FOREWORD—WHAT THIS
REPORT IS ABOUT
FOREWORD—What this Report is about
For national parliaments to influence effectively the development of EU policy, it is essential to engage with proposals as early in their development as possible. In this Report, we scrutinise one of the Commission's principal strategic planning documents, the Annual Policy Strategy for 2008.
This Report focuses on examining the Annual Policy Strategy (APS) as a strategic document. We welcome the Commission's improvements to its Annual Policy Strategy documents, but we believe that there are flaws in the APS which prevent it from being as useful a tool as it could be. We make recommendations for its further improvement, and we present specific points regarding particular proposals in the APS for 2008.
We consider that in future the APS needs to be clearer about its purpose. The Commission should provide more background to its proposals, and explain the status of each of the proposals or priorities listed. The APS needs, above all, to be more strategic. It should explain which policy areas have moved up the Commission's agenda, and which have moved down. We also criticise the clarity of the structure of the APS.
We have concerns about the way in which the APS is constructed in the Commission and scrutinised in the European Parliament: the APS should provoke a political dialogue about the 'bigger picture' regarding the EU's key priorities for the coming year. We recommend that the Government should press the Council to make public its comments on the APS.
The APS should be a presentation of the Commission's strategic thinking to the other institutions. The Commission should include more explanation and justification of its priorities and proposals. It should explain the financial constraints around the APS and the relationship of the APS to the budgetary procedure should be made clear. Political priorities must be matched in budgetary terms, and we recommend that the Commission, Council and European Parliament should forge a closer link between the budgetary and legislative processes.
We reiterate our support for work in the area of Better Regulation, and we encourage the Commission to create a new annual report discussing how the institutions can make further progress on this agenda.
We make this Report to the House for debate.
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