Examination of Witnesses (Questions 340-359)
Ms Catherine Day and Mr William Sleath
8 MAY 2008
Q340 Lord Bowness: In practical terms,
what impact will the absence of a Commissioner from every country
following the Treaty of Lisbon, if it is ratified, have on this
particular aspect?
Ms Day: I cannot immediately see a link to that
aspect. It is unknown territory. We have evolved from having had
two Commissioners from the big Member States down to one from
each Member State, so we have lived through a change already,
but I do not think it will change that particular aspect because
the Commission, the President and, for example, my own department
will have to put measures in place to make sure that in the case
of those Member States that do not have a Commissioner, we know
extremely well what their thinking is and how they are reacting.
We are already doing things in that direction, not particularly
to prepare for the situation when we will not have one Commissioner
per Member State but simply because now that we are 27 it is extremely
difficult to know intuitively what the situation is in each Member
State. We are already beefing up our representation offices in
Member States and setting up much clearer lines of reporting on
a regular basis to make sure that we have our finger on the pulse
of what is happening in the Member States. I think it will be
more of a progression than something that will be a dramatic development.
Q341 Chairman: Can we just move on
and ask you to direct your attention to the shared right of initiative
under the Third Pillar which means that initiatives can come from
a different direction. Does this assist the process of consistent
law making? Does it cause any difficulties? Will the position
be different under the Lisbon Treaty?
Ms Day: First of all, we have to understand
that working in the Third Pillar area in the area of interior
and justice policy is relatively new and very sensitive. We have
an understanding of the fact that we are coming from different
backgrounds and traditions. But, having said that, the experience
with the Member States' right of initiative in the Third Pillar,
if I can be very blunt about it, is that we have seen some fairly
badly prepared proposals coming forward and also proposals which
simply do not take into account the need to try to find consensus
among 27 Member States. That is understandable in a way. If you
work in a ministry for the interior in one Member State you are
paid to know what your Member State wants and thinks and does,
and it is extremely difficult to design something that will appeal
to the other 26, or even to understand their situations. You might
find officials who know the situations in two or three Member
States but now that we are 27 it is very challenging. It comes
back to what I said at the beginning, the Commission is paid all
the time to be looking at the situations in Member States across
the Union. We have had some not very well prepared proposals in
this area. It is also a fact that Member States do not feel bound
in the Third Pillar to do the kind of impact assessment that the
Commission now does as a matter of routine on initiatives before
we come forward with them.
Q342 Chairman: Do they discuss it
with you or do you find proposals coming from Member States at
the moment out of the blue?
Ms Day: I think very little comes out of the
blue, but it is not always, let us say, thoroughly discussed with
us. Sometimes one or more Member States may have an idea or wish
to do something and they may approach us and say, "Well,
could you make a proposal" and if we are persuaded of the
need for the proposal we would do that, but sometimes it is an
attempt to re-balance or even get in before the Commission comes
up with a proposal which may not be to the liking of whichever
Member State is making its own-initiative proposal.
Q343 Chairman: What happens then?
Does the Member State's initiative have priority? Could you put
forward a parallel but different proposal in the same area? What
happens?
Ms Day: It does not have priority. Some that
have not been well prepared in terms of testing the ground with
others fall by the wayside. Where we see that the germ of the
idea is good and there is political support for something, then
we would also try to help Member States improve their proposals
to make them more acceptable to others.
Q344 Chairman: Could you put forward
your own proposal, a Council one?
Ms Day: Yes, we could.
Q345 Chairman: Presumably the requirement
of the minimum threshold of a quarter of Member States under the
Lisbon Treaty, in practice does that mean seven?
Ms Day: Yes.
Q346 Chairman: I think my maths is
right. That is going to mean either fewer or else more coherent
and sensitive proposals, is that the idea?
Ms Day: We hope so, yes.
Q347 Chairman: Both or either?
Ms Day: Well, I hope in general more reflected,
better prepared proposals because having to discuss them already
with seven is a good test to determine whether this is something
that is likely to be more widely taken up than just cast in the
system of one Member State. Secondly, in the last ten years we
have had a huge development in terms of legislation in the Third
Pillar. I expect that will level off at a certain point because
we have not yet completed the basic framework but we are putting
steadily a whole new legal architecture in place. Overall, I would
expect fewer spontaneous legal initiatives to come in future simply
because we will have already reached a level of maturity.
Q348 Baroness O'Cathain: When you
get these proposals from Member States where you said some of
them some have not even got an impact assessment, surely there
must be some sort of formula whereby they would have to have basic
information in any proposal they send to you, like if you were
starting up a new business and you needed a business plan to go
to the bank in order to try and get funding. Surely you should
have a formula which would say, "No proposal will be looked
at without some attempt at an impact assessment" because
that would cut out a lot and make them feel much more focused
in terms of preparing adequately.
Ms Day: That sounds very sensible to me but
it is not the situation.
Q349 Baroness O'Cathain: You are
in the driving seat.
Ms Day: Not in the area that we are talking
about where Member States have a right to make a proposal. They
do not take kindly to the Commission telling them that they should
go back and do an impact assessment before they present it.
Q350 Baroness O'Cathain: It is not
quid pro quo, if they want you to look at it and work at it, surely
they should have basic work to do.
Ms Day: No, they tell us that we should have
impact assessments and we agree, so we do it, but it is not reciprocal.
Q351 Baroness O'Cathain: That is
amazing.
Ms Day: It is indeed. In other words, they do
not practise what they preach.
Baroness O'Cathain: Indeed.
Q352 Lord Jay of Ewelme: If I could
ask a rather more general question. It was put to us in evidence
yesterday that the Commission's role vis-a"-vis that of the
other institutions was reducing over time as a result of a combination
of enlargement, the sheer complexity of business and institutional
change. Is that how you see it sitting in the Commission? I am
talking here in terms of the right of initiative. Would you see
that continuing over time?
Ms Day: My first answer is, no, I do not see
that. I can understand why some people feel that because the role
of the Commission has changed enormously since the early days
of a much smaller Union. What I actually think is that the role
of the Commission is even more important in a Union of 27, but
we have to play our role differently. I think the role of the
Commission is more and more in terms of dealing with big, long-term
issues and issues that the Member States cannot deal with on their
own. Governments have a fairly short timeframe within which to
deal with such issues, given elections every four years in most
Member States, but most of the big challenges that we are facing,
whether it is demography, migration, climate change, even social
change and mobility, most of these are big, long, generational
issues. Where the Commission increasingly can play a real value-added
role is to try to analyse and map out strategies for dealing with
these big issues which are clear enough to make sure that we move
in an agreed direction, but flexible enough to accommodate changes
of government over a 20 or 30 year span. That is very different
from what we were doing ten, 15, 20 years ago when we were designing
the internal market. When people make the kind of comment that
you have made I think they are thinking back to a time when the
Commission was churning out a lot of detailed proposals. It is
a mark of success that we have achieved quite a lot in terms of
the overall framework and we do not need to go on doing that and,
in fact, what we are trying to do now is to simplify and consolidate
that framework. The value of the Commission to the Union today,
if I can put it like that, is to have some body that is able to
sustain long-term projects at a time of a lot of much shorter
term horizons for governments. If you think of the big projects
that the Union has successfully done, whether it is the internal
market, the single currency or enlargement, these are all 20 year-plus
projects.
Q353 Lord Jay of Ewelme: That is
very interesting. When you talk about the right of initiative
or the right of proposal, does that just apply in your view to
the rather traditional, specific directives and pieces of legislation,
or would you see that as also being relevant to the bigger, more
strategic, more policy proposals or frameworks? Presumably those
will come forward and out of those will stem a series of specific
initiatives.
Ms Day: Sometimes. I think when we talk about
the Right of Initiative, in capital letters, we are talking about
a right to make a proposal for legislation.
Q354 Lord Jay of Ewelme: Yes.
Ms Day: In practice, the role of the Commission
is to be a catalyst and to stimulate Member States to think or
change things, and that does not always have a legislative angle.
What I see is that with 27 Member States, there is no obvious
centre point and it is very difficult for Member States to agree,
whereas whenever the Commission puts a well-argued paper on the
table, even if they do not all like it, it gives them something
to define themselves around. If you look at what has been happening
now for most European Council meetings on the big issues the Commission
will provide a paper which sets the scene for the Member States
to have a debate. Sometimes that leads to proposals, like the
example I gave in my paper of the energy and climate package,
but on other occasions it will not necessarily lead to an immediate
decision but enables the Member States to have a debate, maybe
on something that is difficult for them to debate domestically,
like migration for example. That is a good example of where, first
of all, Member States cannot control the situation with regard
to migration entirely on their own and, secondly, if it is something
that is politically sensitive for all Member States it does help
them to discuss at European Union level. Sometimes they will decide
to do something together, but even when they do not sometimes
just to have had the discussion is helpful in itself.
Q355 Lord Burnett: When you are the
catalyst to these things, to what extent do you take into account
the views of these 27 Member States?
Ms Day: To a very large extent where we know
what their views are, and where they know what their views are—and
sometimes the fact that we come forward with ideas helps them
to crystallise their views because they need to react. We are
always trying to help the Union move in the direction it wants
to go in, so we try to have a feel for where would be the common
ground when we come forward with a proposal. There is no point
in us having brilliant ideas if all the Member States are over
in this part of the landscape and we are over there. We are always
trying to find where is the middle ground around which the Member
States can coalesce, so it is very important for us to have a
feel for where the Member States' thinking is.
Q356 Lord Burnett: You find that
middle ground practically by consulting with interest groups?
Ms Day: Yes.
Q357 Lord Burnett: The civil servants
and all those others. Any other people you consult?
Ms Day: We talk to a huge range of people, every
day, formally and informally. When we are at the beginning of
developing a new policy, if we have the feeling that there is
an issue which is problematic and where the Union is the right
level to try to address it then we would normally start by doing
an analysis and putting that analysis out for consultation, so
saying to interested parties, "Do you agree that there is
a problem and have we correctly defined the problem? Is there
a need to do something at EU level?" and then to build over
several years in a very iterative process ideas about how we might
tackle the issue or what should be done. Depending on the issue,
we talk to trades unions, business, civil society, and we also
pay attention to what the media are saying, we consult and listen
to third countries. It is a very elaborate process.
Q358 Chairman: If we can just take
up one aspect that arises from the session we had yesterday with
two lobbying organisations and a professional lobbyist. We heard
some lobbying institutions are industry effectively, they pay
for themselves, but we also heard of a number of bodies which
are effectively funded to promote and develop ideas by the European
Commission and that seemed an interesting and perhaps circular,
some people might say, process. Does that create a problem? Are
you confident you are getting a representative view if you are
consulting with people like the World Wide Fund for Nature, who
I gather are heavily funded, and there is a group of NGOs all
of which are funded, except Greenpeace which on principle refuses
to be funded? Is that a subject that you would like to comment
on?
Ms Day: It may sound a bit strange, but when
you think about it a bit more deeply we feel we need NGOs to exist
in different policy areas and they have a hard time if they have
to survive only by public subscription. We do fund NGOs in the
environment, social and development areas in particular and we
do it on the basis of feeling that we need them to be organised
and participate in the consultative process. We certainly do not
get thanked for our subscriptions, we very often get heavily criticised
by them, but, nonetheless, we feel it is a necessary part of the
democratic process. They are in no sense tame poodles paid by
the Commission; on the contrary, it is more like biting the hand
that feeds you. The fact that it is an uncomfortable relationship
keeps all sides on their toes. It is important that we are as
representative as possible, and we make big efforts to be representative.
If I am allowed a comment, I think the more traditional lobbying
industry is having some difficulties in accompanying the Commission
on the kind of consultations that we do now. When we made very
detailed technical regulations and we said, "Ban this"
or "Reduce that by half", they all knew that they were
for or against it, or they would immediately lobby for twice that
or half that, but now when we say we want to think about where
we should be in 20 years' time on anything from passenger rights
to second languages in schools or whatever, they find it much
more difficult to accompany us on a broad voyage of discovery.
We also find the very same people who criticised some of the legislation
that we already have, when you say, "Okay, let's just take
a blank piece of paper and forget about it and see where we would
start again", they then turn out to have a vested interest
in keeping things as they are, because they know their way around
the existing regulation. It is quite a complex process to make
sure that you can find the people with whom you need to brainstorm
to check that they are representative and to get them to make
the considerable investment that is now needed in modern policy-making
to help you really move to where you need to be, as opposed to
dealing with just tinkering around the edges of what already exists.
Q359 Chairman: We did hear some voices
which suggested that there might be opinions and expertise which
was not reached and maybe there was a role for national parliaments
to have greater input in certain areas.
Ms Day: President Barroso two years ago took
the decision that we now send all of our proposals and all of
our communications to national parliaments inviting them to comment.
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