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European Commission

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Bayley, in today's three-and-a-half-hour debate on this important subject. I thank my hon. Friend the Deputy Leader of the House for proposing the debate as a means of helping the House to achieve better scrutiny of the annual European Commission work plan. That objective is keenly shared by the Government, and I hope that this, the first of what we intend to be annual debates in Westminster Hall on the Commission's annual policy strategy and legislative work programme, will be an important step in how Westminster scrutinises Brussels. The Commission's annual policy strategy establishes policy priorities for 2009 and identifies the initiatives necessary to realise them. As hon. Members know, the new Commission will be appointed in mid-2009. At that point, it will agree a five-year mandate laying out the broad priorities and aims for the period. It is therefore no surprise that the annual policy strategy is primarily a continuation of existing work streams for the current Commission. It is not a set of formal policy proposals but an aspirational document. The Commission has said that it is aimed at ““sparking a debate”” with the other institutions on where the policy priorities should lie for the next year. That dialogue is helpful in translating the annual policy strategy into deliverables in the legislative work programme for 2009, which will, of course, be presented in October this year. The annual policy strategy is nevertheless helpful in a number of ways. It provides a framework for the preliminary draft budget for the corresponding year, as well as an operational steer for the Commission services. It helps the Commission to keep on track, preventing drift and endless new initiatives from dominating a new weekly agenda. The strategy is important also because the broad policy priorities that it focuses on will have an impact on the drafting and implementation of specific legislation and proposals. In Whitehall, such documents are important planning tools to help Departments to plan for negotiations. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) and I discussed earlier, 2009 will bring a new European Parliament and European Commission and, subject to national ratification processes, the entry into force of the treaty of Lisbon. Particularly given that backdrop, Members should see the strategy document as indicative rather than legislative. I hope that we can welcome it as a series of operational measures following our long institutional debate. After our debates on European structures in recent months, it is a pleasure for me to open a debate not on those structures, but on the substance of what Europe can and should be doing in the next year.