European and External Relations Committee, 21 Jun 2005

Meeting date: Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Official Report 200KB pdf

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Pre and Post-council Scrutiny

Agenda item 3 is consideration of a paper on pre and post-council scrutiny. Members have a summary of the various council meetings.

We have no papers on the environment council meeting of 24 June. Is there anything that we should be concerned about?

The meeting is at the end of this week. We have no information on it; it is just one of those things that will fall because of the recess.

The minister is a Liberal, so we should be worried.

It is clear that we are getting near the recess—who knows, there might not be a Liberal minister by the end of it? A reshuffle might have happened; I am told that changes are afoot.

The agriculture and fisheries council of 30 May is covered in annex A to our briefing paper. We are still awaiting information from the Scottish Executive. For the whole time that I have sat on this committee, the Scottish Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department seems to have had the worst record of any department for sending details to the European and External Relations Committee. I could be wrong—I have not kept statistics—but that is my interpretation. Could we send a letter to SEERAD to that effect, saying that we continue to be concerned about its lateness in responding?

I would be quite happy to do that, subject to the clerks checking that that is indeed a regular occurrence—I have not been on the committee as long as Margaret Ewing has. I am happy to raise that point.

A couple of meetings ago, I raised issues about the rural development regulation, which will have an impact on a number of our constituencies. Just before I came to the meeting, I noticed in my inbox a statement from the NFU Scotland, welcoming an agreement that had been reached in Luxembourg last night. The agreement was rather incomplete, in the sense that it had been reached on the structure and focus of the rural development regulation, but not on the amount of money to be associated with it, given the wider problems with the EU budget. I suspect that we will return to the issue in due course.