You are here: Parliament home page > Parliamentary business > Publications and Records > Committee Publications > All Select Committee Publications > Commons Select Committees > Modernisation of the House of Commons > Modernisation of the House of Commons

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

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Select Committee on Modernisation of the House of Commons

 

 

Scrutiny of European Business

 

 

Wednesday 15 September 2004

MR ROGER SANDS and MR LIAM LAURENCE SMYTH

Evidence heard in Public Questions 212-243

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.

This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.

 

2.

Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.

 

3.

Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.

 

4.

Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.

 


Oral Evidence

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

on Wednesday 15 September 2004

Members present:

Ann Coffey

Mr David Kidney

Martin Linton

Mr Patrick McLoughlin

Mr Peter Pike

Joan Ruddock

Mr Paul Tyler

Sir Nicholas Winterton

 

In the absence of the Chairman, Sir Nicholas Winterton was called to the Chair

________________

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Roger Sands, Clerk of the House and Mr Liam Laurence Smyth, Clerk of Delegated Legislation, examined.

Q212 Sir Nicholas Winterton: We now of course move on to matters relating to Scrutiny of European Business and you will need the support of your colleague on your right, who is well-known to us, Liam Laurence Smyth, who is the Clerk of Delegated Legislation, and has sat there extremely patiently and now joins in the discussion. The first area we want to look at is the scrutiny system, and if I again may be allowed to take over the question which I know the Leader of the House wanted to ask himself, can we take it, Mr Sands, from paragraph 3 of your paper, that you are - I hesitate to use the word in relation to Europe - sceptical about the House having a "key role to play in bringing the European Union closer to our citizens", and I use those words because they are your precise words from your paper and I quote. Could any procedural changes make any difference, and obviously both Mr Smyth and yourself should answer.

Mr Sands: I think I am slightly sceptical as to whether procedural changes can do that. I think that the way this House and the Members in it address themselves to Europe and issues surrounding the European Union, must over time have a very significant influence on the way the public perceives the European Union, but whether one can change the way that they address themselves to Europe and issues surrounding the EU simply by procedural change I rather doubt. As you know, and I have said it often to your other Committee, I think there is a tendency to over-estimate the influence that procedure has on these matters. The procedure is just a framework and it is the way that Members fill it that is really significant.

Mr Laurence Smyth: Sir Nicholas, I am here in a spirit of what the constitutional treaty calls "loyal co-operation" so I do not think you could expect me to contradict the Clerk of the House. I am the Principal Clerk who supervises the work of several committees: the European Scrutiny Committee, Regulatory Reform, Human Rights, Statutory Instruments and also our National Parliament Office in Brussels. I am tremendously proud of the work that they all do and I am convinced that there are enormous opportunities for Members, if they want to use them, and it is very interesting to see what your Committee can do to creatively to provide more opportunity for Members, but I am not sure that the opportunities themselves change Members' behaviour. I think we do a wonderful job enabling Members to do things and they could do a lot more themselves.

Q213 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Before I hand over to Peter Pike, can I just ask one question? When we took evidence from Members of Parliament, comment was made about the use that we make of UK-REP because it is necessary for this House to get involved earlier, further upstream as it were, on the decision-making process in Europe, but of course UK-REP report to ambassadors of government and do not report to Parliament. Who is available in the European Parliament and the Commission to brief Parliament on what is happening so that we can become available at an earlier stage? At the moment, really, we get involved far too late and too late really to influence legislation?

Mr Laurence Smyth: UK-REP, I think, do an outstanding job in helping Select Committees. Whenever I have taken Select Committees to Brussels I have started with UK-REP and they have been tremendously frank in explaining what they are doing and giving us an insight into issues we should be raising with the Commission. As a former departmental Select Committee Clerk I have found them unfailingly helpful. The Foreign Office are enormously positive of the European Scrutiny Committee and the Foreign Secretary was appearing before the European Scrutiny Committee earlier and offering even more co-operation to try and make things work better. It is up to Select Committees really to ask the questions, if that is what they want to ask. A word of caution is that some wise words that I have seen used by UK-REP are that the moment when you are most likely to be able to influence the outcome comes before ministers have made up their mind what they want to do.

Q214 Sir Nicholas Winterton: That is precisely the point that we are getting at. Ministers can be influenced by this House, but if this House is not getting the information about what is going on in the corridors of power in Brussels - and UK-REP I think are in a position to do that - should they not be more pro-active in liaising with the House and with Select Committees, rather than merely expecting Select Committees when they go to Brussels to meet them?

Mr Laurence Smyth: I cannot think that there would be very much attention paid to unsolicited notes of that kind, but it is possible.

Q215 Sir Nicholas Winterton: But they know what is going to happen and if we were aware of what was likely to happen - and I do not just describe tittle-tattle and gossip or whatever, UK-REP we understand are very well briefed. You have indicated that they are very well briefed, do you not think they should brief not just the minister, the Secretary of State and our Ambassador but actually Members of the House?

Mr Laurence Smyth: I feel that they do. Part of the February statement from Jack Straw was to say that he would recast his six-monthly White Papers and the autumn update that we just had last week, Prospects for the EU, in a very sketchy format says these are the issues which we think are bubbling up over the next period in Brussels. It is very hard to see what more we can do. If Members pick this document up from the Vote Office and see that there is something there that they are very interested in, everything is open to them, nothing is really hidden, I do not think.

Q216 Mr Pike: I want to move on to how we really assess what our European scrutiny system achieves, what it is reasonable to expect it to achieve and how we judge it. Having listened to what you said a few moments ago about influence on Government policy, is that the main criteria or is it holding them to account or is it something of a mixture? I know you just said there has been some influence, but are we all convinced that that is really the case, that we are influencing things as much as possible before decisions are taken?

Mr Sands: I will have a go at that. I was very interested in the evidence given to this Committee by Michael Jack last week because he drew a distinction between influencing before something gets into a legislative proposal and then the process that takes place after you have a proposal from the Commission. Obviously, if you want to influence in a big sense you have to be in at the first stage, but I would ask the Committee to note that Mr Jack also did emphasise the value of the second stage process as well, even if it was only a process of accountability. A lot of what this House does is setting up mechanisms which ministers and civil servants know are there, and because they know they are there they avoid possibly doing things that otherwise they might be tempted to do. It is a safety net and I know it is often boring for Members to have to police these accountability processes, but it is a valuable function nonetheless.

Q217 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Liam, do you want to add to that?

Mr Laurence Smyth: It is a very hard question, chairman, but there is nobody really better than your Committee to answer it because there are so many different jobs that a Member of Parliament does and on your Committee you have a number of members with very different experiences and different ways of being a Member of Parliament. There is not a typical one. I would not like to rank Members of Parliament nor the institution because there are so many different things that Parliament is trying to do.

Q218 Mr Pike: You will recall that a few years ago as well as Scrutiny Committees we did have a session of questions specifically on European questions. At the moment European questions take pot luck in the general Foreign Office questions and it may be that not a single European question is lucky in the draw. Would you think that Europe is now so important that perhaps we should go back to having a session of questions specifically on European matters?

Mr Sands: I certainly think it is worth considering. I do not think it is for me to make a firm recommendation as to how time is parcelled up, but I can certainly recognise that that is an option. The danger is the one that I mention at the bottom, that the phenomenon of most large scale debates - and it is not just debates it is other proceedings in relation to Europe - tend to become generalised and end up sounding much the same. There is, I think, a danger that a European questions slot would just be monopolised by a handful of enthusiasts in this area, if I can put it that way.

Q219 Martin Linton: Can we just pursue this point a little further because our inquiry is about suggesting improvements to the European scrutiny system, and we will not get very far unless we can all be frank about both the advantages and the disadvantages of the existing system. In your paper you describe the existing system as among the most thorough and effective in the European Union; some of the evidence we have had from other sources, notably last week, points out that the European Scrutiny Committee is predominantly backwards-looking and has a lower profile than the European Community in the House of Lords, which is not necessarily a criticism of the European Scrutiny Committee as such but it implies that it is not very effective in performing the tasks that are needed. We have heard a lot of evidence along these lines; would you not agree that while the European Scrutiny Committee may perform the backwards-looking task of accountability very well, when it comes to dealing with the question of what the European Union is about to do, it does not intervene at an early enough stage to have any effect?

Mr Sands: The European Scrutiny Committee does the job which is prescribed for it in Standing Orders, and that job is based on the examination of documents, and the scrutiny documents are set out.

Q220 Martin Linton: Would you recommend that in order to make the system of European scrutiny more effective we should adopt a different system?

Mr Sands: I think it would be a mistake to move away from a document-based system, and indeed even the European Union Committee in the House of Lords bases itself on proposals; the essential difference is that they try to be much more selective than the House of Commons Committee, and the sift, which is the main purpose of the European Union Committee, used to be done by the chairman and the clerk in concert and the Committee itself was not bothered with it. Then they have this structure of sub-committees which looks in detail at those selected proposals. Their system was set up to be complementary to ours - my recollection is that ours came first - so I think one has to look at the efforts of Parliament on a two House basis, and I do not think it would be sensible for this House to try to replicate or compete with the work that is being done by the House of Lords.

Q221 Martin Linton: Perhaps Mr Smyth might like to comment in terms of European scrutiny.

Mr Laurence Smyth: There are more things that the House might do, but what we do do we do extremely well. I do not think it is exactly backwards-looking because, very often, the Committee is looking at documents that are on their way to Council, but the Committee is looking at documents when an idea has crystallised sufficiently to be a proposal that can be analysed. I think the Scrutiny Committee has been quite influential in pushing the idea of using impact assessments, for example, which is something I think the Chancellor intends to make one of the themes of the UK presence, getting better quality regulation done. He is working, interestingly, in collaboration with the presidency, leading up to our presidency. That is quite an imaginative approach in trying to get better results out of Europe. I thought it was quite interesting what the select committee chairmen were saying last week about things that their committees might do if they wanted, but it is quite clear that they are not going to attempt comprehensively to identify all of the things on the European radar at an early up-stream stage before an idea has crystallised. One of the things that came out strongly from the Foreign Secretary's statement in February, which we have not heard a lot about so far, is the debate about transposition - and the report was done by Robin Bellis - once we have signed up to a Directive to say we are all agreed there ought to be a law on something, how well do we make that into law in Britain? There were some very interesting ideas there which the House of Lords Committee on the merits of statutory instruments has made some great progress with. Sir Nicholas, your Committee has expressed its views about how this House might get involved in the merits. For the time being the Lords are going it alone. The wonderful thing they have already achieved is they have got the Government to agree that there will be a memorandum for every statutory instrument explaining how it is going about implementing a European obligation. That is a wonderful opportunity. You know as Members that you have got far more information than you can use but if your Committee can find a way of using that extra information, I think that is an area which would add.

Q222 Martin Linton: All the Nordic countries' European committees, though, come in at a much earlier stage as a matter of course. Do you not think that would be a good idea?

Mr Sands: I do not think that is true, Mr Linton. I saw this comparison made between a document-based and a mandate-based system of scrutiny and the systems in Denmark and Finland held up as great examples to us, but the mandate is still given at the last moment before a meeting of the Council of Ministers, and as that meeting of the Council of Ministers will be based on a document so the mandate is also based on a document. I do not think there is a huge amount of difference between that and our system of a European standing committee meeting just in the run‑up to a Council of Ministers meeting and that is when they tend to be arranged, and agreeing to a motion or not agreeing to a motion which the Government has put indicating their intentions with regard to a particular document.

Q223 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Do we take it, Mr Sands, that that European standing committees can disagree with the motion and could perhaps even pass an amendment but the Government does not have to do anything about that, it tables the original motion from the floor of House? Is that a satisfactory way to proceed?

Mr Sands: No, I do not think it is, Sir Nicholas. I think it is said in the Government's own paper to this Committee that there is a lack of interest in European standing committees. Well, we know that what really interests Members is when there is an element of uncertainty in proceedings but if the Government is at the same time as saying that also removing any possible element of uncertainty from the proceedings they cannot be surprised if there is a lack of interest.

Q224 Sir Nicholas Winterton: So what would your recommendation be to the House - I cannot say "to the Government" because you are a servant of the House - on this matter?

Mr Sands: A recommendation has been made repeatedly by the Procedure Committee that an amendment to a Government motion in European standing committee should have some procedural consequences, whether it be a short debate on the floor of the House or, more likely, putting the committee's motion to the House and forcing the Government to reject it if they really feel strongly about it.

Q225 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Thank you. Can I just pick you up on one thing. You almost implied that the procedures we have here are as good as those in Finland and Denmark where Ministers appear and are mandated ie, their parliament mandates them on the line that they should take. We do not do that here.

Mr Sands: I think there is more of a connection between what we do and what they do than is acknowledged in some of papers that have been put to you. I do not know what mandates in the Danish European committee look like but I believe they are pretty open‑ended documents and pretty brief. They are not tying the minister down in any detail. So I do not suspect they are very much different from the sort of motion that the Government tends to table for a European standing committee saying "this Committee notes European proposal boom, boom, boom and supports the Government in its effort to secure a particular outcome." That is a sort of mandate.

Sir Nicholas Winterton: Thank you. Ann Coffey?

Q226 Ann Coffey: You mentioned previously that there are things that we did quite well but you thought there were things we could do better. Can you give three suggestions of ways that it could be done better and the reasons for making those suggestions?

Mr Laurence Smyth: I would like to see a Commons involvement of some kind in the select committee on the merits of statutory instruments, so that when a department was claiming that this new set of regulations is necessary to implement a European objective there was some focused Commons' scrutiny of that claim. I think a joint committee on the merits of statutory instruments is peculiarly difficult to tackle. I think it is very wise of the Government to see how the Lords get on before turning it into a joint committee because it has got a lot to do with who controls the time on the floor of the House. It is very sensitive between two Houses. I do not think anybody would accept a Lords majority suggesting that something did not deserve a debate in the Commons. That would be really inappropriate. It is difficult to see how it would work but I would like there to be something to work in that area. When the Modernisation Committee looked at this in 1998 they said pre and post Council scrutiny is the thing, and I must say I agree with that. On the European Scrutiny Committee agenda today they have as a standing item pre and post Council scrutiny. The department says, "This is what is going to be on the competitiveness agenda next week. This is a scrutiny issue. You cleared this item on this date. The Lords published a report on this date. There was a debate ..." and so on and because of the scrutiny reserve nothing is going to happen that has not been cleared at some point. That is a little bit different from the Friday afternoon in Helsinki but it serves the same kind of purpose. Where I think some of our departmental select committees are missing an opportunity is calling in a minister just before the big Council in each Presidency and saying, "What are you hoping to achieve on Tuesday?" I know select committees have an enormous range of things they can do and that is their strength, they can be so selective and creative and imaginative, but my magic wand would be to make select committees choose more often to do that kind of work

Sir Nicholas Winterton: You might be unpopular with select committees. Ann?

Q227 Ann Coffey: Yes, that is not entirely within anybody's control. I suppose that is down to the select committees themselves and their particular interests. In a sense part of the difficulty is that of course select committees take place upstairs. They obviously have a number of MPs that sit on them but they are outside what is seen as the main business and the focus which is the Chamber of the House of Commons, and that is where the interest is and if the media are picking up anything it is from the House of Commons, so I understand the point you are making but I was maybe trying to think of a way in which the Chamber could be more engaged in debating European affairs as a matter of course.

Mr Sands: We also have the facility now of Westminster Hall and of course if select committees did as Liam has suggested and routinely picked up significant European issues and reported on them, there is this regular slot now in Westminster Hall for debating select committee reports, and if they produce a report on a European issue it is able to be debated.

Q228 Ann Coffey: It would be wonderful if select committees were actually doing that. Say, for example, select committees were not focusing in on how the business of their departments relates to Europe then you are not going to get that kind of report to debate in Westminster.

Mr Sands: No you are not. It does depend on the select committee choosing and it is more of a natural for some select committees than others.

Q229 Ann Coffey: But that does not sort the problem out really because it is left to the select committees to make the choice.

Mr Sands: I think you have to do that.

Q230 Ann Coffey: But that is always the issue in this place, is it not, because basically there is always a reason for why things are the way they are, and often you go round in a circle and you come back to leaving things the way they are because there is a reason for them being the way they are, so it does not really get us very far, does it?

Mr Sands: I think I would defend the freedom of select committees to choose their subjects because Members devote huge amounts of time and effort to select committees and I think they do that in part because they feel that they are in control of what is happening.

Q231 Ann Coffey: I am not disputing the point about select committees. What I am pointing out is that the weakness of your suggestion is exactly that, that the select committees have that kind of freedom. That is the only point I am making. I was going back to the problem not only of scrutinising European legislation better but being seen as a House to scrutinise it, because that is part of connecting Parliament with the outside world, that people see that we do debate things that are European as well as national.

Mr Sands: That is a standing problem with a lot of activity here. It is particularly so with this and I hope that the members of this Committee will, before reaching a judgment on the European Scrutiny Committee's existing work, read a few weeks' worth of their reports because it will demonstrate the way they go about the job and way they keep government departments and civil servants and ministers under pressure on a continuous basis. There is all that work and information there and it is a tragedy that it is so little read and so little used.

Ann Coffey: It is a tragedy in everything that things are not read.

Q232 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Do you not accept, Mr Sands, that there is concern right across the House that the House of Commons does not deal with the scrutiny of European legislation adequately?

Mr Sands: If I am told that, yes, I obviously have to accept it. I think though that some of the concern is coming from a feeling that if we were dealing with it effectively there would be a whole lot less of it, and I do not think ‑‑‑

Q233 Sir Nicholas Winterton: -‑‑ that is wishful thinking!

Mr Sands: --- and I do not think that that is true. I think that is part of the feeling.

Mr Laurence Smyth: If I may, Chairman, just thinking over what Ms Coffey was saying about using the floor of the House, I think your Committee has already begun to influence and shape how things are done. Because your inquiry has been going on, when the European Scrutiny Committee came to look at the justice and home affairs legislative programme for the next period they said, "Let's break this out from our normal meeting and let's make this a book on its own to say this is really important. They said Standing Committee A, great in its way. (I do not think A is the Justice and Home Affairs Committee, forgive me) Send it to the floor of the House." In the last business paper that is what the Leader of the House has done. When the House returns on Thursday 14 October the business is "justice and home affairs future programme". That is up‑stream. What are these guys thinking of doing about our civil liberties; absolutely the most basic things affecting us? Now it is a Thursday. I think it is a wonderful opportunity to show how European business can be really mainstreamed and brought to the focus on the Floor of the House. There may be Members who think that it is a chance to go home and see their family.

Sir Nicholas Winterton: We will leave that one undebated. Can I say to David Kidney, who has offered to take a question, clearly we are running out of time and look as though we may well run out of Members which means we will no longer be quorate. Can I suggest, David, that you might deal with questions eight and ten of the suggested questions on our paper because we are going to be running out of time and Members. David Kidney?

Q234 Mr Kidney: Can I say to Liam I thought those were very constructive answers to Ann Coffey. Just on a point of clarification can I ask when you said that it would be really useful to get the minister in before they go to the main Council meeting to say "what is your position going to be?" and you said that the select committees are very busy; why did you think that the select committees were the people to do that rather than the European Scrutiny, European Standing or even the Government's proposals for a new Joint European Committee?

Mr Laurence Smyth: The European Scrutiny Committee does it on a paper basis now and they check stuff on the agenda they have dealt with. What I was hoping to do with departmental select committees is it would be a chance for the departmental select committee perhaps to pick up on work it had already done in the past and identify issues it might want to do inquiries into in the future. It would be a "variety pack" evidence session with the minister. If it appeals to a select committee as part of their repertoire then I think it might be a good way to go.

Q235 Mr Kidney: Question eight is about the trigger for calling a meeting of the new Joint European Committee of both Houses that the Leader proposes in his memorandum. Why does it have to be a Government minister tabling a motion in the House of Commons to send a message to the House of Lords? In your memorandum you say that the European Scrutiny Committee ought to be able to initiate meetings and items on the agenda and the House of Lords Committee ought to be able to initiate meetings and items on the agenda, so how could they do that within the confines of the Government having to table the motion?

Mr Sands: They could only trigger them and I think it would have to be that it was written into the terms of reference of the European Joint Committee that its subjects for discussion would include matters recommended for that purpose by the European Scrutiny Committee and/or the European Affairs Committee of the House of Lords, so there would be that bit there in the standing orders' terms of reference of the European Joint Committee and the committee could therefore only meet when there was an outstanding recommendation of that sort. The timing of meetings is very difficult because who do you give the discretion to launch a meeting of the joint committee? Hitherto we have always left that to a motion in the House to determine the time and date of the meeting, and a motion in the House means it has to be moved by the Government. I cannot see an easy option to that unless you appoint a Chairman of the European Joint Committee who has truly awesome powers and can convene a meeting on his own say so whenever there was something outstanding in the Committee's pending business, but that would be a departure for us.

Q236 Mr Kidney: I suppose I am departing if I say that I suppose some parliaments have a business management committee which is separate from the government and they table motions and if we ever set such a thing up they could table this sort of motion.

Mr Sands: That is the norm rather than the exception on the Continent.

Q237 Mr Kidney: The second question, number ten, is about the perceived accountability of the Commissioners if they come to these Joint European Committee meetings as though we are holding them to account in some way and that is transparently not the case because their accountability is over in Brussels.

Mr Sands: European Commissioners have tended to be quite sensitive about this. Some of them see an advantage in increasing their visibility in national parliaments and are keen to attend meetings. It has been meetings of select committees up to now of course but I think they like to do so, if I could put it this way, on their own terms and I think any implication, whether in the way that we drafted a new standing order setting up the European Joint Committee or in the way that standing orders were implemented, that we were actually summoning these people and requiring them to come at a certain time to answer questions would be very badly received. I do not know if Liam wants to comment

Mr Laurence Smyth: In carrying out his responsibilities, Chairman, "the Commissioner shall be completely independent, and members of the Commission shall neither seek nor take instructions from any government or other institution, body, office or agency", according to the Draft Constitutional Treaty. I think they would be quite clear that they were not accountable to the House but I think if your Committee opens a dialogue you may well find that the Commission itself is actually quite keen to do better at relating to national parliaments. They might be happy to talk but I think there would be a sensitivity about the perception of who was in charge.

Q238 Sir Nicholas Winterton: So are you saying, Liam, that they would be happy to explain but not to be accountable?

Mr Laurence Smyth: I think that is right, Chairman.

Mr Kidney: In fairness, I think personally there would be a lot of parliamentary and media and therefore public interest in such sessions so I am very strongly in favour of this getting started because and see where it leads to. Because we have been short, Roger and I, on questions eight and ten, could I ask him two very tiny consequential matters that we have not reached?

Sir Nicholas Winterton: They do not appear here?

Mr Kidney: They are on this list and I would like an answer to them.

Sir Nicholas Winterton: If you are very quick.

Mr Kidney: Firstly, to allow the European Scrutiny Committee to sit in public simply requires a change of standing orders, does it not, there are no other consequences?

Q239 Sir Nicholas Winterton: I was going to ask that one but you asked it and you do it much better than I do!

Mr Sands: Giving it power to do so, yes, would only require a simple change in standing orders. I have to say that I was quite surprised to see that the Committee had recommended this. It did not strike me as most the obvious committee where deliberating in public would be a good idea because of the intractability of the material that it is presented with, number one, and a particular point I would like to make, because it has been mentioned to me, because I think it could potentially cause some difficulties for the staff who, as you know, play a more prominent role in its meetings than is the case in most other select committees. They are there to give candid advice and they give it candidly, and how that would come across in public I am not at all sure.

Q240 Sir Nicholas Winterton: You think it would destroy the valuable role that staff do play at the moment?

Mr Sands: I think there would be a risk of that. I think there would be a risk that proceedings would become much more formalised, that the meetings might be longer, and because Members might feel they were being held to account for decisions not to identify a document as important politically or legally, we might end up with more recommendations for further consideration, whereas I think on the whole it would probably benefit our scrutiny system and the engagement of Members in it downstream if there were fewer such recommendations.

Q241 Mr Kidney: I think this is a political judgment. Personally I would disagree with you and we will have to have those debates. The other question is you give us an illustrative timetable for operating the subsidiarity early warning system where you run to seven weeks and we have only got six weeks to give the reasoned objection in. Where would something have to give to get to six weeks?

Mr Sands: I think I say somewhere in my paper that I cannot see how the six weeks will ever work unless the House is prepared to give the European Scrutiny Committee the authority to operate it on the House's behalf, which would be a big step.

Mr Laurence Smyth: I think I have cheated, Chairman, by doing 42 days. Assuming the Commission publishes its proposals on a Thursday or Friday and the result of the deferred edition comes out on a Wednesday, although it does go from week one to week seven I think I was still within 42 days within that timetable.

Mr Kidney: That is very clear, thank you.

Q242 Sir Nicholas Winterton: Is there anything that either Roger Sands or Liam Smyth would like to say to us? I apologise that we are now down to a bare quorum and I will not risk going on longer and having to declare the meeting at an end because we are inquorate. Roger?

Mr Sands: I have got nothing to add.

Q243 Sir Nicholas Winterton: If there are any other matters to which we might at a later stage ---

Mr Sands: --- The paper is very comprehensive.

Sir Nicholas Winterton: It is but if we need to come back to you and ask specific questions in writing you will be happy to let us have them and the same with you Liam? Can I therefore on behalf of the Modernisation Committee thank Roger Sands and Liam Smyth for the extremely important evidence that they have been able to give.

Mr Kidney: Including the time of the next General Election which was very helpful!

Sir Nicholas Winterton: You always seek to get in the last word! Thank you.