Meeting Summary
This week the Committee took oral evidence
from George Eustice MP, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State
at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on Animal
Cloning: the use of Article 352 TFEU. It also considered the
following documents:
European Semester 2014: for debate
in European Committee
The European Semester is an EU-level
framework for coordinating and assessing Member States' structural
reforms and fiscal/budgetary policy and for monitoring and addressing
macroeconomic imbalances. The Commission Communication on the
Annual Growth Survey, the draft Joint Employment Report and the
Alert Mechanism Report began the 2014 cycle of the European Semester,
by setting the overarching scene; the Committee recommended, in
early December 2013, that they be debated in advance of the March
2014 European Council and separately from the more detailed analytical
and country specific documents that would follow for the June
2014 European Council. This week the Committee reports on the
second stage of the Semester, the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure
which involves a Commission Communication that sets out the findings
of In-Depth Reviews into the 16 Member States identified in the
2014 Alert Mechanism as showing signs of potential macroeconomic
imbalances, scoring them against a scoreboard of 11 macroeconomic
indicators, and a Commission Occasional Paper that sets out the
imbalances identified in the UK, the background to them, and an
analysis of the risks the UK faces as well as the Commission's
preferred policy responses to them. Noting that the Government
has subverted the House's scrutiny process with its failure to
meet the Committee's intentions of an early general debate, the
Committee now recommends that these documents be debated together
with those already referred, and the country specific recommendations,
when available, and that the debate should take place before the
June European Council.
Strategic guidelines for EU Justice
and Home Affairs to 2020: for debate on the floor of the House
We also scrutinised two Communications
setting out the Commission's political priorities for the next
set of strategic guidelines for EU justice and home affairs policies
to 2020. The guidelines are expected to be agreed at the June
European Council and will replace the Stockholm programme once
it expires at the end of 2014. Successive justice and home affairs
programmes have grown in length and ambition and become increasingly
prescriptive, so the Committee welcomes the emphasis in these
Communications on consolidation, through the effective implementation
of existing EU justice and home affairs laws, and on better monitoring
and evaluation of their impact. The Government's Explanatory Memorandum
provides a helpful commentary on the Communications but gives
little indication of the Government's strategic vision for the
development of this area over the next five-years. The Committee
invites the Government to do so and recommends that the Communications
should be debated on the floor of the House before prorogation
in May, so that Members are able to express their views on the
content and future direction of EU justice and home affairs policy
and inform the contribution to be made by Justice and Home Affairs
Ministers, whose final meeting before the June European Council
will take place on 5/6 June.The Committee is also drawing its
Report to the attention of the Justice and Home Affairs Select
Committees.
Relocation of the European Police
College (CEPOL)
In January the Committee reported on
this draft Regulation which provides for the European Police College
(CEPOL) to be relocated from its current base at Bramshill in
Hampshire to Budapest, following the Government's decision to
sell the Bramshill site.The proposal is subject to the UK's Title
V (justice and home affairs) opt-in and has wider implications
for the UK's block opt-out of pre-Lisbon police and criminal justice
measures which will take effect on 1 December 2014. The Committee
accordingly recommended a debate on the opt-in, to take place
in time to inform the Government's decision on whether or not
to opt in. The opt-in deadline expired on 13 March without the
debate having taken place. The Committee requested an urgent explanation
for the delay as well as a response to questions raised in its
earlier Report chapters, including how CEPOL's relocation costs
are to be funded.On 14 March, the Government wrote to inform the
Committee that it had decided to opt into the draft Regulation.
In a further letter, the Government explains that the share of
CEPOL's relocation costs to be borne by the UK has not yet been
determined. It attributes the delay in scheduling a debate to
"wider business management reasons" and says that the
debate has now been scheduled for 30 April, nearly four months
after it was first requested. The Committee makes clear that all
opt-in debates are time-critical and serve a vital dual purpose:
to enable Parliament to express a view before the Government
reaches a definitive position, and to ensure transparency and
accountability for opt-in decisions. It expects the Government
to explain, during the debate on 30 April, the business management
reasons which prevented it from scheduling a timely debate and
seeks an undertaking that the Government will not support the
adoption of the draft Regulation until the funding issue has been
resolved.
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