European Standing Committee B |
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Jane Kennedy: I can deal with that question very quickly. I agree, and the development of the HSE’s new strategy is influenced by the need to reach as many employers as possible, many of whom are in the SME category. Mr. Boswell: My next question relates to the balance between health and safety, which we have referred to many times. I suspect that I might have the Minister’s support on this, too. I notice that there is some reference to a risk observatory. How does the agency believe that might work? Does it believe that it will be able to make an active contribution to occupational health as well as the more politically sensitive issues of risk, including major risk, and safety at work? Jane Kennedy: The hon. Gentleman raises an issue that is of great interest to me. He might have seen the article in the Financial Times, in which the chairman of the Health and Safety Commission, Bill Callaghan, discusses the question of balancing risk and the need to manage it sensibly. It is a very good article, and if the hon. Gentleman has not seen it, it would be worth his while to read it. We are listening to the comments of, for example, the advisory committee. In the report, the committee notes
the Bilbao agency—
Observatory means observance of health and safety regulations within member states. The development of the agency presents us with an opportunity to consider such matters and encourage the agency to develop its work and the nature of its involvement with employers. Mr. Boswell: I am genuinely grateful to the Minister for the reference to that article, which I had not seen but will now study. My final question refers to what she just said about the observatory. Will the agency be able to build up a base of knowledge on the comparative achievements or performance of member states in health and safety and in addressing regional problems, with the implication that they then require the attention of the relevant national agencies on top of any European initiative? Jane Kennedy: One of the agency’s roles, and perhaps its most important impact, has been in developing and translating guidance for countries with less well developed systems than ours and whose regulators in-country lack the expertise to produce their own material. That can be effective only through the development of a sound knowledge base and an understanding of what is happening in other member states. In particular, having embraced the accession countries, that work will need to develop and to be founded on a sound information base, and I am confident that the agency will develop such a database. Mr. Boris Johnson (Henley) (Con): Will the Minister clear up some doubt in my mind? Will the representatives of this new European health and safety agency, in so far as they incarnate an observatory, be able to travel to member states and observe the extent of compliance with EU health and safety law? Is it really the intention to have clipboard-toters and monitors from a European observatory going around other member states? Jane Kennedy: It is not—I can reassure the hon. Gentleman instantly on that. This is not a new agency; it has existed since 1995, but we are refreshing the founding principles on which it was based. To reassure the hon. Gentleman further on the risk observatory, it is intended to enable the agency to link up not only with member states in Europe, but with other agencies in, for example, the United States and Japan and with European health and safety research institutes to predict health and safety issues across Europe—for example, new dangerous substances and new trends, such as migrant workers. I hope that I have reassured the hon. Gentleman that we will not have a new plethora of inspectors marching across Europe with clipboards held aloft. We are taking forward a very sensible measure today. Mr. Wilkinson: The Minister will know that article 308 can be invoked—if necessary by unanimity—to attain one of the objectives of the Community. Which of those objectives had the Minister in mind when she made the concession that she did? Jane Kennedy: That was another fast ball! In coming to the view that the legal advice that we had was contrary to the legal position that had been adopted by other states, I had a number of judgments to make. As I have tried to explain to the Committee, I also had to make a judgment on negotiating positions. I cannot give the hon. Gentleman the answer that he seeks to his question, although I confess that I probably should be able to. Mr. Wilkinson: Will the Minister write to me? Jane Kennedy: I will certainly write to the hon. Gentleman to clarify the position, and I apologise for not being able to clarify it immediately. Mr. Wilkinson: How much will the new provisions, which will, according to the Minister, refresh the founding principles of the agency, cost the European Union in a financial year? Jane Kennedy: May I include the cost to the European Union in my letter to the hon. Gentleman? The provisions will not cost the UK Government a great deal because the Bilbao agency does not significantly affect health and safety oversight and regulation in the UK. However, I will supply the detailed information that he seeks. Mr. Wilkinson: If the provisions will not affect the way in which we operate health and safety in the UK because, as the Minister implies, we do it better, might it not be a better idea for accession states that have recently joined the Union and states that intend to, such as Bulgaria and Romania, to follow our example rather than having to go to Brussels? Jane Kennedy: Most European states have in place health and safety regulations of one sort or another. The agency was established under article 235. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not engage me in detailed debate on the reasoning behind that, but I will write to him and all members of the Committee to clarify the point. I am sorry, in the course of answering— Mr. Wilkinson: Do not worry. Motion made, and Question proposed,
2.45 pmMr. Boswell: I need not detain the Committee long. We have had some useful exchanges and have given the Minister quite a hard time. I shall divide my remarks into various chunks by way of commentary on the questions and answers that we have heard. My initial comments relate to the process side. I have some thoughts—I say this with considerable trepidation—that the Minister and the officials who brief on this matter might like to share with the European Scrutiny Committee. As the Minister will know, I am not an aficionado of these Standing Committees, although there was a time when I might have been more familiar with them. It is clear from the papers and the comprehensive document submitted to us by the Minister that there has been a serial dialogue with the European Scrutiny Committee, which involved at least four elements of exchange on each side. In terms of the European Scrutiny Committee’s response, there has been a great deal of repetition. I make it clear that that is not an implied criticism of that Committee’s work, which is of very high quality. It would be worth considering—if not today, nor within the bounds of this Committee—whether it would be possible to offer such responses in a rather more palatable form, instead of repeating them, scattered through documents in some kind of chronological order, so that one finds oneself suddenly reading documents that one has read in another context. We need a history of exchanges that have occurred, but they do not have to be reproduced. As regards the substance of the document, it seems to me that a moral can be drawn. I go back to my own experience of conducting European negotiations as a Minister some 10 years ago. It is important that a Minister has the right kind of diplomatic input into the Commission. In this case, I realise, the Minister is also operating with the Executive, and that that is not always easy. I am not talking about a particular relationship or the Minister who is here, but about the whole nature of ministerial links with agencies. It seems to me, to put it charitably, that there has been a rather radical misunderstanding of the Commission’s position. The Minister said several times—I am sure she said it in good faith—that the Commission’s legal advice is tendered to the Commission, not to her, and that it is not a public document. That would also be the case for legal advice in other member states. However, it would not have been beyond the wit of man or woman to have had a dialogue with the Commission in which it was said, “Well, you are worried about this?”, or “Why do you think this? Can we not meet or get our lawyers to confer and come to an understanding?” If there was a radical and overt difference of view, as there appears to have been, and given that the issue was entirely technical rather than substantive, should it not have been possible to resolve it before it gave rise to a degree of unpleasantness? I make those comments as someone who is no enemy of the European Union, but it is understandable, when that sort of situation arises, and when the Commission appears to fall back on article 308 powers, that those who are enemies of, or highly sceptical of, the European Union will start looking for enabling Acts, other kinds of mischief on the part of the Commission and a centralising agenda, all of which, frankly, give it a bad name. There are genuine morals to be drawn across Government and about the conduct of Ministers. Many of the procedural points ought never to have arisen, and one disadvantage of the fact that they have is that they tend—quite properly, because the Committee is a Scrutiny Committee—to distract us from substantive issues. I now turn to those substantive issues, on the importance of which the Minister and I agree. The first relates to the agency itself. I said—not in a hostile way—that the consultants raised the question of the value added by having a European agency, as opposed to leaving such provision to the member states, nearly all of which, as the Minister reminded us, have functioning health and safety legislation and enforcement arrangements. We should always tests bodies of this sort. I am not sure, because I have not read the consultants’ report in full—if, indeed, it has been available to us—how much serious concern has been exposed about what has happened. There is always a danger with any body once it is set up that inertia will enable it to continue—that no one will want to lay it to rest. I am not saying that the body in question needs to be laid to rest, but there should be a degree of scepticism about and scrutiny of its continuing activity. In that context, I note that, partly to accommodate the expense and complication relating to the accession countries, there is a proposal to cut the board meetings to one a year. If there is only one board meeting a year for anything with which I am involved, I wonder whether the body is necessary at all. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Wilkinson) said, there is no budget recommendation. Indeed, the Minister was not able, off pat, to tell the Committee the extra cost. As I looked at the documents in the time available to me, I found no implication of overall extra cost. That is to be welcomed, but we do not really know how much the body is costing and the implications of that—at least, not in this context—so it is difficult to decide how much extra value it is adding. There are issues to consider in that regard, and they read across into what the activity of the European body should be. I shall now expand slightly on something that I said during questions. Given the genesis of many issues that have arisen, including what happened at Seveso in Italy and at Flixborough in the United Kingdom, there is understandable pressure to consider major accidents and incidents and to concentrate all the attention on them. I do not think that any member of the Committee would want to take away from concern about such matters, and certainly no one wants to caricature the issue. People should not distort our position by saying that we do not care about such matters; of course we do. They involve significant loss of life and economic loss, so that goes without saying. However, as practice develops throughout the western world, including, as the Minister said, across the Atlantic in the United States, the emphasis is bound to shift from acute emergencies towards a wider consideration of new forms of risk, such as repetitive strain injury for office workers, and of wider occupational health issues, such as whether a work force are healthy and whether the employer is providing the best possible environment for them to function effectively. There is some interesting development work in that regard. Companies, including some insurers, are beginning to have an input into that work, because they can make a good business case for doing so. We need not go into that here, and I do not think that we should, but if the Minister can signal to the European agency that those considerations are important and that this is not simply a matter of ticking off the major avoidable risks from, for example, a chemical accident or a fire, that would be useful. It would also be welcome if she could follow up what she said in response to my question about the importance of making things available to smaller and medium-sized enterprises and of creating a slightly different culture, which many big companies operating across European borders will seek to do anyway. We should always be testing the agency. The legal basis is being changed and the operation of the agency is being modified by the proposals under scrutiny today, but I hope that we will not feel that that is the end of the matter. I hope that people will not walk away from the agency and say, “Get on with it”, without a degree of examination or reconsideration from time to time. Whether or not the agency works will depend on two or three things. First, I refer to the comment of my hon. Friend the Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson). I am not wholly certain that I agree with him, or rather I suspect that he had something in mind that he did not quite bring out, but there are issues of compliance. I do not want to lose any of my Czech friends, but I visited a glass factory in the Czech Republic when I was on holiday some months ago, and I saw practices there that I would not feel comfortable about here. An inspector in the UK would not have felt comfortable about them either. That is a cheap observation, but we need to ensure as a European Union that we are raising standards progressively, and not necessarily through European inspection only. There are important issues about whether competitiveness exists for a British glass manufacturer if he feels that corners are being cut in other countries. Compliance issues, even if not directed by a European inspectorate, are interesting. The second point relates to the need for better information. My hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood had a point when he said that for some of the accession countries, the more they can take off the shelf—from developed practice in Britain ideally, but also in Germany and Scandinavia—to adapt into their own systems, the better it will be. If the agency can help to get that put out in the vernacular and not just in English, it would be welcome although we are happy for it to be in English. Thirdly, we had some rather amusing exchanges arising from the word “observatory”. There may be merit and value added if the agency can build up comparative data that will require it to establish a common basis of comparison and reporting. That at least means that we are all talking in roughly the same terms when we report figures and expenditure, and all the rest of it, so that we can all begin to understand the subject better. That does not mean, and no one in the Committee argues that it does, that the agency either takes over from the essential national thrust of what is being done. It does not give it carte blanche to go and do what it likes, regardless of budget, but there may be areas where value is added. If we can confine action to those areas and ensure that the agency operates effectively in them, it will have my support and, I hope, that of the Committee. 2.57 pmMr. Hopkins: I apologise to the Minister for asking some rather difficult questions earlier, but it was right that I did. In eight years as a member of this Committee—I have been to almost every meeting—I have never before seen the kind of division between the Scrutiny Committee and the Government that exists on this occasion. I take a slightly more cautious view of the European Union than some of my hon. Friends and some Opposition Members, but it is noticeable that Labour Members of the Scrutiny Committee are all vocal enthusiasts for the European Union yet still took a critical position. One of my hon. Friends drew attention to the fact that the Committee does not lightly put on a scrutiny reserve, yet the Government have chosen to override it. I have serious concerns that we, as a smaller Committee with a small number of members, are being asked to make a decision that was not acceptable to the Scrutiny Committee itself. It is unlikely that there will be a Division today, but if there were one, I should be inclined to abstain. In all honesty, I feel that the matter should be referred back. I do not underestimate the importance of health and safety. There has been a transformation in my lifetime. I did a lot of student jobs in factories years ago, and the things that went on would be unthinkable today. There were machines without guards on, horrible chemicals everywhere, open cyanide tanks, no hard hats, no ear defenders, and so on. Industry was dangerous in those days, and the position has been transformed through a lot of good legislation and pressure from the trade union movement, for which I used to work; indeed, I was partly involved in some of those issues then, too. Clearly, there is a problem, and it is obvious—to me at least—that a political compromise has been reached, that the legal niceties to which the Government have rightly drawn attention have been glossed over by the Commission and the other member states, and that we have acquiesced in that. That is how it seems to me, and if I am absolutely wrong, I should like to be told that so, that the document is legally perfect, that there is no problem, and that we did not give in to force majeure because other member states took a different view. Perhaps I was brought up in a different world, but I remember a film from my youth, “Twelve Angry Men”, in which one member of a jury managed to persuade all the others that they were wrong so that a young man who would have been executed was not executed. That is, perhaps, a romantic view, but sometimes hon. Members on their own are right and majorities wrong. It is up to minorities to push their case until they win the argument. I appreciate that the Government have put their case to the Commission, to other member states and to the Council of Ministers, but in the end they have acquiesced. I can see that an impasse, a fracture or a non-communautaire position would be politically difficult and embarrassing for the Government at the moment, and they have understandably chosen not to push their point of view. However, some Euro-enthusiast members of the Scrutiny Committee probably want to ensure that everything is legally right in order to justify their support for the EU and, no doubt, to support a vote in favour of the European constitutional treaty. They do not want hostages to fortune that people like myself can perhaps pick up on. There are concerns, which I hope can be registered and perhaps communicated back to the European Scrutiny Committee, even if we nod through the decision today. I hope that in future we reach a better resolution between the Government and the Scrutiny Committee before matters are referred to Standing Committees A, B or C. Sadly, those Committees are not brilliantly attended and are not as rigorous as the European Scrutiny Committee itself. I carefully read the relevant papers and the transcript of the Minister’s debate with that Committee. Clearly, it is very rigorous—quite rightly—but I hope that we can in future avoid a repeat of this type of situation in the scrutiny process, a process important for those who take an enthusiastic view of the Union, as well as for those who take a critical view. It is important, if the Government are to pursue their European agenda, that they get things absolutely right, and do not leave hostages to fortune for people like me to exploit. 3.3 pmJane Kennedy: I will make a couple of quick points. It is explained in the relevant papers that the changes proposed today will have no impact on the overall budget of the agency, in the sense that no new activities are launched. As a consequence, the proposal is presented without a financial statement. The hon. Member for Daventry pressed me again on the development of a database, but it is worth paying tribute to the agency, which succeeded in putting in place an infrastructure to provide information on health and safety at work, both at the level of data dissemination techniques and that of a network structure. It has partly succeeded in achieving its goal of addressing clients’ needs. Generally, the agency has reasonably achieved the aims set out in Council regulation 2062/94, especially given the time available and the complexity of the tasks that it was set. I should like to reinforce the point that this is not about big multinational companies being targeted by the Bilbao agency, but about creating a level playing field across Europe for precisely the reasons that the hon. Gentleman highlighted in his description of the Czech factory. It will benefit small and medium-sized enterprises. In response to my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins), I say that this debate has been a sobering experience for me, as I have never been in this situation before. It is fair to say that the Scrutiny Committee’s concerns and my debate with it reverberated around Whitehall, because I made sure that they did. As a result of my experience, my ministerial colleagues have been firmly reminded of the Committee’s concerns about the use of article 308. Notwithstanding that, I encourage my hon. Friend to accept that although we had a different view on the legal basis and the use of article 137, we accepted in the end that we could not persuade anyone else to support our view; however, it was not worth the potential damage to other items of business at the Council meeting to force the issue on a simple, non-controversial piece of regulation. The risks far outweighed the benefits that would have been gained from such a position. As a result of today’s discussion and the concerns that my hon. Friend raised, I will write again to the European Scrutiny Committee explaining that although we knew in June the views of the Commission and other member states about the tripartite nature of the agency, we did not fully understand the legal thinking on the matter until recently. I will be more than happy to explain that to the Scrutiny Committee. In the meantime, I hope that this Committee will accept the proposal and allow scrutiny of this important measure to be concluded. Question put and agreed to. Resolved,
Committee rose at seven minutes past Three o’clock. |
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