Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
8 SEPTEMBER 2004
HON MRS
GWYNETH DUNWOODY
MP AND RT
HON MICHAEL
JACK MP
Q180 Mr Shepherd: How should it be done,
Gwyneth?
Mrs Dunwoody: I think inevitably
it has to be done by the bulk of Parliament; it cannot be done
by being hived off to a committee. It must be done on the floor
of the House. One of the sad things for me—and I hesitate
to say this with Mr Pike here because he is such a hard working
member—was that I was a bit disheartened by the behaviour
of some of the members of that committee who simply sat and did
not ask questions because they obviously had not had the time
to brief themselves and did not know what it was all about. That
meant that the conclusion that was reached was not one that was
going to affect anything. Had, however, a very simple change been
made, had it been possible for that committee to amend what was
before them and get a vote on the floor of the House, then I think
the attitude of members would have been remarkably different and
the result would have been different. Then, Mr Shepherd, I think
possibly we would have had some effect.
Q181 Mr Heald: Can I just come in on
that and perhaps ask Michael what he thinks. The Liaison Committee
have suggested giving a power to table a motion which can be considered
by the European Standing Committee so that it would not just be
the Government motion, it would also be an alternative motion.
First of all, do you think that is a good idea and, secondly,
we have the European Scrutiny Committee sifting away and identifying
some documents for debate. Is there not a case, once they have
done that, for saying that they have identified this document,
there should be some witnesses, there should be some evidence
taken by somebody to get at the inside story on the document concerned.
Mr Jack: Can I say, Mr Chairman,
by way of responding to the first question you asked and the one
that Mr Heald has subsequently put, that I think it is very important
that a distinction is drawn between influencing the development
of policy and the carrying out of an exercise of scrutiny once
policy has been agreed. I see them as linked but very distinctive
roles. If I take the work that the Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs Select Committee does, sometimes on our twice yearly visits
to Brussels we are able to get sufficiently upstream of thinking
to be able to say to ourselves, "Should we be undertaking
some work in particular fields?" For example, we recently
went and learned about perspectives on waste and recycling and
various issues connected with that subject. This was ahead of
us carrying out a scrutiny as to how we are doing in terms of
our own policy activity within the United Kingdom. What we learned
in Brussels was very useful by way of briefing and giving background
to the most up-to-date thinking within the Commission on this
subject and to get ahead of what is coming down their conveyor
belt in terms of policy. In that sense the work that we undertake
in scrutinising the United Kingdom Government's activity in this
field will be informed by a fair bit of pre-knowledge, having
acquired it by going and talking to the Commission, talking to
UKRep and talking to others in Brussels. That is different, in
my judgment, to the question of scrutiny, and I think that is
where Mr Heald's question is relevant. In a way you have to decide
what it is you want to fix. Our scrutiny process, as I understand
it, is born out of the fact that ministers require for the processes
of decision making in Europe to have a parliamentary decision
one way or the other on particular policy at a particular time.
That process is usually towards the middle or the end of the process
of negotiating in the Council of Ministers to come to a conclusion
on a matter. As far as this House is concerned, having any real
influence on those matters, in terms of the outline of policy
the influence is pretty well zero. If it is a question of trying
to put some steel in the back of a minister to fight for a particular
issue—for example over food supplements, I do not think
there is anyone in this room who did not have a vast amount of
postcard representations and those who went through our scrutiny
process were able to say to the minister, "You go and fight
for all these people who are writing postcards" and that
enabled us all to write back to them and say, "I told the
minister what he (or she, in this case) ought to be doing"—in
that way we were able to stiffen the resolve of the Government
but we were not able to influence the formulation of the policy
that gave rise to the concerns of people writing the postcards.
I think that one of the fundamental decisions the House has to
take is: Does it really want ministers and the select committees
and what other mechanisms you may decide are appropriate for the
scrutiny of European legislation to interact as ideas are developed?
From our Parliament's point of view we get involved far too far
downstream. If we are going to have an influence on policy we
have to be involved upstream and therefore the decisions to be
made are what are the mechanisms and what are the resources required
to improve our engagement? My final observation is this (and it
refers back to something Mrs Dunwoody said about the time and
the resources of the committee): inevitably you have to have a
filtering process as to what you are going to be involved in.
There is just so much potential material that you could get stuck
in on. We need to decide how we deal with that because the scarcest
commodity is time. Looking at the way that our select committee
works, we have a main committee always in session and up to two
sub-committees working, but then to say to members that in addition
to that we want you to perform a downstream scrutiny role—difficult
to incorporate into an already busy programme—and then we
want you to go upstream, we want you to go to UKRep, we want you
to go to the Commission, we want you to go to the Parliament,
we want you to find out what is happening in the ideas formulation
stage, that is a big draw on time. It can be done, but it may
require the select committees to reconfigure the way that they
operate. It might, for example, require us to have a European
rapporteur who would go individually to make these enquiries and
report back to the main committee and so inform the committee
about its work programme.
Q182 Chairman: Would that be an extra
post?
Mr Jack: It would be within the
number but you would have to re-designate somebody's task to do
that. My concern is that most colleagues' focus is domestic.
Q183 Chairman: A member of Parliament
you mean?
Mr Jack: Yes, a member of the
committee who may have to take on a particular responsibility
in the context of maintaining contact and finding out what is
going on upstream in terms of Europe to help guide the rest of
the committee. There are ways and means of doing it, but there
is only so much time and only so many people.
Q184 Chairman: Do you mean a sub-committee
of the main committee with a specific focus?
Mrs Dunwoody: It still has to
be serviced; you still have to have clerks doing the work. Without
being immodest, we do an enormous number of reports on my committee
and the clerks on my committee are really very, very heavily stretched,
even with all the extra assistance. If I were to add to that more
work—after all this is extremely detailed work, this is
not something that can be done on the basis of reading two lines
ahead—I think you would find that you were really putting
enormous pressure on the select committee staff and also, of course,
limiting what they could do because they would not be choosing
this; you would be telling them what they had to do. Twenty years
ago the socialist group on the European Parliament suggested to
this Parliament—it consisted then of one or two unknown
people like the present deputy prime minister, myself and one
or two others—that we should follow the Scandinavian pattern
where a very small number of people representing each political
party were almost perpetually in session and their responsibility
was to know what ministers were doing and what ministers were
following as a line of policy and have the right, if needs be,
to be consulted by telephone or any other means at very short
notice. It needed to be a very tiny, a very tight group because
the bigger the committee became the more unwieldy it was and,
of course, the less influence it had. It depends on what you want
the committee to do really.
Q185 Chairman: Michael?
Mr Jack: We certainly could have
it but again I think we need to examine role and purpose. If we
decided to have a permanent group of people—a select committee
sub-committee—who would look at that, then we have to decide
whether they are really going to be able to add some value to
the process. In other words, are ministers going to be willing
to engage and to come and discuss and be influenced by what the
sub-committee would say? Are departments going to be willing to
share with the select committees what is going on? It is not just
a question of what the minister is up to in the Council of Ministers,
but what his officials are up to in the management committees
and what is happening, if you like, upstream which UKRep would
be aware of. Again, there is a limit to how much intelligence
gathering a select committee and its staff could do if it were
to engage in that kind of process. If scrutiny is about ticking
the boxes so that when the minister and the Council says, "Yes,
I can now lift my scrutiny reserve; my Parliament has looked at
it" that is one thing. However, if ministers want to have
more interaction with the United Kingdom Parliament over the development
of the United Kingdom Government's position in terms of new European
legislation, then our select committee process would assist that
but we have to be equipped to get upstream in a way that we are
not at the moment.
Mrs Dunwoody: I must make it quite
clear, this is outwith the select committee system altogether;
it had nothing to do with the select committee.
Q186 Mr Pike: Gwyneth, obviously I cannot
comment on the committee that dealt with Galileo because I have
to be an independent chair, but on the point that you made about
amendments you will know that committees can actually amend but
the problem is that those amendments are not actually reported
to the House. Is this not an issue that was discussed as long
ago as under the chairmanship of Sir Peter Emery when he was chairman
of the Procedure Committee? Is it not that that makes the whole
procedure a nonsense: that whatever is tabled as the original
motion is the motion reported to the House whatever the committee
does?
Mrs Dunwoody: You are not only
absolutely correct but it was a good idea, it was a workable idea
and it would transform the work of the Scrutiny Committee because
people would feel that they were actually doing some good. They
would look in detail at the policy, they would be able to table
a resolution and they would know that it was going to be voted
upon. At the moment they simply know that they are going to sit
there, it is all going to roll in front of them and they are not
going to have any impact even if they think it is an astonishingly
bad and ineffective policy.
Q187 Mr Shepherd: Even if it had a vote
in the House of Commons no British government has overturned any
arrangement entered into with the European Union, so what is the
point?
Mrs Dunwoody: I have the old-fashioned
idea, Mr Shepherd, that Parliament actually matters and that it
may go on screaming into the wind about European institutions
for many years, but eventually there will come a government which
has sufficient intelligence to realise that to be representative
of the United Kingdom you must take notice of what its elected
members say in Parliament.
Q188 Barbara Follett: Gwyneth and Michael,
you both mention in your written evidence the role of the European
Scrutiny Committee and we would like to know to what extent its
work informs and helps your committees to decide when or whether
to conduct an investigation and what steps you think could be
taken to make the European Scrutiny Committee's work more effective?
Mr Jack: In simple terms, the
European Scrutiny Committee does not have any influence at all
in determining what our select committee does in looking at Europe.
I think visiting the Commission and basically keeping an eye on
what is happening determines our priorities in those particular
areas far more than either the European Committee of the House
of Standing Committees A, B and C.
Mrs Dunwoody: I would agree absolutely
with that. They do not know what is coming up. We more often know
from our internal contacts what subjects are going to come up
and they come from the people who are directly commercially affected.
If you are an airline trying to set up a new flight between London
and Pakistan or London and Singapore and you are told that this
is going to be put back because the Commission has not had the
time to do the negotiation, you are going to be quite vocal in
your contacts with someone like the Select Committee on Transport,
but the ESC will not know.
Q189 Chairman: The European Scrutiny
Committee does actually have documents at early stages, including
green papers and consultative documents, so it does track it through
its different stages. They do not just have the downstream end
of things.
Mrs Dunwoody: We were being asked
what effect did it have on us. My clerks are very, very conscientious
about trying to check anything that is likely to affect us in
Transport right the way across the board and this committee is
one that we check all the time but frankly I would be lying if
I said it had an effect.
Q190 Joan Ruddock: It seems to me that
both of you are saying that the people who are most likely to
have the expertise and the interest in these matters are to be
found in the membership of the select committees. Therefore, despite
the fact that most chairs of the select committees are saying
they are overworked, their members and clerks are overworked,
if we really want to get to grips with this I believe we have
to find some way whereby it is the select committee membership
which becomes directly involved—or more directly involved—in
this system. If you do agree with that, it is possible to increase
the numbers as this committee proposed of those who are on select
committees. Gwyneth made the point that people throughout the
House would be excluded if it were only select committee members
but that is only because we do not do what many other parliaments
do which is to put all our members on a select committee. It seems
to me that the only way that we are likely to really get to grips
with this problem is by tackling these very, very difficult aspects
of involving a select committee. I think the proposal that Michael
puts that you have a rapporteur or a small number from the select
committee is an appropriate way of getting the work done. However,
as Gwyneth says, it is going to mean that there has to be increased
staffing. Given that those are big questions, given that this
Committee has the power to put proposals, do you think now that
this is the way that we have to go because you have both acknowledged
that the way we have at the moment is not working and is not actually
delivering the goods?
Mr Jack: I come back to my very
simple proposition: what does the House want to influence? I think
members of Parliament would like to have some influence on the
development of policy before it gets cast in concrete in the form
of a regulation or a directive which is then the subject of the
Council of Ministers' decision. As the chairman will appreciate—and
other colleagues who have been ministers in Europe—whilst
there is a certain amount of discussion about the guts of regulations
and directives, once the policy direction has been agreed it is
seldom the case that a directive does not ultimately, in some
form or another, get to the end of the process. I am interested
in us having some influence—as we might do, for example,
through the House's pre-legislative scrutiny process which select
committees are involved in—in helping to shape what the
final form of the legislation is, then I agree very much with
Ms Ruddock's contention that we need to be in earlier and we need
to engage with European officials, with commissioners, with ministers
as they discuss the ideas whilst they are still malleable enough
to be changed. There may well be a role to comment on the final
version and there may well be a third role which is Parliament
putting a tick in the box to deal with the mechanics of the scrutiny
process. I happen to think that it is a pretty sterile activity
in Standing Committees A, B and C because I have been both a giver
and a taker of information from those and what I realise is that
it is a very testing experience for the minister of the day (Mrs
Dunwoody used to give me an extremely hard time when I had to
ask her questions) but as long as you have done your homework
you can answer the questions for an hour and you can deal with
the debate and then, effectively, that is it. On some contentious
things sometimes you have to come back and have a second go, but
the idea that somehow you are influencing the British Government
position, the stance the minister takes, the words that will be
uttered in the Council of Ministers, forget it; the die is cast.
My vote goes for hammering out what we can do upstream. Who knows
where it might lead because the one dynamic that we have not discussed
is whether in fact national parliamentary committees should be
talking to parallel bodies in other parliaments. I do not want
to parallel the European Parliament, but we do not actually think
too much about what other member states do. I will give you one
instance, just to conclude. We had a very interesting short inquiry
on the difficulties the United Kingdom faced in the disposal of
old refrigerators. It was very interesting when you discovered
what other member states had done. They had been much farther
down the road in having all the mechanics put in place to deal
with the recycling of old fridges and had we known all this was
going on and also been able to say to the Bundestag equivalent
committee, "What are you doing about this? What is happening
in Germany about it?" "Oh well, we have all these specialist
plants." "We don't have those in Britain, let's incorporate
that in a report that says to the British Government that it is
going to have to learn to recycle fridges in a more sophisticated
way, here are some things to think about." Our Parliament
got in right at the end of this process when the fridges were
piling up in mountains and we discovered that for two years the
British Government had been arguing about a technicality as to
whether this regulation applied to the gas or the foam (the CFC
material inside), whereas we, as practical politicians, had we
become involved in this matter earlier we might have been able
to ask some of the practical questions that could have avoided
the mess that subsequently ensued.
Mrs Dunwoody: One of the other
practical questions in that instance was that this country had
a commercial market in exporting used fridges, whereas Germany
had none. Their situation was manifestly different, but it was
of no interest to them whatsoever that we were unable to reach
agreement.
Q191 Mr Tyler: I wanted to tease out
what Michael said earlier but I think the examples from both of
you are giving us even more encouragement to go down this route.
What I think you were encouraging us to think was that there was
a real case for differentiating the upstream and the downstream
and if the select committees were given early warning of a responsibility
more explicitly and given the resources to do it, that they should
not duplicate the work of the downstream scrutiny. This was a
better way of differentiating between the two, but there are questions
that arise from that. I think there is a logic to that, a rather
difficult logic to argue against, and I think that is a better
way in trying to avoid duplication, problems of members having
enough time to do everything than perhaps other routes. However,
I think there are two difficulties that arise out of that. One
is that you must have cross-fertilisation from one to the other
and I do not think that happens at the moment. I do not think
the select committees are able to identify in advance potential
problems with the downstream detail. Secondly, there is the problem
of gold plating which I think probably select committees are more
likely to be alive and alert to because they are earlier in the
process and therefore can educate the latter end of the process.
How would you deal with those two problems?
Mr Jack: I think your acknowledgement
of the differentiation makes it easier to deal with in the sense
that if you get in upstream you hope that some of the problems
you try to deal with downstream will not occur because a select
committee deals with the practical. It deals with taking evidence
and scrutiny from people who have knowledge about a subject and
you hope that in some way you can then inform the ministers and
officials who are negotiating that there are certain things that
they ought to be taking into account. You say there is no cross-fertilisation—and
I go back to what I said before—by the time Parliament in
its current circumstances of Standing Committees A, B and C gets
to deal with it you may well have an awful lot of information
and in fairness the European Scrutiny Committee itself in its
own report guiding Standing Committees A, B and C as to areas
of weakness or concern, you have a lot of that information available
as a member of those committees but as to your ability to influence
what is happening, it is too late in the day because you are but
one of 25 other people who are going to be chipping in views as
a national Parliament to the hapless minister who has then got
to try and remember what the House said and what is his position
with the Government and then he has to go and negotiate in the
Council of Ministers and which alliance is he in to get this result.
It is a very complicated process and our Parliament at that stage
is a bit of bit-player when it comes to influencing the kind of
detail. All you can try to do is to stiffen the resolve of the
minister. If you, as a parliamentarian, have sensed that there
is a real problem—representative bodies have made representations
to you, people have written to you—you can communicate the
strength of public opinion to the minister, but the ability of
the minister to then shift the position and go and alter does
very much depend on where in the Council of Ministers' process
the particular item of legislation is. There may be some effect,
but my view is that the effect is limited in the latter point.
Gold plating comes back to, first of all, the upstream influence,
but also when you are then discussing with UK ministers the implementation.
For example, we have been carrying out some work on the most fundamental
piece of legislation in the field of water that will affect Britain
over the next 20 years, the Water Framework Directive. This is
an interesting piece of legislation in that the policy has been
decided but unusually for Europe the implementation has been very
much left to member states. Therefore there, the select committee—as
we have done—can have an influence on how matters are brought
into effect in the United Kingdom. In those circumstances if the
design of the regulation or the directive gives more flexibility
to the member state, then a select committee does have a role
in talking to ministers about practical implementation and hopefully
avoiding some of the worst examples gold plating.
Mrs Dunwoody: We cannot have bigger
select committees; we have done that. When we had a select committee
of 17 it meant there was difficulty for the chairman in getting
everybody in; you do not get focussed questioning; you do not
work together in the way you do in a smaller group and if you
keep splitting people into sub-committees you do actually remove
from all the committee members the same responsibility. You will
discover from the remarks of the Liaison Committee generally that
we very specifically limited the numbers of select committees
because of the practical implications. I do think you also must
be very well aware that all of these things, if they are unloaded
on a select committee, are limiting the work of the select committee.
At the moment the select committee itself chooses what it wants
to look at; it is not restrained by what the executive wants it
to do. The executive would like it to have a great deal of work
scrutinising existing legislation and one of our functions is
to be able to ask the awkward questions a lot of people do not
want asked. I can assure you there is quite enough European regulation
for us to keep going without ever doing any work that we want
to do. I can also say to you that the system of rapporteur—I
suffered this for four and a half years—is an excellent
system if you never, ever want to do anything. I was brought up
by a Welshman who said, "If you really never want to reach
any conclusion you appoint the largest committee that you can
find and, if you are really clever, you will never let them meet."
I think that we should be quite clear that if we have a system
of rapporteur, as long as you can keep the membership of the committee
changing, the rapporteur is always going to be faced with a different
group of people who changes his or her text from meeting to meeting
so you achieve astonishingly little. It is a continental import
which we can well do without.
Mr Jack: Can I just put on record
that we have used that mechanism twice in our own committee and
on our report on Horticultural Research International and London's
Wholesale Markets, if you read the Government reply I think you
will actually find the Government moved towards the results of
our focussed and limited inquiry, so it does actually have some
effect.
Mrs Dunwoody: I have no doubt
that the Government would approve of the system; it was not the
Government for whom I was speaking.
Q192 Mr McLoughlin: Gwyneth, do you think
that Parliament was better informed about European matters before
we had a directly elected European Parliament?
Mrs Dunwoody: Now that would be
prejudiced; I could not possibly say that that was the case even
though it manifestly was. I think what you do have to be well
aware of is the fact that if we are not awfully careful we will
find ourselves loading on exactly the things that the European
institutions do. You create bigger and bigger machinery; you spend
more and more time looking at less and less of importance and
at the end of it you have virtually no impact on the final conclusion.
If we are going to treat this seriously it has to be done in a
way that Parliament itself can look at and it cannot be hived
off onto the select committee which would actually limit the degree
of involvement.
Q193 Mr McLoughlin: I am interested in
that answer because I wondered whether it was the fact that Europe
is now doing a lot more than it was doing before it was a directly
elected Parliament. Of course, each select committee can appoint
special advisers. Do you think there would be any role at all
to appointing various MEP's to take a specific interest in the
select committee's region, to be an adviser for the select committee
for a particular period to warn the select committee what is going
on in Europe at all?
Mrs Dunwoody: I see no reason
why outside this building people cannot keep in close contact
with those who have other functions, but frankly you are going
to get into a very odd constitutional situation if you are bringing
people who are not elected to this Parliament in here.
Q194 Mr McLoughlin: I said as advisers,
like you have special advisers at the moment on specific issues.
Mrs Dunwoody: All I can say is
that we have just done a number of things which have direct EU
involvement. We have received less evidence on these subjects
than on any other. The Press have totally ignored the result and,
as far as I can see, we have had very little success with making
them either public or making them clearer for people to take an
interest in. I am afraid the appointment of a well-meaning person
from some other establishment might not necessarily bring that
great in-rush of information. We have as much information as we
need. The clerks at the present time check all the time for the
legislation that is going through that affects us.
Q195 Mr Salter: Michael, you had some
fairly critical words to say about the effective functioning of
standing committees which, as it happens, I share. Gwyneth has
pointed out that select committees are already overloaded and
if they were to adopt this function there is a danger that the
primary function of select committees could be undermined. Do
you think standing committees in our Parliament ever work in terms
of holding ministers to account or influencing policy?
Mr Jack: In the sense holding
them to account, if you go back to what was there before which
were the bizarre late night debates in the Chamber, we used to
have the absurd situation where Parliament was asked to remove
a scrutiny reserve by agreeing to a particular European motion
sometimes after the whole thing had been agreed by the Council
of Ministers. That was a farce. I think the present situation
is better in that there is some public scrutiny of the position
and the reasons taken by the United Kingdom Government on particular
policy issues. However if we, as parliamentarians, are saying,
"Can we have an influence over what our minister does in
the Council of Ministers?" we may have a marginal effect
particularly if there is still quite a lot of discussion to be
done and the scrutiny process takes place at some point between
the beginning and the end of the Council of Ministers' considerations.
It does enable a minister to put on record the United Kingdom
Government's position in more detail about a particular subject
and in that context if scrutiny is about finding out about what
is going on then the current process is better than the one that
was there before. However, if scrutiny is about holding the executive
to account and the House taking the vote, then by definition those
committees suffer from the same defect—in inverted commas—that
a committee formed on a partisan basis in the House will always
follow in that the vote will determine what the view of the committee
is. As an information exchange—a two and a half hour shop
window as to what is going on—it is better than what was
there before, but at that point I come back to what I said at
the beginning, our Parliament is rapidly losing a real influence
on the situation which it could have had if it were actually engaged
in the process of the policy formulation. That is a process which
should involve not just the United Kingdom ministers, but engaging
with the Commission and their officials. When you ask the questions,
"Where do ideas come from in Europe? How is policy formulated?"
it is actually quite an opaque process. It is a bit like trying
to track a river to the tributary and then to the source of the
stream by starting at the bottom of the river and going all the
way to the top. It is quite difficult to see where you are going
to end up, but if you want to influence it you have to find the
source of it.
Q196 Mr Shepherd: You have just made
reference to the debates after 10 o'clock of which I have been
a participant and you undoubtedly have been a participant. It
would have had consequences if Parliament had decided—or
the Commons had decided—not to follow the advice of the
Government and it would have affected the matter. The Government
would have been in great difficulty because it had to reconcile
its position with that of Section 2 of the 1972 Communities Act
and that is at the heart of this whole discussion on whether we
are relevant to the processes of forming the laws that govern
this country. That is what we are looking at: can we have influence
on it? Can we actually say "no"? The burden of your
argument there is that we cannot say "no".
Mr Jack: I do not want to get
into too much detail of what the House has decided, but clearly
if the House, when the European committees report back, decided
to vote down the motions to take note of the outcome of the committees'
process, the House could say "no" if it wanted to but
unlike the old procedures the discussion informing that position
is taken upstairs in Committee. To give a very personal view,
I think that part of the problem with Parliament is that we, as
parliamentarians, concentrate on the things that we think will
matter in terms of the wider public view of what is going on.
When you see within our newspapers the virtual zero reporting
of anything about Europe unless it is a sort of clash or a big
cause célébre issue, then in our order of priorities
things drop down. When you look at the way the House positions,
we have occasional debates on a European white paper on the floor
of the House and the rest of our consideration of Europe is swept
away slightly out of public view. I think Parliament has to decide
whether it is going to apportion more of its scarce time in a
rather more public way to European matters, thus hopefully conferring
on it a higher status. If that were to occur then I think people
would engage and say, "That's important" and join in
more than they perhaps do now.
Mrs Dunwoody: There is also the
question of the subsidiarity breach which is going to come up
in the constitution. That is actually a proposal which would cause
us considerable difficulty. If a third of the parliamentary chambers
of the EU member states believe a proposal breaches the principle
of subsidiarity the European Commission has to reconsider. If
that were accepted, would it then mean that if, for any reason,
a third of these institution had not demanded that it would be
re-considered then it would automatically be said by the Commission
that everybody accepts this. There are all sorts of changes within
both the constitution and the existing legislation which hold
very real difficulties for this Parliament.
Q197 Sir Nicholas Winterton: I have three
questions to our witnesses. Firstly I want to pick up the point
that Michael Jack has just made. He talks about the minuscule
publicity or public interest in European matters. Is that really
surprising, I put to Mr Jack, bearing in mind that irrespective
of what this Parliament thinks it has absolutely no influence
on the ultimate decision, which is really what Mrs Dunwoody has
said to the committee this morning? Secondly, can I ask our two
witnesses whether they believe that if European Standing Committees
A, B and C actually pass a motion or an amendment to the matter
they are discussing, that that should then be debated and the
Government should be obliged to find time for that matter not
only to be voted on on the floor of the House but also to be debated
on the floor of the House as a right? Otherwise is it not a complete
waste of time for these committees to meet and discuss particular
matters relating to Europe? My third question to our witnesses—and
both Mrs Dunwoody and Michael Jack have referred to the UKRep
(the United Kingdom representatives in the European Union)—can
somebody tell me who appoints them, who are they accountable to,
who do they report to and if, in fact, they are to be meaningful
and to enable Parliament to achieve the earlier involvement in
discussion (which Mr Michael Jack has rightly highlighted as being
very important) should they not be appointed by Parliament and
report to Parliament so that Parliament actually knows what is
going on at an early stage and can then have some influence upon
the legislation that is being put forward by Europe and which
at the moment is binding upon the UK whether or not this Parliament
believes it right or not?
Mr Jack: To take those questions
in order, I think you have influence in the context of Europe
if you can get in early enough and influence the shaping of the
policy. That is the bit where you can have leverage and that is
why, for example, select committees are well placed if they go
and talk to European commissioners; if they talk to the second-
and third-ranking officials in directorate generals that is not
only a very good way to find out what is going on but also to
influence. Bearing in mind you have 25 streams of thought now
coming into the Commission which have to be digested and worked
up into policy proposals, the best way we can get in is when the
ideas are being formulated in terms of policy. You could engage
in that process in parallel with UK ministers—and, indeed,
their officials—if they themselves were prepared to advise
the select committees in a bit more detail about what they were
doing and willing—perhaps once a quarter or once every six
months—to come and discuss their European work so you could
talk directly to our participants in that process. The second
question you asked was about whether an amendment arising out
of the European Scrutiny process should be automatically debated
on the floor of the House. Sir Nicholas, I think the only thing
I would say to you is what are the odds of such committees making
an amendment and what would you actually be amending? Would you
amend the Government's motion to take note with something like:
"This committee decides not to take note of X until the United
Kingdom Government alters, for example, sub-paragraph 3 of the
European directive on X, Y and Z"? Then you are left in the
process that, say it was a very contentious matter and the House
votes in favour of the position of the committee, what then does
the minister actually do? I do not want to debate that in detail,
but I do think you have to go through that process to understand
what it is you are trying to achieve.
Q198 Sir Nicholas Winterton: What is
the point of Parliament if they cannot influence a minister?
Mr Jack: I will come back to what
I said at the beginning, Sir Nicholas: there is influence which
is upstream and there is scrutiny which is downstream. Unless
I have it wrong, the scrutiny process is part of a process in
terms of what happens to enable the Council of Ministers to know
that member states' parliaments have discussed and taken a view
on a matter being considered. That is a different process from
the one of influencing the formulation of ideas and the development
of policy. I am not saying for one moment that our Parliament
should not have the ability to vote, but it can do under the current
circumstances. There may well be value in some of these matters
being debated on the floor of the House. I just raise the technical
issues: you have to decide what it is you are going to amend and
therefore what you are going to debate. On the final point, I
think the chairman is better placed to describe in intimate detail
about UKRep as he would have dealt with that during his time at
the Foreign Office, basically they are officials. Some of them
come from departments on attachment. For example, DEFRA put the
agricultural representative into the United Kingdom's permanent
representation and that person covers monitoring all the activity
going on in the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs portfolio
so that when we go over to meet with UKRep they give us a read-out
not only of what is happening officially but sometimes what is
happening in the margins of the official business. They give us
a flavour of what is happening. They are controlled by the United
Kingdom's permanent representative, in other words our ambassador
to the European Union and those are all effectively government
appointments.
Q199 Sir Nicholas Winterton: If we are
going to have this earlier involvement, Mr Jack, is it not necessary
for UKRep to report directly to Parliament, not necessarily through
our ambassador to the Government because the Government may well
not pass on a lot of the information that UKRep is actually supplying.
I think that is the only way for Parliament to be involved earlier
in the negotiation and consultation.
Mrs Dunwoody: Could I say a little
word about influence? I think there is some confusion here. My
experience of European institutions is that those governments
who had their own way and who influenced civil servants were those
who had an extremely disciplined control over both their own nationals
who worked within the Commission and those who were elected to
the European institution. They had no nonsense about careful scrutiny;
they were simply told what they were expected to do. It was made
very clear to them within the Commission that if they failed to
do it they would have a very short civil service career when they
returned and that was an extraordinarily effective way of influencing
what happened. We do not do that and I think that we have to be
very clear. You can go as often as you like to Brussels, you may
talk to as many people as you wish in a number of different languages—which
I am sure you are very capable of doing—but it will have
absolutely no effect if their member states have decided on a
particular political line and are determined to push it through.
This is a matter that ministers face every week. The habit of
not producing agendas until the last moment, the habit of adding
particular important items on at the last moment, the way things
can be deferred; they are all well-known and very effective means
of influencing the outcome. Having been brought up by French nuns
it is something I not only recognise but I appreciate. I managed
to keep one directive on immigration in a particular committee
within the European Parliament for a year and a half simply by
encouraging a Florentine professor to discuss, at inordinate length,
anything that was on the agenda ahead of the item that I did not
wish to reach. We can all play these games, but the reality is
that the governments control the civil servants within the Commission
whereas we have the strange extraordinary idea that if people
go there they should seek to produce fair and balanced judgments
and it is one which is not always effective.
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