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During our recent inquiry into The future of the European Union: UK Government policy, witnesses identified UK nationals on the staff of the EU institutions as one of the potential sources of UK influence in the EU. We gathered a significant body of data, principally from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), on the size of, and developments in, the UK staff presence in the EU institutions. We were sufficiently struck by what we found to decide to publish the information we had gathered and our conclusions as this short separate Report, in order to give the issue greater accessibility and prominence.
The Government is correct to have identified both the importance of UK personnel on the staff of the EU institutions as a channel for UK influence in the EU, and the fact that the UK faces a serious problem with respect to its declining representation among EU staff. We commend the Government for launching an effort to increase the UK staff presence in the EU institutions.
However, the Government's efforts are not so far reversing the decline in the UK presence. In relation to its share of the EU's population (12.5%), the UK remains significantly underrepresented among the staff of the major EU institutions, and its presence continues to shrink. We were seriously concerned to learn that the number of UK nationals on the staff of the European Commission has fallen by 24% in seven years, and now stands at 4.6% of the total. This compares to 9.7% for France, which has almost the same share of the EU's population. In the increasingly-powerful European Parliament, the UK's share of administrator-grade staff has fallen from 6.2% to 5.8% since 2010 (while France's has risen from 7.5% to 8.6%); and in the General Secretariat of the Council of the EU the UK's share of administrator-grade staff fell from 4.8% to 4.3% over the same period (while France's fell from 7.7% to 6.9%).
The chief cause of the current decline is the fact that, forty years after the UK joined the then-European Economic Community in 1973, the cohort of UK officials who went then to work for the EU institutions (especially the European Commission) is reaching retirement age. The UK staff presence at middle-ranking and more junior and entry levels in the Commission is insufficient to compensate for the exit of senior UK officials. Even if UK representation at entry levels were to start to pick up, the Government must therefore reckon with what the Foreign Secretary has correctly identified as a 'generation gap' in the UK presence in the European Commission, and with declining UK representation at the most senior levels there in the medium term.
In the entrance exam to become permanent EU officials, the pass rate among UK candidates appears to be roughly the same as for the EU as a whole, although we were concerned to note that it is on a downward trend. We were also disconcerted to discover that the Civil/Diplomatic Service European Fast Stream programme, which is intended to prepare candidates to enter the competition successfully, appears so far to have generated no additional permanent generalist EU officials for the UK since it was re-launched in 2010. We welcome signs that more UK nationals are becoming interested in embarking on careers as permanent EU officials. However, given the pass rate, the numbers of UK candidates for the entrance exam remain too low (2.4% of the total in 2012) to compensate for the numbers of UK retirees.
With respect to the EU's new European External Action Service (EEAS), we endorse the view taken by our predecessor Committee, namely that it will be to the benefit of the FCO and the UK if high-quality UK diplomats and other civil servants undertake secondments into the EEAS and then return to UK service. While we recognise that FCO and Civil Service financial and staff resources are strained, it must be to the UK's benefit to have UK officials in key EEAS positions and to gather first-hand experience of the new Service to feed back into Whitehall. The requirement that one-third of policy jobs in the EEAS must go to national diplomats seconded from the Member States appears to be enabling the UK to have a slightly larger share of the staff of the new Service than of other EU institutions. However, the number of such jobs remains limited, and UK candidates face tough competition to secure them. We endorse the FCO's strategy of seeking to target EEAS jobs of particular potential importance for the UK, although it must do so without risking UK candidates being seen as representatives purely of UK interests. As UK diplomats move through their periods of secondment to the EEAS, we recommend that the FCO should focus on maximising the prospect that they will return to UK service.
We welcome the creation of an EU Staffing Unit in the FCO with a remit to increase secondments of UK civil servants into the EU institutions. We recommend that, as it develops its plans for Civil Service reform, the Government should ensure that undertaking secondments into the EU institutions will be encouraged and recognised.
We further recommend that the FCO should report annually to Parliament on the numbers of UK nationals working for the main EU institutions, and the representation and performance of UK nationals in the EU staff entrance competition (the concours). This is warranted by the importance of the issue for UK influence in the EU, the resources that the FCO is devoting to increasing the numbers of UK personnel working for the EU, and the difficulty otherwise of compiling relevant published data from multiple sources. Such an annual publication could also act as an indicator if the Prime Minister's commitment that a Conservative Government after 2015 would hold an 'in/out' referendum on the UK's continued EU membership were to weaken the willingness of UK nationals to pursue EU careers.
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