European and External Relations Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Official Report 406KB pdf

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“Brussels Bulletin”

Item 2 is the “Brussels Bulletin”, which is one of the early warning systems that the cabinet secretary just described. The European officer, Ian Duncan, is here today. Members have a copy of the bulletin. Are there any points?

I was looking at two areas. At this point, I announce that I have no legal training whatsoever, so I will rely on what is in front of me.

Page 4 of the bulletin mentions EU state-aid rules, and reforms to thresholds on public procurement in particular. I have read through the information, and I think that it will be beneficial for local authorities not to have to advertise on a grand scale for every single item or service that they might be looking for. It looks as if the reforms will be beneficial and will not in any way threaten the EU project to allow free movement and trade. However, the contract law issue that is mentioned on page 7 seems to go against the idea of the reform of state-aid rules, because it seems to benefit larger operations in one country in their dealings with other countries. I am not 100 per cent sure about how those two issues will mesh.

I do not know whether that makes any sense to Ian Duncan, but I have looked at the two articles and they seem to be contradictory to some extent.

They touch on different things. The state-aid rules are an exclusive competence and the proposed reform is straightforward. It seeks to remove from local authorities the obligation to advertise far and wide for very small projects.

The reform of contract law is at a very early stage and I would not necessarily read too much into what is said in the bulletin about what will happen. The debate is just about to begin. The issue is not without its controversies, as you might imagine, and its resolution might look different from what we are witnessing at the moment. We are at the beginning of the process of the development of contract law, which is a controversial issue. It will almost create a new jurisdiction that is separate from national jurisdictions. If that happens, it will be quite a significant development in European law and European affairs. As you have pointed out, there might indeed be conflicts, but we will have to wait and see whether that is the outcome of the negotiations.

I imagine that one of the Scottish Government’s top priorities is to ensure that it is fully involved in the discussions. At the moment, for example, the incoming Polish presidency is talking about 27 legal jurisdictions, almost ignoring the Scottish jurisdiction. There is a lot of work to be done, but I am fully aware that the legal adviser to the Scottish Government in Brussels is on top of the issue and is actively engaged.

I knew that I was putting together two things that were not exactly complementary, if I can put it that way, but it seemed that the bulletin was giving with one hand and taking away with another. For instance, it seemed that local authorities would find things much easier in their legal dealings and what they have to do under state-aid rules when procuring smaller contracts and so on. Reading the contract law status update, I was not certain about how soon that development would take place, but, in relation to the idea of the EU single market being genuinely borderless, it seemed to me to contradict the other update. However, I can tell that there are obvious differences.

My question is about page 9 of the bulletin, which refers to e-health and the digital agenda for Europe—one of the Europe 2020 strategy’s flagship initiatives. The article talks about the new EU task force under the chairmanship of Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Is the United Kingdom, or Scotland, involved in that work group? I see that the consultation finished on 25 May, but e-health has been a high priority for the Health and Sport Committee, so I was wondering whether it could still feed into the consultation or whether it is now too late to make a submission.

I understand that the UK is represented on the task force. The task force aims to get into the guts of the issue and work out how best to move forward. Although the consultation closed recently, I do not think that there would be a problem, if there was a collective and determined view in the Health and Sport Committee to do work on the area, in ensuring that that work was directed to both the task force and other participants in Brussels. Consultation is happening, so there will be consideration of the issues. I imagine that, if work could be done, it would be welcomed.

This committee would be happy to bring that to the attention of the Health and Sport Committee.

That would be good.

I have one further point of clarification. Ian Duncan said that the United Kingdom was involved as the member state. Does he know whether Scotland has any input to that through any of its officials or civil servants?

I am not aware that Scotland has a representative on the task force, but one would hope that the UK representative was not acting in his own right but collecting the views of the wider group.

Is there a mechanism for checking whether Scotland is having an appropriate input?

I can check that on your behalf. That is not a problem.

I have a couple of questions about process. It may be that I am supposed to know the answer to the questions, but I do not so I will ask them.

Ian, do you prepare the bulletin?

Yes.

Is it monthly?

You will get it for every one of your meetings.

Okay. How is it disseminated beyond this committee?

At the moment, this committee will disseminate it directly to the subject committees in the Parliament. It appears on the Parliament’s website, and there is a distribution e-mail list that has a significant number of members who receive it.

This bulletin is issue 57, from June. On what date in June was it signed off?

It goes out with the committee papers, so it will have been current as of last Wednesday.

That might have sounded like a pernickety point, but as you will be aware the EU diary can move dramatically from one week to the next, with major announcements and so on. I just wanted to get an idea of the currency of the bulletin.

You are right. You will notice that I often have to think about the tenses. The bulletin is published before you read it but after I have written it, so I sometimes have to hedge my bets and assume that something will happen. I sometimes hedge my tense bets and push things forward in that way. Sometimes I am right and sometimes I am not, so sometimes I will come back and say that something did not actually happen.

Okay. Thank you.

I wanted to ask the minister something about the common agricultural policy earlier, but I will ask Ian Duncan about it now. It is to do with our involvement with the other devolved countries in the UK—Wales and Northern Ireland—which have similar issues, especially with regard to the CAP and how it is delivered. Ironically, the policy seems to be delivered according to different criteria in all three devolved countries. Is there a move towards seeing who is getting the best deal among the devolved Administrations—and among the farmers in the three devolved countries, for that matter? Who is getting the best deal, and from which arrangement?

That is a good question. I imagine that the answer depends on whom you ask. At the moment, farmers from the devolved regions are certainly united in trying to ensure that they get a better deal, but there appear to be differences between the UK Government’s position and that of the devolved Administrations on the best way forward for the reform of the CAP.

Each Administration within the United Kingdom should be bound by common rules, but how they seek to apply them can be more nuanced. We know that there are significant differences north, south and west of the various borders. You will probably find that assessments of that nature have been conducted by the National Farmers Union in its various guises in the devolved regions. I suspect that the information is available. However, I do not think that the Administrations compare and compete directly.

The devolved Administrations are united now, at any rate, in trying to ensure that the next step delivers well for their farming communities, and for rural communities more broadly.

The Greek question does not appear in your bulletin, and I imagine that Brussels must be weighed down by that cloud. Do you think that it will be the endgame for the euro by the time another week is over?

That is an interesting question. The discussions around the financial situation certainly dominated last week’s European Council for heads of state and Government. There is no doubt that it is becoming a dominant feature on most high-level discussion agendas. Exactly what will happen next depends on a range of factors.

Inside Brussels, there is a great deal of optimism that a solution can be found. Whether that optimism is shared by everybody outside Brussels remains to be seen.

How is that for a gnomic answer?

Well, I was not expecting a yes or no.

Let us move on to agenda item 3, which, as members will recall, we decided at our previous meeting to take in private. I thank the public for their attendance.

15:13 Meeting continued in private until 15:15.