European and External Relations Committee, 16 Dec 2008

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Official Report 187KB pdf

---

Pilot Subsidiarity Check

Clerks at the House of Lords have asked whether we would consider participating in a pilot subsidiarity check. I assume that members have read the paper on the matter in detail and that we can consider the recommendations that it contains. Do members want to participate in the pilot?

Since we wrote the paper we have received further information about the timescale for the pilot. If the House of Lords formally asks us to participate and we undertake to do so, we will be asked to respond by 19 January, but we can probably get an extension. The House of Lords will take cognisance of the situation and consider our submission if we make it by the end of January.

Given that the Christmas and new year holidays are coming up, the exercise would give us an opportunity to flag up problems that we will experience if we are to have an on-going role under the subsidiarity protocol. Our participation in the pilot might be worth while, even if it just demonstrates the difficulties that we would experience with the proposed timescale. I invite comments from members.

I support our getting involved in the pilot. However, if it is decided to go ahead with the protocol—the outcome of last week's winter council will have implications in that regard—we must give serious thought to how we will operate. The proposed eight-week timescale will never be long enough.

At last week's meeting of the European elected members information liaison and exchange network, we considered a team Scotland approach—I am sorry to use that term, but it is the best way of describing what we mean. If there is to be an early warning system on legislative proposals, eight weeks will not give people in Scotland who are involved—such as members of the European Parliament, the Committee of the Regions and the Scottish Government—long enough to form a view that will have much influence. It would be useful to have a protocol on how we can best influence policy before the eight-week period, which will come at a late stage in the process. I apologise if the committee has discussed the matter in the past, before I became a member.

If we proceed with the pilot, we can consider the lessons that we learn from it and perhaps then draft such a protocol. We will make mistakes—that is for sure—and the pilot will enable us to consider the best way of operating.

I endorse what the convener and Keith Brown said. However, we should not wait to make the point that the proposed timescale is short and we should be given notice of legislative proposals as early as possible.

The committee must decide whether to participate in the pilot. We could say that we have not been given enough notice, given that Christmas and the new year are coming up, but I am inclined to go ahead with the pilot.

We should do it. However, Jamie Hepburn and Keith Brown are right. We should make the point about the timescale. We should also say that we are participating in the pilot on the basis that an extension will be possible. If the House of Lords can confirm that that is the case, we can proceed.

I suggest that we agree to the recommendation in bullet point 1. The options that we are invited to consider in bullet point 2 are not mutually exclusive; it would be logical to go ahead with them all simultaneously, because they will all be relevant. How involved we become in the pilot will depend on the response that we get from the Health and Sport Committee. If we get a response early in January, we will have a clear indication of the extent to which we will become involved.

I think that we all pretty much agree.

I press the more general point about how we make our views known. Much will emerge from the pilot and we will have a better idea of what will happen when we know whether the Lisbon treaty will be implemented in its current form. There is a role for the committee in considering how Scotland gets involved and responds, not just when we are consulted as part of the subsidiarity protocol—which might require us to have more meetings at short notice—but in general, after proposals have been initiated in the Commission. It would be useful to discuss the issue after the pilot has taken place.

We have programmed into our meetings early in the new year a discussion that members wanted to have on our future work programme—although the current discussion seems to be leading us into the next item on today's agenda, item 7, which relates to an item that we will take in private at our next meeting, if members agree to that today. In previous discussions, we have realised that some timescales would be too short and that we really needed early interventions on a number of issues that are crucial to Scotland. We have therefore produced a paper on how we might conduct such early interventions. In the first instance, we would write to the Scottish Government to ask what issues it is flagging up, and to discuss the issues that the committee wants to pick up on, using our rapporteur system.

I think that we should incorporate the point that Keith Brown made into the general discussion of our work programme and the future strategy of the committee. Meantime, having heard the comments that were made by other committee members, I feel that we should agree to the specific recommendations in paper EU/S3/08/20/5. Under agenda item 7, we should then agree to hold the resultant discussions in private.

Let us take one step at a time. Do we agree to the recommendations in the paper on item 6?

Members indicated agreement.

We will take all the steps suggested as a way of testing how to proceed.

We are agreed with all the bullet points in the paper.