Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100
- 118)
THURSDAY 3 MAY 2007
MR GARY
TITLEY
Q100 Chairman:
What sort of vision do you suspect there is in that?
Mr Titley: Part of me, the cynical side of me,
says we have been through this many, many times before and got
nowhere, but I think there is a genuine desire this time to get
to grips with some of the issues about how effectively we work.
The problem ultimately is we are constantly restrained and undermined
by the requirement to come to Strasbourg 12 times a year. We are
now in a position where some of the committees do not have the
time they need to carry out the scrutiny they are required to
do. As I have said, we do not have a structure for getting an
overall perspective properly, yet we are still going to Strasbourg
12 times a year and, quite frankly, given the legislative flow
has reduced, we do not need to be there. It is a huge waste of
resources and time. Quite frankly, some of the debates in Strasbourg
are pretty well padded out by grand statements, et cetera. Every
time you try and reform our procedures you come up against this
problem. The logical thing would be for the Parliament to meet
in plenary, shall we say, Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday afternoon
and Thursday afternoon every week and the rest of the time in
committee or political groups. In a sense the working group is
trying to get round some of that by proposing that every week
there is a sort of plenary session for two hours where the Commission
will report on their meeting that week or any other matter of
some urgency and looking at how we work to get more people involved.
One of the problems about having such a huge Parliament now is
that it is less easy for people to get their teeth into something
and inevitably that begins to affect attendance and assiduity.
What they are trying to do is loosen things up. My colleague,
Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, is running this on our side and has been
consulting extensively. We need more spontaneity and more flexibility
in how we do our work.
Q101 Lord Bowness:
At the beginning Mr Titley said we need to find a way of getting
a political response to this rather than a technical one. Are
there thoughts on how that might be done?
Mr Titley: I do not think there are. Our standard
response in the Parliament is to set up a sort of all-encompassing
committee. We have just had a temporary committee on climate change
to try and bring it all together, but even that is now too inflexible.
We have already got a committee of the Chairs of all Committees
and I think there needs to be more use of a structure like that
in order to bring together the priorities of the Parliament. I
wrote to President Pöttering on this when he became President
and said that we need to deliver that structure. I feel that has
to be taken on board by the working group.
Q102 Chairman:
If you need that kind of political force, as it were, is there
not always the danger that it will end up being a race to the
lowest common denominator of consensus? We were talking earlier
about the lack of an overall strategy but, on the other hand,
if you try to find a consensus in a large parliament on many disparate
views you certainly end up with the lowest common denominator.
Mr Titley: There is obviously a danger of that
but, of course, against that is the sense that ultimately you
have got two political groups who are by far the biggest groups
and, therefore, they are able to hammer out positions without
having to go down the road of the lowest common denominator. If
it was a more divided parliament, a more splintered parliament,
then that would be true, it would be very difficult, but I think
the fact that we have got two big political groups mitigates against
that danger.
Q103 Chairman:
I take that point. On the whole, do you find the Annual Policy
Strategy a useful document? You told us at the beginning that
we must not think of it as a great strategy document but something
rather more current than the great vision of the future. Why can
there not be some kind of a real strategy?
Mr Titley: In a sense the Commission has a five-year
strategy.
Q104 Chairman:
The Commission has, yes.
Mr Titley: In a sense, the Annual Policy Strategy
is a way of saying that we need to make these adjustments, we
need to remind ourselves this is where we are going. Therefore,
I find it useful from that point of view but I do not expect it
to be a major policy formation. Again, we come across some of
the structural weaknesses of the European Union. From the Council
point of view, six-month presidencies are not designed for coherence
of development and the sooner we get over to a full-time Chair
of the Council the more we can start to get some consistency of
work. Each President comes along with all their enthusiasm, with
their priorities, and before you know it the six months are up
and someone else is doing that. I think that is part of the problem.
In a sense, we are trying to get round this by having these rolling
presidency programmes now but I think we have got to have a full-time
Chair of the Council. That has to happen. They could work with
both the Commission and the Parliament to provide much greater
strategic analysis of where the European Union should be going.
Q105 Chairman:
While we are on institutional reform, can I just ask you what
your views are about the size of the Commission?
Mr Titley: There are two sides to this. It is
difficult to believe that any country would willingly give up
a Commissioner because they see that it gives them a stake in
the European Union. Equally, it is clear at the moment that the
European Commission is too big and there is not enough work to
go round for them. Even I do not recognise all the Commissioners,
quite frankly, and it is very unwieldy. How we get round it, it
seems to me that if every country is going to insist on having
a Commissioner then we need to give the power to the present Commission
to organise this into directorates, as it were, and have, as a
government does, junior ministers and senior ministers all with
one vote, so they do not represent their Member States but they
really do, so they still have that power. It has to be streamlined.
When you have got the Commissioner from Romania coming in and
being given responsibility in multi-lingualism you think we are
reaching the end of the line here.
Chairman: I can imagine.
Q106 Lord Tomlinson:
On this question of the size of the Commission, is it not also
producing just as many problems as the European Parliament looking
at the Annual Work Strategy on the basis of committees? You have
got too many Commissioners who have not got real jobs and in order
to prove their existence they have to take initiatives and even
if the initiatives are no use at all some of them get through.
Is that really a risk?
Mr Titley: I think it can be. We are having
a new impetus behind consumer policy and that coincides with the
fact that we have now got a Commissioner whose responsibility
is consumer policy. There is a risk because, in a sense, if you
are a Commissioner and people are writing articles about you,
you have got to be able to show you have done something and you
have carried out this initiative, so there is that problem. I
think the current Commission to a degree gets round that because
President Barroso has got a fairly strong hold on the Commission,
along with his Vice-Presidents, and therefore there is a focus
but, as I say, if I was a Commissioner I would be wanting to prove
I am worth the job and, therefore, I would carry out some initiatives.
This is why we need to organise in directorates.
Q107 Lord Marlesford:
I suppose my biggest disappointment in this document is in section
3.2 which is on switching resources where there is not any of
it, it simply does not exist. When one goes through that table
on page 23, it is pathetic. When one goes through the headings
that make up page 23, almost every one of them ends up with, "We
are not changing the total under the heading". To me a strategy
must be based on updating use of resources and on this they do
not seem to be under starter's orders, or is that unfair?
Mr Titley: I think it is a valid point. To a
degree I think the Commission are caught between the Council and
Member States, who set out the Financial Perspectives, and the
Parliament which in most of these areas is the budgetary authority
and, therefore, in a sense it could argue it cannot start messing
around with the budget to a great degree. I think there does need
to be a much closer correlation between the Strategy and the preliminary
draft budget which the Commission produces. I do not think that
relationship is strong enough in this document. As I have said,
we are increasingly trying to get a quart out of a pint pot on
the budget and this is one of the things that has to be looked
at when we come to have a review of the budget.
Q108 Chairman:
Is it the Council that is digging its heels in over bringing the
Strategy and the budget together?
Mr Titley: Yes. Ultimately the responsibility
has to lie with the Council. It sets the Financial Perspectives
of the Member States and, as I say, the Council is the world's
worst at adding things for the European Union to do and not worrying
about where the money is going to come from.
Q109 Chairman:
Yes. What can one do about that? How does one get a change of
culture there?
Mr Titley: You could argue that what you need
is a root and branch reform of the budget and we need to look
completely differently at how the budget is going to be structured.
That is unlikely to happen because I do not think most governments
are prepared to be very radical on the budget. In that sense you
have got a problem. When we reach the point where we cannot afford
to carry out these policies then somebody has got to address this
question. You cannot suddenly decide you are going to get several
million pounds to reconstruct a country when there is nowhere
for the money to come from. Playing around with margins and squeezing
things out, I think you are going to run out of space to be able
to do that shortly.
Q110 Lord Tomlinson:
Would a serious approach at zero-based budgeting where you systematically
look at budget lines and make them justify all over again from
scratch be a beneficial part of the process?
Mr Titley: I think that is what is needed. This
is something I have advocated to the Parliament and it constantly
falls on deaf ears, every committee should not just spend time
arguing about their interest in the budget but afterwards they
should be given responsibility for monitoring and expected to
produce quarterly reports on the implementation of the budget,
because it is not enough simply to say, "We want more money
for X" without then saying how that is being spent and is
it of any use, or is there any sitting in a cupboard somewhere
not being used. That is a weakness of the Parliament, that we
are not sufficiently assiduous at following up on the budget and
looking at the implementation of the budget.
Q111 Lord Marlesford:
To me, the epitome of the whole of this was pre-2004 when President
Prodi commissioned an economist from outside, I cannot remember
his name, to look at the Structural Funds.
Mr Titley: I have been trying to remember his
name myself, that is why I have not mentioned it.
Q112 Lord Marlesford:
His conclusion was a simple one, that there should be a switch
of Structural Funds from the ongoing recipients to the new entrants.
The Commission resisted this, it was not just the national governments,
although it was the national governments as well of course. In
a way if those sorts of changes cannot be carried forward one
is a bit cynical about the real value of the policy.
Mr Titley: Ultimately it is a matter for politicians
and Member State governments to decide if they are prepared to
contemplate a complete radical overhaul of the budget. I think
that is what is needed. In essence this budget is a variation
of what we have had since 1957. We have added bits on and so on
but nobody has actually sat down and said, "Let us see what
the European Union budget should be for", partly because
governments are afraid where that debate will go. I wish I could
remember the name of the economist.
Q113 Chairman:
Sapir.
Mr Titley: Sapir, that is right. The British
Prime Minister came and said we should follow the Sapir report
and then somebody pointed out that the Sapir report also talks
about the EU having its own proper own resources, which is something
this Government has also resisted in terms of an EU tax or whatever.
Everybody likes bits of his report but not the whole thing.
Q114 Chairman:
Is not the idea of asking the question, "What is the budget
for?" a major part of the 2008-09 review?
Mr Titley: It should be. My concern from a UK
perspective is we are not getting enough coming out from the UK
saying what our view on that should be. The French are already
doing it and we should be doing it. If there is anything you can
do to encourage more of that, it will be for the better in my
view.
Q115 Lord Tomlinson:
My Lord Chairman, as Mr Titley has mentioned there is no discussion
about own resources, can I just assure him that, having looked
at Mr Lamassoure's proposals that went through the Budget Committee
recently, I am a strong opponent of those and I think I could
reasonably assure him that would be the response of the British
Treasury. If the changes in the occupation of Number 10 are as
one would anticipate them to be, I cannot anticipate our Prime
Minister of the future supporting them.
Mr Titley: It does illustrate my point that
the French are throwing their ideas around and the British are
not.
Q116 Lord Tomlinson:
Absolutely.
Mr Titley: And we should be throwing our ideas
around.
Q117 Lord Marlesford:
The idea that you do not switch resources because you do not have
own sources of tax does not follow at all.
Mr Titley: I would not argue with that. I am
just saying that the Sapir report looks at even more than our
own Prime Minister was prepared to admit.
Lord Marlesford: But you could have done
the one without the other. You could have switched to Structural
Funds.
Q118 Chairman:
The French are taking initiatives in every direction. For example,
Pierre Lequiller with his ideas about an amending treaty, or whatever
it is. It is amazing how much space it is getting in Europolitics
nowadays.
Mr Titley: The British are bad at doing this,
frankly. You do need to throw ideas around in the ether well in
advance because they suddenly solidify, but we tend to wait until
the debate and by that time the decision is already made.
Chairman: I am afraid we have come to
the end of our time, Mr Titley. Thank you as always. You are always
an excellent witness and it is very kind of you to take time out
of your busy day to come and be with us. We will send you the
transcript. Thank you so much.
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