Letter to the Chair of the Committee from
Mr William Cash MP, Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee
I am grateful to you for taking the lead on drawing
up a draft set of arrangements for adoption by the House as the
basis for discussion at the April Speakers' Conference on successor
arrangements for the WEU parliamentary assembly.
The matter was discussed by the European Scrutiny
Committee at its meeting on 8 September and meetings have since
taken place between parliamentary stakeholders and the Minister
for Europe. During the course of those discussions a consensus
emerged, based on the fundamentally intergovernmental nature of
defence and security, that:
- New arrangements should be founded on Article
10 of Protocol 1 to the Treaties, and should include members of
European affairs committees;
- New arrangements should not provide an entrée
for a new institution;
- Doing nothing was an option; but, if national
parliaments left a vacuum, the European Parliament would move
to fill it;
- New arrangements should aim primarily not at
"direct effect", such as scrutiny reports and resolutions,
but at the "indirect effect" of helping national parliamentarians
to be better informed, in order to perform scrutiny of their own
governments more effectively; and
- Secretariat arrangements might need a degree
of continuity, between six-monthly meetings. This might involve
the use of the COSAC Secretariat. Cost was an important consideration.
Discussion of the issue at the recent Brussels COSAC
meeting demonstrated general agreement that new arrangements should
build on existing structures and expertise, add value, be cost-effective
and be open to third countries. The UK delegation succeeded in
ensuring that the COSAC Contribution was amended to reflect these
factors.
The European Scrutiny Committee therefore endorses
the proposals which you have sent to me, and which were agreed
informally by the Chairmen of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Defence
Committee, and the European Scrutiny Committee of the House of
Commons, together with the Lords European Union Committee.
I am copying this letter to Lord Roper and Andrew
Makower in the House of Lords; to James Arbuthnot MP and Robert
Walter MP; and to Les Saunders of the Cabinet Office.
16 December 2010
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