Examination of Witness (Questions 100-120)
Lord Kinnock
30 APRIL 2008
Q100 Chairman: Lord Kinnock, thank you very
much for coming to this meeting of the Law and Institutions Sub-Committee.
As you know, we are carrying out an inquiry into the initiation
of EU legislation. This is a broadcast session and, as I said
at the beginning of the last evidence session, all members' interests
are as set out in the register of interests. Is there anything
that you want to say to us in opening, or are you content that
we go to questions?
Lord Kinnock: I am grateful for that opportunity,
simply because, if I make a very short statement at the beginning,
it could abbreviate proceedings without actually losing anything.
Regarding the generation of future legislation, I thought it worthwhile
to go back to what, as far as I know, is the only real study undertaken
about the origin of Commission work, both legislative and non-legislative.
That material appeared in a report produced by the Santer cabinet
back in 1998. I have no reason to believe that there are substantial
differences now, although I did urge at various times in the Prodi
Commission that the figures should be updated, simply as a matter
of public information. The paper appeared as a Commission report
to the European Council in 1998 under the heading Better Lawmaking.
The percentages given relating to the origination of Commission
work are obviously approximate to within one or two per cent.
The origins of Commission proposals are, first, in response to
international agreements. The proposals are either for enacting
arrangements between the Community and third countries or for
enacting the Community's international commitments for implementation
within the Union. That accounted in 1987-88—probably about
the same now—for 35 per cent of the policy output of the
Commission. Secondly, another major area of activity is the amendment
of existing Community law to update and also to take account of
any significant scientific or economic innovations or new data.
That accounts for 25 to 30 per cent of the legislative and policy
output. A further 20 per cent is accounted for by proposals for
legislation presented to the Commission at the express request
of other Community institutions, notably the Council and also,
increasingly, the Parliament—I would be happy to go into
greater detail on that later on—or express requests from
Member States, individually or collectively, or from economic
operators, which are also requests that are frequently science
or technology-based. Another part of that 20 per cent component
is taken up by responses to requests to take new initiatives which
come from the Parliament or the Council, in particular exercising
their statutory powers: in the case of the Parliament under what
used to be Article 192 of the Treaty and, in the case of the Council,
what used to be Article 208 of the Treaty and which, in the Lisbon
Treaty, become respectively Articles 225 and 241. You see that
I have not lost my bureaucratic habits quite yet! A final around
10 per cent of output is proposals for legislation from the Commission
that are either required by the Treaty and required by secondary
legislation—for instance, the annual fixing of agricultural
prices or the adoption of multi-annual expenditure on research
programmes—or initiatives which the Commission considers
to be in the interests of the Union and will almost invariably
follow Green and White Papers and impact assessments, and will
be very thoroughly prepared. The point to make, therefore, is
that in terms of the origins of Commission legislative activity
only a minor proportion—indeed, in some years you could
call it a minuscule proportion—of total output relates to
pure Commission original initiative; the rest is responsive and
directly in the service mainly of other institutions but also
a wider spectrum of interests within the European Union or internationally.
Q101 Chairman: A minor point
arising from that, is this. Do you believe that the culture of
the Commission encourages those who work for it to bring forward
ideas for legislation? How does the Commission develop those ideas
or any other ideas that have come from the various sources?
Lord Kinnock: The development of ideas—if
I can deal with that first—comes with the assistance, or
sometimes at the prompting, of a wide network of contacts that
from time to time centre themselves on the Commission. They can
include the Permanent Representations, the ministers in Council,
the expert groups and committees of various kinds, the Parliament
and its committees, lobbyists occasionally, NGO networks and,
very substantially, professional and recognised business interests
and academic bodies. They will prompt and subsequently assist
in the refinement and development of proposals.
Chairman: We will have to suspend the
Committee at this point.
The Committee suspended from 5.25 pm to 5.32
pm for a division in the House
Q102 Chairman: Could you continue,
Lord Kinnock?
Lord Kinnock: I was going to say
in answer to the second part of your question—before we
were rudely interrupted!—that the degree to which members
of staff, or at least the policy grade of the European Commission,
are encouraged to come up with bright ideas and try to pursue
those ideas to the point of legislation varies from directorate-general
to directorate-general. I can give you instances from what was
my own Directorate-General of Transport in the late 1990s, where
one very big initiative was taken because an expert and enthusiast
in the directorate-general came up with an idea for what became
the PACT programme—Project Action for Combined Transport—to
facilitate movement of freight from road to rail. From his point
of conception, which occurred before I got to the Commission,
it took us another three years to get it adopted, and it has proved
to be an immensely helpful way of trying to secure what, in the
jargon, was called modal shift. The Committee may be even more
interested in an initiative that was embarked upon by Claude Chêne,
who is now the Director-General in Administration for the Commission.
When he was a much more junior member of staff, he noticed people
getting bumped off a full aeroplane despite the fact that they
had tickets which were perfectly in order. Because the plane was
overbooked they were denied boarding. Back in 1994, Claude started
to draft legislation, which I pursued throughout my time as a
Commissioner and which, eventually, was enacted by the first Council
attended by my successor in 2000—Loyola de Palacio, who
became the Transport Commissioner after me. In total, therefore,
conception to EU law took about six years; but on the wall of
every airport in the European Union now you will see a notice
giving the definition of passenger rights. It includes mandatory
compensation by airlines for anybody bumped from an aircraft.
In that directorate-general, therefore, under the leadership of
Sir Robert Coleman—he was not a knight at the time—people
were encouraged to come up with good ideas, as long as practical
and as long as they did not involve any money, or very little
money. We pursued several of them, and they are just two examples.
Q103 Lord Tomlinson: Lord
Kinnock, how helpful do you think it is to describe what you have
described to us as being a Commission's sole right of initiative?
There is perhaps a Commission sole right to introduce legislative
proposals, but the "sole right of initiative" is not
a very good description and is very often used to heap criticism
upon the Commission. Do you think that it is a help or a hindrance
to use that phrase?
Lord Kinnock: I think it is conceivable that
the original use of the French term misleads more than it informs:
first of all because that right of initiative in the First Pillar
stops the moment a policy is produced or legislation is drafted.
It then becomes, not the property of, but certainly the focus
of the legislatures. The right of initiative only lasts that long,
therefore. In any case, and increasingly in the last 20 years—but
I would say particularly in the last ten years—the Commission
welcomes the engagement of other parties, including other institutions,
in the inauguration and development, often in great detail, of
policy. It would therefore be useful to find an alternative term,
but summing it up in a single word would be difficult. What the
Commission has is the monopoly right of pulling things together,
trying to present them in a coherent form, initially consulting
exhaustively about them, and then eventually putting them in the
form either of a policy draft or into draft legislation, which
then quite rightly can be kicked around by Council and the Parliament—the
democratic bodies—until eventually it may emerge, with the
blessing of successive presidencies, as the legislation of the
European Union. It would be very good to have a single term that
more accurately reflected the right that is necessarily and generally
exerted, rather than giving the impression that there is this
great spider at the centre of the EU cobweb with the monopoly
of doing everything—which of course is very far from the
truth.
Q104 Lord Jay of Ewelme: I
want to go back for a moment to the statistics, Lord Kinnock,
if I may. I wondered where in that categorisation would come the
proposals which came forward under the Single Market programme.
They are presumably not the pure Commission proposal ones.
Lord Kinnock: No, they are certainly not pure
Commission proposals, but they take a variety of forms. For instance,
in the area I knew best in specialist terms, transport, much of
the legislation that I was able to advocate, and often secure,
between 1995 and 2000 was implementation of Single Market practices
and measures in respect of road freight, rail freight, aviation,
maritime transport, whatever. Consequently, therefore, those activities
would—and I can provide the paper with the definitions by
the Santer Commission—fall into updating of established
legislation or measures to enable the implementation of the existing
body of law.
Q105 Lord Jay of Ewelme: What
I am trying to get at is that there are certain proposals which
really do emerge from the Commission itself.
Lord Kinnock: Yes.
Q106 Lord Jay of Ewelme: There
are others which emerge as a broad framework, which means that
the Commission says, "We need a proposal on this, that and
the other" but the Commission will still have a great deal
of authority in deciding exactly what sort of proposal to come
forward, when it should come forward. There is therefore quite
a lot of, as it were, Commission initiative even in some of them
which are not in the full 10 per cent.
Lord Kinnock: Yes, that is certainly the case.
However, in the presentation of legal proposals—as in sport
and politics more widely—timing is all. An ill-judged proposal,
either in terms of its quality, in terms of its refinement or
in terms of its timing, will probably find its way into the sand,
if not into dust itself, as efforts are made to pursue the legislative
process. The Commission therefore understands that it is vital
to exercise thoroughness and care in discharging this duty and
right of making initial proposals.
Q107 Lord Burnett: During
the sifting process—it is a question I asked of Lord Brittan—is
there consideration given to the divergences of the quality of
implementation in different countries? Some Member States will
not be able to afford to do things; some Member States might find
it difficult or impossible to implement them. I gave the example
of dairy quotas, which you may remember, which came in in the
early 1980s. We introduced them and it was done thoroughly and
efficiently—very thoroughly and very efficiently—whereas
I do not believe that they are yet introduced in Italy. I may
be wrong, but they certainly were not for the first 15 or 20 years
anyway.
Lord Kinnock: It is quite possible that they
have not been implemented in Italy, and maybe some other states
that were Member States at the time. There is unevenness about
both the implementation of laws, to which every Member State has
agreed, and also the transposition of laws, to which every Member
State has agreed. We have figures for transposition, and it would
be worth the Committee referring to the latest figures because,
while the greatest offenders, the feeblest transposers as it were,
are still Italy and France, the British record is not as good
as I assumed it would be. It is fairly good but it is no better
than average. I was suffering from the delusion for many years
that while we fastidiously transposed, it was others that did
not; and, of course, in the popular press there is still a momentum
behind that illusion. It is worth having a look at those figures.
Unfortunately, there are not comparably dependable figures—league
tables, if you like—for the actual implementation; because
even where the law has been transposed, even where the means of
implementing the law has been set up, it can be implemented with
diverse standards of energy and enthusiasm. Short of having some
kind of European Commission inspectorate to charge round the Member
States, seeing how well laws are implemented, it is difficult
to see how sovereign democracies can be subject to assertiveness,
unless the failure to implement is so gross as evidently to fall
foul of the law, and then produce proceedings in the European
Court of Justice—which, of course, occasionally, and quite
rightly, does occur.
Q108 Lord Rosser: We always
seem to be in the situation of the Commission—and you have
referred to the figures—perhaps seeking to tell everybody
that maybe it does not have as much influence as they think. On
the other hand, certainly in at least one document I have seen,
an interpretation I would put on it from a member of the European
Parliament seemed to say how much influence they have nowadays,
and the European Parliament is a very interesting scenario to
be in. What would your reaction be to this view: that since information
is power and since surely the Commission has more information
on things from a Europe-wide perspective than either the European
Parliament, the European Council, or any individual Member State—bearing
in mind it also has the right of initiation of legislation or
proposals—does that not mean, in reality as opposed to theory,
that it is more influential than either the Council or the Parliament?
Lord Kinnock: It is in certain circumstances
rightly influential, but that rarely derives from the stock of
information available to the Commission—mainly because the
Commission is a cornucopia of information and produces it readily
and spontaneously in most respects. Where it does not, the Commission
is subject to the questioning of the permanent representations,
of Council and particularly, increasingly and unerringly, the
Parliament. Even if the Commission is reluctant to disclose information
that could be of real influence on the quality, quantity or effectiveness
of proposals, including legislative proposals, it knows very well
that it will not get away with it for long, and the offer of information
might as well be readily undertaken from the outset. I therefore
do not think that it would be possible to demonstrate the cunning
deployment of superior stocks of information in order to exert
influence. That is not how it works.
Q109 Lord Blackwell: Whether
one describes it as right of initiation or right of proposal or
presentation, the Commission at the end of the day is the body
that, out of all these proposals, puts together the Annual Legislative
Programme.
Lord Kinnock: Yes, but with some codicils there—especially
now. I will come back to it.
Q110 Lord Blackwell: Could
you describe how that process works? There must be more proposals
than there is legislative time or capacity. How does the Commission
go about deciding what is in the annual programme?
Lord Kinnock: First of all, the decision process
means setting out the Annual Policy Strategy, which was a reform
we introduced in the Prodi Commission. People working with me
were substantially responsible for compiling it and putting it
forward. The proposal was easily adopted. It means that not only
does the Commission have the obligation to be economical with
time and proposals for resources in the compilation of that Strategy,
but the Commission also submits it to the Parliament and the Council.
Even after that Strategy is adopted by the Commission, therefore,
it is subject to thorough examination. Secondly, it is important
to see that when the Commission adopts not just the APS, the Annual
Policy Strategy, but also the Work Programme, it intentionally
ties in with what is now, since 2002, the Council's multi-annual
work programme and the annual operation programme that comes from
the Council. Consequently, the APS and Work Programme are—not
isolated acts of genius by the Commission they have reasonably
to take into account the understanding that the Council will produce
its operation programme within the context of the Work Programme.
The Commission also knows that, in submitting the Work Programme
annually to the Parliament, it will get a shower of criticisms
and proposals, which if fully accommodated would mean they had
to do ten years' work in one year's work. I can give you a copy
of the summary of the Parliament decisions of last month on the
2009 Work Programme. Our hair would fall out on looking at this
long set of alternative proposals coming from the Parliament!
The important thing therefore is that, in working up the programme,
there are some external realities that must properly be taken
account of. Secondly, there are internal priorities and there
is a process of internal argumentation, not to see whether something
should be in the Work Programme—though that is a consideration—but
where it should appear in the priority list of the Work Programme.
The most influential part of the Commission in determining that
is the President and the President's cabinet. That was the case,
rightly in my view, with Romano Prodi; it is more the case with
the present President Barroso. From what I understand, the operation
of the College of Commissioners and the Commission as an institution
is now more firmly, I will use the word "co-ordinated",
by the President's cabinet than was the case in the Prodi years,
when there was a democratic approach and a degree of permissiveness
that accommodated really good ideas, that addressed the priorities,
whether the President's people had thought of it first or not.
Q111 Lord Blackwell: In practice,
how well does that top-down, strategic view, if you like, dominate?
There must be an inevitable tendency for individual directorates
or individual Commissioners to fight to get their bit of legislation
in the programme. Are there examples where a Commissioner has
seen something that they saw as very important totally excluded
because it did not fit with the priorities?
Lord Kinnock: That would be unusual and I cannot
think of a prominent instance, because of the way in which the
Work Programme is developed. It does not start out with a thousand
flowers blooming. Obviously there are streams of particular work
being undertaken by the Commission, by the Commissioners, and
it is from those sets of activities that the one or two that they
think ripe for consideration in that coming year, as part of the
Work Programme, should be pursued. That is the first thing. Then
of course there are inter-service consultations between all of
the affected directorates-general within the Commission and there
is a degree of contest between cabinets. Sometimes it can grow
very heated. Therefore, by the time there is a draft Work Programme,
which is considered by Commissioners fastidiously, a lot of the
arguments have been had and a lot of the proposals have been winnowed
out. The stage between the draft and the document that eventually
appears before the College of Commissioners for discussion, sometimes
disagreement, is the period in which the Work Programme is finalised,
with very substantial influence, rightly in my view—but
not, in the case of Romano Prodi, overweaning influence—from
the office and person of the President. By the time that document
comes before the College of Commissioners there is concensus,
unless somebody is truly resentful and furious about the fact
either that their pet subject has not achieved the desired priority
or because it has been left out altogether. The argument then
can be fairly tense; not often, but it did crop up a couple of
times, entertainingly I may say, in the Prodi Commission.
Q112 Lord Tomlinson: That
is a very interesting description of the internal dynamics inside
the Commission. I can remember one occasion quite well when, for
example, the European Parliament made an offer to the Commission
that they could not readily refuse. They were looking for a lot
of support in relation to Single Market legislation and the European
Parliament decided there was to be no Single Market regulation
in relation to freedom of movement of food across boundaries unless
there was a pan-European public health directive.
Lord Kinnock: Yes, that is right.
Q113 Lord Tomlinson: Two British
members of the European Parliament, using the Institute of Public
Health Inspectors, drafted a draft directive, topped and tailed
it, and called it a Parliament resolution. It is very difficult
in those circumstances, whatever the President thinks, for the
Commission to refuse it, when they have to deal with the same
Parliament on budgetary matters.
Lord Kinnock: Yes. In fact, though I do not
think that enough attention is given to it, the Parliament does
have that precise power to adopt a resolution which, especially
if adopted by a large majority, says the Treaty, must be taken
account of sensibly by the European Commission. That is why I
refer to the former Article 192, now Article 225; and equally
one could refer in the case of the Council, for which there is
similar provision, to what used to be Article 208 and is now Article
241. That is healthy. I have brought, and it may be of interest
to the Committee, a list of 17 pieces of legislation between April
1994 and February 2007, which appears in a book—and this
will not surprise Lord Tomlinson—compiled by the MEP Richard
Corbett, showing where the Parliament had taken an initiative
and it ended up as a legislative proposal. Anyone examining this
list would acknowledge that they are really useful initiatives
that were pursued to the point of legislation. I will happily
provide that to the Committee.
Chairman: That would be very helpful.
Q114 Lord Jay of Ewelme: I
want to ask a question about the Commission's engagement with
stakeholders, in two senses really. I imagine that when you were
a Commissioner you were assailed fairly regularly by lobbyists
demanding this, that and the other. I imagine also that when preparing
legislation you were, of your own initiative, consulting stakeholders.
I wonder if you could say something about the balance between
those who are getting at you and those from whom you are trying
to learn, and whether overall that improves or distorts legislation.
Lord Kinnock: That is a very good question,
because it is critically important that a strong distinction is
made between the professional bodies with recognised expertise
that are prepared to donate advice, information and ideas, or
to argue about information and ideas, and professional lobbying
firms that may be brilliant at what they do but nevertheless are
not the originators of the ideas, and have not done service in
the particular industry or area of activity that is seeking to
bring influence to bear. I coined a maxim a few years ago, a very
simple one, that lobbying can be a good servant but it is always
a bad master. As long as that distinction is drawn and Commissioners
and Commission officials understand what the lobbyist is doing,
why they are doing it and for whom they do it, then it is fairly
easy to tread the necessary straight-and-narrow. Indeed, the Commissioner
has been trying for some time—it began with the Prodi Commission
and it is continuing now, not concluded—to draw up effective
general guidelines and rules of the game that lobbyists are willing
to be governed by. Of course, there are reputable, established
lobbying firms in Brussels who would be very happy to have that
body of rules; there are others that are not quite as willing.
The contributions to policy development, drafting of law, assessment
of effectiveness, made by professional bodies of repute and expertise
is invaluable. I used to find it so in Transport but it certainly
applies in other spheres; especially since the submissions they
make are often balanced by other submissions and are grounded
in real experience. It is that reality which makes the introduction
of mandatory impact assessments by the Prodi Commission in 2002
particularly valuable. The impact assessing has always taken place,
more in some spheres of activity than in others, but the reality
now is that any proposal must be subject to forms of thorough
consultation which satisfy the requirements of impact assessments—with
a capital `I' and a capital `A'. That is entirely healthy, and
it means that at least the initial proposal coming from the Commission
is better-informed and more pragmatic and usable than would be
the case otherwise.
Q115 Lord Burnett: You drew
a distinction with recognised bodies and professional lobbyists,
and perhaps lobbyists generally. I think you mentioned, Lord Kinnock,
that the Commission are trying to draw up guidance. I raised this
precise matter with Lord Brittan earlier. He explained to the
Committee that he thought that there were now more thorough, far-reaching
rules for controlling corrupt practices in lobbyists, for example.
Are there now stricter rules and stringent rules to control the
activities of lobbyists generally, and are they rigorously enforced?
Lord Kinnock: It is over three years since I
was in the Commission. We did not have those rules at that time.
It is conceivable that there have been notable developments since,
but I have to say that they have not come to my notice. I would
simply repeat in order to emphasise that there are well-established,
reputable lobbying firms in Brussels that recognise they have
a very strong interest in having strict and effective rules. They
would be very co-operative, not only in accepting a body of agreed
rules but also in implementing them. The difficulty is that if
you have nominal rules that can enjoy very widespread endorsement
from every firm, including one set up a week last Thursday, then
the rules are unlikely to be effective. The rules must therefore
be narrowed down and given authority by the professionalism of
the lobbyists: a form of self-regulation which can be very healthy.
I think that it has still proved to be difficult to reach the
necessary standards that would be practical but also rigorous.
Q116 Lord Burnett: It has
been suggested to us by the Law Society that there is an absence
of what I would call controlled development of policy, and particularly
legislation. They also have stressed that they believe that particularly
legislation is developed within silos. Do you agree with them
and do you believe that there is a lack of co-ordination, not
only in policy but also particularly in drawing up legislation?
Lord Kinnock: There is some silo problem, and
I do not think that the European Commission is alone amongst drafting
bodies in experiencing that. Who knows? It may affect the Law
Society. I have yet to come across an organisation that cannot,
if it really searches itself, find a silo problem. All I can say
is that, particularly over recent years, the Commission has put
a great deal of effort into recognising and trying to resolve
this problem. It is now much more the case than it used to be,
even in the Santer Commission, that there are working groups of
Commissioners and their cabinets and directorates-general who
try, when there is an obvious community of interest in an issue
being addressed, to work together in a systematic way. Of course
there has always been inter-service consultation, and that is
a necessary and required part of the development of proposals
coming from the Commission; but that does not necessarily prove
to be wholly satisfactory and often depends upon a sort of arbitrage
between DGs. Understandably, "You support us on this and
then we will agree with you on that". That is bound to occur
in many organisations, actually in a very transparent way, including
the Commission. How do they seek to overcome a silo problem? I
can give a couple of instances in which I was involved and where
it worked out satisfactorily. I was the Commissioner responsible
for the development of the Trans-European Networks Policy between
1995 and 2000. I was appointed chairman of a group of Commissioners,
which included the Budget Commissioner as well as External Affairs,
Environment, Regional Development—in other words, the relevant
Commissioners. We met once every two months—the Energy Commissioner
and Industry Commissioner were also involved—and discussed
the updating of the policy profile. I found it very helpful and
I know that DG Budget found it very helpful, because they were
able to monitor all the time, which was entirely healthy. The
result of it was that it was not only, so far as the Commission
or the Member States were concerned, the effective implementation
of the Trans-European Networks Policy, which had been adopted
by the Council, but also, and more successfully, the further projection
into linking up the applicant states with the Trans-European Network.
That would not have been achievable if there had not been genuine
co-ordination between the Commissioners.
Chairman: We will have to suspend the
Committee at this point.
The Committee suspended from 6.06 pm to 6.14
pm for a division in the House
Q117 Chairman: I am sorry to ask
you to come back for such a very short time, but it would be very
helpful if you could let the Clerk have your notes and that would
cover the points that we have perhaps left uncovered in our questions.
However, can I ask you this? I think that you dealt with this
partly in an answer to Lord Tomlinson, but could you tell us whether
you think that the Commission's monopoly, or virtual monopoly,
on the right to initiate legislation is a good thing? We have
dealt with whether it was a good thing that it was described as
such, but do you believe it to be a good thing?
Lord Kinnock: I do, not only because it gives
substance to the Commission's necessary role as the guardian of
the Treaty and the enforcer of the law, but also because it means
that there is a responsible body that has to follow through the
policies adopted by the Union—Council, Parliament, Commission—and
therefore the Member States. What happens if that does not occur
is that initiatives that are not the subject of Commission responsibility
come to pieces. Tragically, the 2000 Lisbon strategy for competitiveness
and employment is a case in point. It is an orphan. To try to
compensate for the lack of coherence and cohesion, the Council
invented something called "the open method of co-ordination".
It still exists. It is the most dyslexic political process anybody
has ever thought of. All it does is to invite a Christmas tree
of added "objectives" at every Council meeting and it
is rendered meaningless. I therefore think that it is necessary,
not only in very straightforward legal obligation terms and policy
coherence terms but also in terms of ownership and pursuit of
a policy, that the Commission has the right of initiative in the
first place.
Chairman: Are there any other
questions that members would like to ask Lord Kinnock?
Q118 Lord Blackwell: I have
just one short question. Lord Kinnock, do you think that there
ought to be any more focus within the Commission, in the process
of developing legislation, on challenging it for subsidiarity?
Lord Kinnock: Yes. In latter years, there is
quite a strong consciousness of the need to examine proposals—certainly
for new policy and new law—on the basis of whether the European
Union is the appropriate level for activity. That goes alongside
the increasing, and I think healthy, tendency of the Commission
since the late Santerre years, very much so in the Prodi years
and also now, to take the attitude that "less is better".
Alongside the conscious search for an answer to the question,
"Is this the level at which this policy is best developed
and implemented?" is the question, "Does this policy
really need legislation in order to make it effective?" and
a stronger emphasis—which, as I say, I think is healthy—on
self-regulation; an alternative means of getting effective and
coherent results without going through a legislative process.
The nature of the Commission and its engagement is therefore changing.
I do not think that the Commission is weakened by it. I think
that what is happening is that the Commission, in the discharge
of these obligations, is maturing as the Parliament matures and
Council matures—a much bigger Council, of course—and
a better equilibrium is being developed.
Q119 Lord Rosser: This flows
from the question about the virtual monopoly and the initiation
of legislation and whether that is a good thing, to which you
have made it very clear that you think it is. We know what the
Council and the Parliament can do if they do not think very much
of proposals that are put forward by the Commission; but are you
also satisfied that, bearing in mind the Commission does have
the virtual monopoly in the initiation of legislation, the checks
and balances are there so that the Commission, through having
that virtual monopoly, cannot deny the clear wishes of the Parliament
and Council as far as the legislation proposals are concerned?
Lord Kinnock: To some extent the honest answer
to that involves timing. Ideas may come from the Parliament or
from the Council. Of themselves, they may be entirely valid ideas;
but, of themselves too, they are unlikely to have been costed
and any consultation that has taken place about them has been
fairly narrow. Therefore, if the Commission is to follow through
those proposals and turn them into legislative proposals or developed
policy, it has to take account of the economic, the environmental,
the labour market, the Single Market, and many other implications
of that policy. It has to take account of cost and it has to make
an assessment of the balance of opinion across the Member States
in favour of this particular kind of policy. The Commission could
therefore seize upon the proposal and do its damnedest to turn
it quickly into workable proposals for law, or it could be a little
more circumspect. Some time, some considerable time, could then
pass before that idea saw the light of day as a formal proposal
for law or even for a Green Paper, let alone a White Paper. This
is not a jealous protection of the right of initiative; this is
a pragmatic view of what is and is not likely to work and a pragmatic
view of what priority should be given, in view of the extensive
set of demands made on the Commission in any event, and particularly
its policy goals.
Q120 Chairman: Is there anything
you wanted to add that we have not covered or that is not in your
notes?
Lord Kinnock: No, I have the luxury of being
able to submit them! There was one issue that was raised, however,
and it is a very valid issue, about legitimacy. While not everyone
may believe it, it is the truth that conscientious Commissioners
certainly, and large numbers of people in the EU civil service,
exercise their minds about the question of legitimacy. In recent
years, of course, there has been a search for a definition of
democratic legitimacy for the Commission. As it happens, that
is a bit nearer than it used to be, because of the new levels
of accountability that the Commission recognises and in any case
has to discharge to the Council and to the Parliament. That is
entirely healthy. However, the legitimacy of the Commission is
not really definable in democratic terms; it has to be an operational
legitimacy. The Commission must be efficient in what it does;
it must be relevant in what it does; it has to be prudent in the
way that it performs its duties; and it must be accountable. If
it is those things—if it is efficient, relevant, prudent
and accountable—then it has legitimacy as a policy-developing,
law-enforcing, administrative executive for this unequalled and
unprecedented edifice called the European Union. I think that
[uses up time and energy unnecessarily to try to search round
for a means of giving the Commission a classic democratic accountability].
That is why I think it is folly, for instance, for the Parliament
to elect the President and consequently politicise the office.
It is one of the serious deficits in the Lisbon Treaty as far
as I am concerned, because I think that it will end in tears.
It is much better that the powers-that-be in the Council, in the
Parliament, indeed in the press and widely in politics, put the
maximum pressure on the Commission to fulfil at least those four
requirements of legitimacy; and when the Commission manifestly
does—as it does most of the time, and certainly most of
the people working for the Commission, overwhelmingly the majority,
seek to fulfil those objectives—then it will justifiably
enjoy legitimacy in the public eye. However, it must not be distracted
from trying to fulfil those demanding obligations, which are absolutely
justifiable obligations.
Chairman: That is perhaps a good note
on which to close. Thank you very much, Lord Kinnock, for giving
your time and answering our questions. We are most grateful.
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