Examination of Witnesses (Questions 460
- 469)
THURSDAY 13 DECEMBER 2007
Ms Jacqueline Minor and Ms Marian Grubben
Q460 Chairman: It is very
subjective, of course, but we might be able to compare any movement
from "low" to "adequate".
Ms Grubben: They are not entirely subjective
because we ask the SOLVIT centres how many man-months they have
devoted to SOLVIT over the past year and we also then ask them,
"Was that enough or do you need more resources?", and
it is essentially based on that, so probably if their minister
had seen their reply they would have vetoed it but since SOLVIT
is informal we manage to get away with getting objective information
and putting it in the report. We will do the same thing this year.
The questionnaire to the SOLVIT centres will go out next week
and we normally produce the annual report in April because we
also need to take account of all the cases that are still open
and they tend to be closed towards March.
Q461 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
I think you said that standards were affected quite favourably
by peer pressure through the internet. Can each SOLVIT centre
publish their accounts on the internet, or do they not do that,
because that is another way of exerting pressure?
Ms Grubben: You mean to publish their own resolution
rates and case handling times?
Q462 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
No. I was thinking more about the actual resourcing, because you
need funds to resource, whether it is for staff or whatever, and
if there were certain SOLVIT centres that were not being properly
resourced by their Member State government then having the income
that they had available to spend published on the internet for
each one would be another way of exerting pressure for the ones
that are not being funded properly to be more properly resourced,
because most of their resource has to come from their own government,
does it not?
Ms Grubben: Yes. SOLVIT is based on a Commission
recommendation, so it is not a formal thing and there is no instrument
we have to force Member States to be as transparent as that. In
addition, the number of man-months is not the whole story because
there are also SOLVIT centres where in terms of man-months you
would think, "This is okay", but still they leave a
lot to be desired in terms of the way they treat cases. It would
not be fair just to compare that figure. You should also look
at resolution rates, case handling times and general satisfaction
within the network.
Q463 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
It is much more subtle?
Ms Grubben: Yes.
Q464 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
But presumably there need to be ways of bringing the weakest SOLVITs
up from the bottom of the list, as it were, so that they are providing
a better service to their users. Do you have any ideas for how
that can be done, or is that not really up to you?
Ms Grubben: I have the impression it is already
being done because you can see how it changes over the years,
how SOLVIT centres which were not doing a fairly good job three
years ago have now shaped up. Apart from this annual report we
also do three annual workshops with SOLVIT centres. We bring all
these people together and we really have frank discussions about
the way things work. There may be a lot of criticism from one
SOLVIT centre about others, without mentioning names, so we really
discuss these problems and you can see that that has an effect.
You can see that over a couple of months SOLVIT centres try to
improve these things. One of the other aspects of SOLVIT centres
is that they tend to become better the more cases they have, which
makes sense because that gives them the opportunity to build a
routine and to develop relations with ministries with whom they
need to talk frequently to reverse decisions, and you also see
that SOLVIT centres which are relatively small find that very
difficult. It is also a matter of building the reputation of a
SOLVIT centre within your administration because, just imagine,
SOLVIT UK is based in --- DTI now has a new name.
Q465 Baroness Eccles of Moulton:
Yes, BERR. Do not laugh!
Ms Grubben: They have a lot of complaints which
are about residence rights and visas, which means that they have
to talk to other parts of the administration about solving these.
As you will imagine, it is not always easy to do that, because
why would BERR be concerned about visa cases? Why are they interfering
in this area which is essentially within the competence of another
ministry? This is the first thing which every SOLVIT centre has
to overcome. They have to establish a working relationship with
all the ministries where they will have to handle SOLVIT cases.
That is also part of how well or how badly the SOLVIT centre is
functioning. Have they managed to create this network? Do they
have the political support to do that? What sorts of instruments
do they use? The whole picture is more nuanced than just looking
at how many people they have there. It is an essential requirement
but it does not tell you the whole story.
Q466 Lord Paul: The Single
Market Review (and we also heard it this morning) says that regulations
are being simplified. If that happens do you think your work will
go down? Secondly, you mentioned two examples in Germany where
you have intervened. Are there any countries where the regulations
are more difficult to understand than in other countries?
Ms Grubben: On your first question, if things
are simplified it does not necessarily mean that it becomes easier
to enforce them because it may also mean that there is a lot of
margin then for Member States to fill in the details which are
missing from this nice, simple legislation. That is what you see
with many SOLVIT cases. The legislation may be fairly simple but
a lot is delegated to the Member States and then you have 30 different
interpretations and it becomes quite difficult, so I am not so
sure about that. Simplification in a different sense, that you
explicitly forbid Member States to impose requirements in particular
areas, of course would help, but that is not how simplification
in general is normally understood. It means less Brussels and
more Member States. That we often see is the cause of many problems,
so I am not very optimistic about that. Regarding the difficulty
of understanding regulations, there certainly are differences
between Member States, especially those who have a very decentralised
system, which means that just checking at national level does
not give you the full story and you just have to invest in finding
out what is happening at the lower levels as well.
Q467 Lord James of Blackheath:
Do you publish any record of the cases you have resolved so that
they can be used and followed by others? Do you have a newssheet
on that?
Ms Grubben: Yes. On the SOLVIT website we have
a very long list of our success stories. I sometimes think we
should also publish the stories which were not successful because
they are sometimes also very informative and then in this annual
report, of which I will leave copies for all of you, we have a
selection of success stories which will give you examples of cases.
Q468 Lord James of Blackheath:
Can we be a bit cheeky? We have asked you for examples of cases
where you have succeeded. Can you give us an example of a case
where you could not find a solution?
Ms Grubben: Yes. We have a lot of cases with
the UK where we cannot find solutions.
Q469 Lord James of Blackheath:
That figures. The Government has the same problem.
Ms Grubben: There is this ongoing problem with
the new Residence Rights Directive which also regulates visas
for third country spouses of EU citizens and the UK has its own
interpretation of this directive which is not necessarily accepted
by the Commission, so there is a procedure ongoing and a lot of
cases we get in SOLVIT are complaints from people who try to exercise
their EU rights because they have read the directive and they
find that in the UK unfortunately this is not possible. This is
a very big category of problems which we cannot solve.
Lord James of Blackheath: That makes
a lot of sense.
Chairman: Thank you very much. You have
helped us enormously.
| 
