested in listening to us. They have some connection with the Balkans as regards quotas, discards and other technical matters, but rather than wanting to talk about any proposals, they were in more of a listening mode.

That is interesting. I thank colleagues for that report back. If no other members wish to raise points on the report, are we content to note it and—given the justice issues that Patricia Ferguson mentioned and the points that Jim Hume and Ted Brocklebank raised on rural affairs and the environment—to pass copies to the appropriate committees?

Members indicated agreement.