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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 565-iv

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON Modernisation of the House of CommonS

 

 

Scrutiny of European BUSINESS

 

 

Wednesday 8 September 2004

MRS GWYNETH DUNWOODY MP and MR MICHAEL JACK MP

Evidence heard in Public Questions 173 - 211

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Select Committee on Modernisation of the House of Commons

on Wednesday 8 September 2004

Members present

Mr Peter Hain, in the Chair

Barbara Follett

Mr Oliver Heald

Martin Linton

Mr Patrick McLoughlin

Mr Peter Pike

Joan Ruddock

Mr Martin Salter

Mr Richard Shepherd

Mr Andrew Stunell

Mr Paul Tyler

Sir Nicholas Winterton

 

________________

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mrs Gwyneth Dunwoody, a Member of the House, Chairman, Transport Committee and Mr Michael Jack, a Member of the House, Chairman, Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, examined.

Q173 Chairman: Thank you both very much for coming and also for your very interesting written evidence which we are grateful for. You will find that the style of this Committee is perhaps a little more informal than you might approve of, but it is up to you as to how you respond and the terminology you use. What I would be grateful for - perhaps beginning with you, Gwyneth, if you do not mind - is if you could summarise what you really see as the purpose of your committees in European scrutiny and the overall strengths and weaknesses from a select committee point of view and whether we can help you better to do the job.

Mrs Dunwoody: I think it is important to realise that the institutions in the European set-up are, of course, completely differently organised from our own. I was four and a half years in European institutions and I learned very quickly that negotiation will go on very specifically at the Council of Ministers but also much more effectively at Corepair which is the one where the representatives of the various civil servants meet. All that preliminary work is very often done only within the very broad lines of policy. Therefore ministers who arrive will very frequently be presented with agendas at the last minute which they have not had proper time to study and even more frequently they will be required to take decisions and negotiate on a fairly broad front without having the time to go back and negotiate, for example, with a select committee. When you put that into context and you look at the way that this House organises its work, you then begin to realise there are a number of difficulties. We, as a select committee - as I hope I have made clear to you - do look very closely at European subjects. Indeed, because so much of it impinges on what we do, we frequently pick up instances which do not appear to have been looked at in very much detail anywhere else. We have just finished an examination of European aviation negotiations which mean that for the first time commercial negotiations of our aviation interests will be left to a European institution which certainly does not appear to be adequately staffed - but that is a matter for them - and will be negotiating on completely different terms than any that have been used before in this country when it was negotiating bilateral agreements. If you had two nations who negotiate an aviation treaty which is in their own commercial, political and economic interests, it is very different from an institution which is supposed to be negotiating an aviation commercial agreement which is in the interests of 25 nations. When we looked very closely at what the European institutions were doing we soon came up with a number of very important and difficult questions. What we do in the select committee is, in a sense, a thematic approach. We decide where the subjects that we have decided to look at are being affected by European institutions; we will look at the impact of the European legislation and the European institutions. I was interested to see that you suggested that the commissioners should appear before the select committees. That would be nice if one could arrange it. We have been trying for some very considerable time to get a commissioner for transport to appear. When the lady in question seemed to be rather occupied with politics elsewhere in Europe - as is natural for politicians, I make no criticism - we then said that we would be quite happy to have the senior civil servants of her transport committee and even with the very considerable muscle of the UK Representative we were unable to obtain that.

Q174 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Why?

Mrs Dunwoody: We were not given a reason; we were just not given dates. As you can imagine, Sir Nicholas, I am not in the habit of being refused by gentlemen for any length of time.

Q175 Mr McLoughlin: You said it was a lady.

Mrs Dunwoody: The gentlemen were the civil servants. Like all ladies she frequently surrounded herself by gentlemen. In this particular instance we have been trying for well over eight months, perhaps nine, to get anyone to come and talk to us who was senior enough to give us evidence. That does rather indicate to me that what we might get if we were to suggest that European commissioners came to give evidence would be a series of rather elaborate and staged appearances by commissioners who, after all, do not regard themselves as answerable to national governments; there is no reason why they should. They are not answerable to national governments nor is the Commission. Therefore I am not at all sure what the function of these sessions would be. Are we to take it that if they were given instructions by a select committee they would then take a different attitude? I think that is interesting and it can really only wait to be seen, but it seems extraordinarily unlikely. I also have real reservations about unloading even more European Union work on select committees. At the moment the members of the select committees choose their own programmes; they look at every aspect over the year. As you know the Liaison Committee gave guidance to select committees to help them to look right the way across their ministerial responsibilities during the Parliamentary year. They have already had to ask very specifically for extra assistance because those of you who are select committee chairmen will know how very stretched the staff are and, even with the extra assistance, to unload a responsibility like looking at the extra legislation without it being something which the committee itself has chosen as being relevant to the work they are already doing, it seems to me would add an enormous extra burden.

Q176 Sir Nicholas Winterton: If the select committees do not do it, Gwyneth, who does it? Who can do it impartially on behalf of Parliament in the UK?

Mrs Dunwoody: I have to say to you that if select committees, for example, undertook this responsibility one immediate effect would be to cut out two thirds of the Parliament. At the present time, if I wish, I can go along and take part in European Scrutiny. I cannot vote but I can go along to the European Scrutiny Committee and ask questions.

Q177 Chairman: Standing committee.

Mrs Dunwoody: Yes. I am afraid I am so old; when I joined them they were called European Scrutiny. It is a real power; you have the ability to go along. I can give you an instance: one of the hazards we face as a select committee is that we are not given sufficient notice of what is happening and we suddenly discover, for example, that there was a meeting concerning Galileo.

Q178 Mr Pike: I chaired the committee.

Mrs Dunwoody: Of course you did, Mr Pike, and extraordinarily well and with great tact as is always the case. However, the reality was that we were given very short notice that this actually had to be examined. I am sure Mr Pike himself had only just been told. I went along; no other member of my committee was able to get there because of the shortness of the notice and I took part in that debate. If that had been referred as a very specific piece of legislation to my committee everyone else would have been excluded and would not have been able to ask questions nor take any cognisance of what the minister said. Indeed, if we came out with a report, that report would go through the normal select committee procedures, there would still be six weeks for the Government to answer it and then we would have to get in the queue to get it debated on the floor of the house. It is not a rapid way. It does not improve the quality of scrutiny, it actually puts it back.

Q179 Mr Shepherd: Can it affect the outcome?

Mrs Dunwoody: I am sorry to tell you, Mr Shepherd, I think it is extraordinarily unlikely that it will affect the outcome. If that were the case, believe me I would be number one in the queue to get all of this legislation referred to my committee but then frankly the select committee would be doing something totally different because there is an enormous bulk of regulations.

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 of 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 Mrs 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 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 twenty-five 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 twenty 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 seventeen 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 advisors. 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 advisor 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 advisors, like you have special advisors 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 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 ten 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 if would have affected the matter. The Government would have been in great difficult 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 committee's process, the House could say "no" if it wanted to but unlike the old procedures the discussion informing that position is taking 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 célèbre 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 the European 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 be then 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 Europe 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 twenty-five 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 described 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.

Q200 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Do you think that the UKRep should report to Parliament?

Mrs Dunwoody: I do not want the responsibility of appointing officials, Sir Nicholas. We have enough trouble managing to get people to join political parties. God help us if we had to control civil servants as well.

Mr Jack: Can I just add that there may well be something the Government should consider, that is the reporting via an UKRep mechanism to select committees matters that they ought to take note of because they are the source of a great deal of useful intelligence and that would actually be quite helpful.

Q201 Martin Linton: Can I bring you back to the role of select committees because there seems to be a bit of a paradox here because you are being pressed to take a greater role, not just inquiries but European scrutiny, both upstream and downstream; draft bills, pre-legislative and maybe post-legislative; even the European Scrutiny Committee wants you to actually take evidence from ministers pre- and post-council meetings. Also you are being pressed to take greater membership as well. You might expect select committees to say they will build their empire, have more members, more sub-committees, more functions; that is the normal way that organisations operate. However, it seems to me it is almost the opposite: you do not want more members, you do not want more sub-committees, you do not want to have more jobs foist on you or at least you want to retain your right to concentrate on inquiries which I think is probably the strongest role of select committees. However, it does not seem to me that you are addressing yourselves to the basic question. Everybody recognises that we need more involvement of select committees, because of their expertise, in European scrutiny. We need more involvement of select committees in the legislative process, in draft bills. We have 150 MPs just on our side who are not on any select committee and not in any government post; there are plenty of people to do the job. You have to tell us why we should not have some system - as they do in Finland and many other European countries - where the select committees are involved and can be expected to be involved in the process of European scrutiny both upstream and downstream. Gwyneth, you say in your evidence - which I found very interesting - that you are not given the resources and cannot be expected to do the work without additional resources and I accept that point entirely. Supposing select committees were given the resources to do this job in European scrutiny, would you do it? Would you be prepared to do it?

Mrs Dunwoody: I think you may have to be quite clear what it is you want select committees to do. At the present time we are charged with taking what is in effect a monitoring role of a government department and not just a government department but all of the agencies connected with a government department. If I were in the seat of the leader of the House and I regarded having 150 back benchers as a distinct hazard without them having enough to do, then I would be seeking to set up a series of committees and giving them responsibilities way beyond what they have at the present time. I think that at the present time select committees are expanding the work that they do. We can get into a philosophical argument about how Parliament itself has changed the way it operates: so much of it here is timetabled; so much of it is not properly scrutinised; so much domestic legislation has to come back and be amended because we have changed the way we operate. Select committees are much more important in their role of monitoring what government departments do than they were originally. That is one reason why they are taking on extra powers and have extra impact. If the government of the day then says, "Ah, but you also have to look at all the pre-legislative scrutiny and you have to look at every bit that flows out of Europe and you have to do it after it has gone on the statute book", then I can tell you you would limit the amount of time that was spent on looking at domestic legislation.

Q202 Mr Heald: Can I just come in on that, Gwyneth, because a key part of the job of a select committee is to scrutinise what the department is doing. One of the things the department is doing is going to Europe negotiating all sorts of directives and regulations so surely part of your job is to make sure you are finding out what they are up to.

Mrs Dunwoody: And this is exactly what we do. This is why we have just done an inquiry on aviation; this is why we are looking at every aspect of the decisions they are taking in relation to road safety.

Q203 Mr Heald: Does it not involve the sort of thing Michael was talking about as well, which is getting out there, finding out what they are doing over there in the Commission and then putting this to ministers and asking them what they are doing about it.

Mrs Dunwoody: I am saying to you that we are already directly involved in those aspects of our committee work which are being influenced by Brussels. This is what we do already. This is why we have already done at least three reports on various aspects. However, there is a difference between that - which is following through the theme of the government involvement and government interest in specific policies - and being loaded with the responsibility of looking very carefully at every detail. I spent four and a half years amending words. I can use a number of words in different languages which mean approximately the same thing but never the same thing. I can tell you that if that is the way we are going to go then the work of the select committees will be effectively neutered.

Mr Jack: I wonder if I may put another perspective on that. I wrote down two things when Mr Linton asked his question. One was: more involvement; the other was: prioritisation. We do not cover everything that our department does domestically; we cannot, we do not have the time. I think your question goes to a very fundamental view of the nature of our select committees. At the moment what happens is that by the various mechanisms people find themselves on the committees. It is one of many things that they do in the House. If the expanded role as you describe were to be put onto committees then the chairs of those committees would almost find themselves in a full-time job.

Mrs Dunwoody: We are paid now so of course we should do more.

Mr Jack: I am not objecting for one moment to doing more, but the nature of what we would be doing if we were going to cover the full canvass which has been discussed could mean that you would do that almost to the exclusion of everything else.

Mrs Dunwoody: It would keep us very busy which would be very good, would it not? You would not have any time to go to Questions and not be able to vote.

Mr Jack: Quite right, there is a price to be paid, just like holding offices that you absent yourself from doing something for your constituents that you might feel is an integral part of what you came into the House to do.

Mrs Dunwoody: What an old-fashioned idea.

Mr Jack: Maybe it is; maybe I am a little old-fashioned but I will stick to those old-fashioned values. We do not want to create a parallel universe where the select committees are out there trying to be on a par with departments because that is not what we are there for; we are there for a scrutiny role. Let me give you an example: the European Union has just concluded and implemented the biggest single change to the Common Agricultural Policy since it was originally designed. Our committee have from time to time written reports about the nature of agriculture and commented on how the European Union's processes could be amended. However, when this process started the Secretary of State for DEFRA (in this case) did not come along to the select committee and say, "I am now starting, in concert with my fellow ministers, to discuss what will ultimately be the biggest single reform. I think it would be a good idea if your committee did a parallel exercise and informed what was happening." We ended up by doing a scrutiny of what had happened to a certain extent after the event. It is on issues like that that the Government and ministers have to decide as well if they are prepared to engage the select committee. We can come in and do our own things but sometimes they are privy to what is happening and therefore it is a question of, right, this is a proper matter for Parliament to be involved in; the select committee should start the process of inquiry and work in parallel with what the Council of Ministers are doing and take its own views from within the United Kingdom or wherever else and inform that thinking process. In that way we would then have the potential to have real influence over the development of ideas prior to them being set in concrete.

Q204 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Why did that not happen?

Mr Jack: Because we are not geared up to doing it; people do not think like that. Usually the select committee comes in after something has appeared and is well and truly on the radar.

Q205 Sir Nicholas Winterton: But you are chairman of this committee.

Mr Jack: We do, from time to time, get involved in things upstream because we pick them up but we are not equipped to know that all of the processes that are going on are occurring. I go back to the practical example I gave about fridges. Most of the discussion about the United Kingdom's position that ultimately resulted in some of the problems of fridge mountains occurred in what is called Management Committee which is the officials of a government department beavering away trying to fix a problem, reporting to the minister who is desperately hoping that a fix will emerge.

Mrs Dunwoody: No-one asked why we have got an entire industry exporting used fridges when no-body else had.

Mr Jack: No, but what I am saying is that that was below the radar of the committee; we did not know it was happening.

Mrs Dunwoody: So even though it was upstream, it was below the radar.

Mr Jack: Yes, it was. There is no way you can necessarily see that that problem was coming because no-one had told us.

Q206 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Who should have told you?

Mr Jack: We could have had some information from the department and we could have had some information from the permanent representation and it would have been interesting to see whether we could have had some from the Commission.

Q207 Mr Stunell: What we have really heard is a council of despair. The select committees are too busy; the standing committees are ineffectual and we have also heard that the larger the group of people that considers any issue the less likely it is to produce a sound conclusion which rather rules out the chamber of the House of Commons as well it would appear. If we try to break out of that cycle of despair then just one of the possibilities that Mr Jack put in his evidence was about Euro-days once a quarter, about ways which it seems to me were setting an agenda in the House which is independent of other events. I wonder if you would like to take us through the ideas that you have there and perhaps put a slightly more hopeful view as to how we might get out of the mess you have so thoroughly identified.

Mr Jack: I am sorry if I have created an impression of a council of despair; it is dealing with the realities. The idea of having something on a quarterly basis that I suggested or a cross-cutting question time on Europe would enable these people to engage - who are not involved in a select committee process but who are interested to know what is going on - in probing ministers about what is happening. At the moment in terms of Europe if you have under the standard question time procedures a question on Europe it takes its place in competition with everything else. If you have carved out some time, for example, the Government might say, "Okay we are going to have four of these sessions every year and we will give them a theme. We might have a theme on the environment; we might have a theme on cross-border security. We might have whatever you choose, transport through Europe." Therefore you can decide either to have a minister who will come along and brief the House on behalf of key developments and there can be a focussed debate on the subject or you could have some form of question and answer session so that people could engage and discuss. It would enable the ministers to talk about both the things that were in the Council and were coming along towards the Council and there could be some dialogue in which members of the House, either by a question time format or by a debate - I suggested Westminster Hall as one way of doing that - could engage in those areas where they may have a specific interest because the current mechanism of the white paper discussions is a sort of catch-all run by the foreign secretary which does not enable you to go into the detail where some of the more contentious issues are being discussed on a departmental basis.

Q208 Chairman: What about this idea of a European Grand Committee?

Mr Jack: I suppose we are getting back into focus, function and numbers of people because by definition a European Grand Committee could either deal with everything or be very focussed in what it does. The thought of having separate forms of debate perhaps three or four times a year where we could take a more focussed departmental view would enable people to go into more depth about particular subject areas. As to the European Grand Committee, I would have to give more thought about that particularly in determining how its agenda would be focussed. It comes away from engaging or giving an opportunity for the whole House to become involved in that subject. One of the points that Mr Shepherd and Sir Nicholas raised earlier was the almost impotence of the floor of the House to engage in dialogue on European matters. If you had something that enabled you to have a one-to-one with a minister and a debate or a question time, then those members of the House - as with any debate - who wanted to could engage in that process. By having the Grand Committee process you are almost saying that it is only the enthusiasts and there are people who are very domestically minded but want to know how the European issue will impact on them and their constituents.

Q209 Chairman: I think we would all sympathise with what you are saying in principal, but just to clarify what would you say to the proposition which I think came from Martin Linton in an earlier session about having, say, an hour's slot for whatever main departmental questions and ten minutes were reserved that had to cover European issues if questions were tabled on Europe. What do you think of that idea?

Mr Jack: It is another way of providing the same opportunity that if you said, for example, right we will have a question time for the main departments who deal with European business and people could table whatever questions they like and ministers will have to come and attend and answer those questions. I am conscious that even within our own question time people are frustrated that we only get through a limited number of questions and that effectively it is only on a three- or four-weekly cycle where you can get in on domestic issues. I think my view would be that it is better to carve out a separate chunk of time to focus on the European issue so that those who were particularly interested could come along and engage in that and that it did not take time away from the domestic side. On the domestic side, you cannot stop members tabling now questions which may have a European dimension to them.

Mrs Dunwoody: We have been looking at European competencies precisely for this reason, that they affect so much of our domestic policy, so I see no reason why we should not have extra to the existing debates on the floor of the House half an hour which was just for European Union matters. I am sad that you so readily are prepared to abandon what, to me, is a very obvious thing. The European Scrutiny Committees at the moment are ineffective because people do not think they have any result. If you just simply gave them the right to amend and debate then frankly they would come along because they would be prepared to enjoy questioning a minister. I am glad to hear that Michael thought I gave him a hard time, but it is one of the few opportunities in the House of Commons to question a minister for an hour and a half on a particular subject. It is very focussed; ministers have to know their brief and they have to answer questions. Members of Parliament used to use that very effectively. However, unless you give them the chance at the end of their debate to actually put down an amendment or to vote on what has happened, then you really dissipate all the effort they have put in up to that point. You cannot just abandon your existing structure without thinking what you could do to amend it and make if effective.

Mr Jack: I think the only way you could get to that position is if those committees were not formed on the strictly party lines that they are at the moment. If you gave them the ability to be like a mini, one-off select committee who, at the end of a question and answer debate session with the minister, could then produce a short report saying what they think is wrong and what should be amended and that could then be put to the House for debate, that might get you somewhere near where you want to be.

Mrs Dunwoody: The other side of the suggestion of a select committee is that if you move down this way, putting more and more European examination on select committees, then the whips would become even more active in deciding who does what.

Mr Jack: No, I am talking about reformulating the existing standing committees on a different basis so that they had the flexibility to produce amendments and commentary because at the moment with the Government tabling a government motion then by definition the Government has a majority on those committees, albeit they are unwhipped business, but the chances are that the Government will always win the day and whatever amendment the Committee might wish to put to the House will never get there.

Joan Ruddock: Let me just respond to some of those points with a very specific area of policy. In terms of the DEFRA Select Committee, of course the majority of policy is actually European-made these days so the majority of the items which our committee - I am on Michael's committee - takes up have a European dimension. If you look at genetically modified food and crops the vast majority of our constituents do not want these products in this country on any terms whatsoever. There has never been a debate in the House of Commons on this issue with a vote in which people could express the views of their constituents. Every couple of months either the Agriculture or the Environment Minister is in council voting - voting, not talking - on some aspect of introducing a new food, a new crop or making some other regulations. The committee that does the selection of items has spotted this as being contentious and, indeed, repeatedly refers matters to Committees A, B and C. At those committees the Government always tables its motion. I have gone to those committees as a person who does not sit on any of them and I have put down amendments and I have forced a vote. Of course the whole of my side voted against my amendments whipped by the Government, despite the fact that virtually every person agreed with my position. That is the reality in the European Standing Committee and it is the reality on the floor of the House. It matters not. The power to amend is there, the power to force a vote is there but it matters not at the end of the day whether it is in the committee or on the floor of the House, if the Government has a majority and it uses its whips effectively it always wins the day. The mechanisms we have at the moment do not provide any way of influencing what that minister does in council, not least because one of the committees on which I forced a vote, the opposite minister - the Minister for the Department of Health as opposed to the Department of the Environment - was in council at the very time we were having our committee actually making a speech and voting on the matter that we were debating. As I see it, with apologies to Gwyneth, there is not a way of amending or making more effective the present system because it ends up with a party vote. Clearly that is a form of scrutiny which we all understand. The proposals that Michael makes approach the matter from another perspective which is to try to get influence that is not based on party political votes either in committee or in the chamber and it seems to me that is the only positive proposal that we have had that would enable us to gain more influence. I just want to really try to get this committee to some point of not exploring constantly the problems we are all familiar with but where on earth can we find solutions? We have two perspectives here. One does give us an opportunity. Gwyneth is enormously experienced in these matters and enormously respected, but I cannot see what she is proposing coming to any kind of solution because, as I say, the mechanism - despite what she has said - is there to amend and to have a vote.

Sir Nicholas Winterton: Joan Ruddock is incorrect; I am afraid she is wrong. If Standing Committee A, B or C actually does amend - and the committees have amended motions - the Government is not obliged to table that amended motion on the floor of the House; they will table the original motion. To an extent these committees are not able to influence the House as a whole as they should be. I believe this is a matter for the Procedure Committee to look at as well as your committee, Chairman, because I believe that if an amendment is passed in a European standing committee that is the motion that not only should be tabled on the floor of the House but it should also be debated on the floor of the House.

Joan Ruddock: The issue is: if the Procedure Committee, for example, were to get a change that meant that the amended motion did go to the floor of the House, I am putting the point that with a Government with a majority and an effective whipping system it would still be defeated. Therefore we are not influencing the process.

Q210 Chairman: I think both points of view have been very clearly expressed and I think we need some stronger chairing here. Could Gwyneth and Michael respond to Joan's points, please?

Mrs Dunwoody: I know it is a fairly revolutionary idea that a government with a majority insists on getting its own view onto the record; that is not altogether new, it has been known for some time. The reality is that we can do certain things. We could amend existing procedures in the European committees. There is no other time at which a minister can be questioned for an hour and a half on a specific process. We could ensure that the actual mechanisms of making sure that select committees know that there is legislation or regulation coming up or general debates coming up which might concern them early enough so that they can look at it and can seek to influence it. Influence on governments stems from the amount of public pressure that can be put on by debates on the floor of the House and work on the committees that influence that debate. The reality is that the select committees are not the place in my view. They already do a lot of work about European matters; because of the work of the departments they already follow what is happening in Europe and seek to influence it. I actually think there are ways of doing it but not by putting more and more detailed work onto select committees.

Mr Jack: I think that if we had the more flexible mechanisms which I described you would get somewhere near being able to respond to Joan's observations in this way: if, for example, as a result of the scrutiny process a short report was issued to which the Government would respond in the same way that it responds to the full-scale select committee process saying that the Government's position remains to vote in favour of GM - just to pick up on your example - but we will do the following things to respond to the Scrutiny Committee's concern about product labelling, about the percentage of contaminants that might be permitted in still calling something GM and the growth of the organic movement or whatever it happened to be. I am very conscious that at the end of the day a minister is in the process of negotiating and it would be unusual for this House to tie the hand of a minister absolutely and I somehow think that whatever the colour of a government, a government would be unwilling to be tied in a negotiating position. I think we have to think that one through carefully because I think there is a lot we can do to influence the nuts and bolts but if the United Kingdom Government has taken a principal decision then maybe the Government has to say right, we want Parliament to decide yes or no to GM - which is one thing - but then in terms of influencing the European policy towards it then these mechanisms which I have described may enable you to get the Government to say, "Okay, we will tick the following boxes, we agree with the House on points a, b and c but cannot agree on d an e and will fight for those in the European Council". Obviously I recognise that there are no absolutes because it is only part of a bigger process of negotiation and which can also be influenced by the one area that we have not discussed but which could still have a big effect on everything we are talking about: the role of the European Parliament. Now, with the co-decision making mechanisms in place they too have a big influence over the end-game - the final shape of the directive or the regulation - over which we have no influence whatsoever.

Q211 Chairman: We had a very interesting session - just as yours has been - with some European parliamentarians on those kinds of areas. I am very grateful indeed for the time you have given, the expertise and experience you have brought. What we make of it all remains to be seen. I am very grateful indeed. Thank you.

Mr Jack: Thank you for asking us.