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EU: Codecision (EUC Report)

I am grateful to the Minister. Perhaps I may elucidate on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, on the question of access by our national parliamentary representative in Brussels to Council documents on the same basis as applies to the French and some of the other parliamentary representatives. I understand that discussions on that subject are beginning to take place in Brussels. Again I hope that there will be some progress on that fairly soon. I should like to make three further points. First, in the original presentation I said that in the trialogue the rapporteur was the main speaker. However, the rapporteur is not necessarily the only representative of the European Parliament present. The chair of the committee will be present, as will, interestingly, what are called shadow rapporteurs. Each political group appoints a rapporteur for a particular topic so there is a rather full representation from the Parliament, although the negotiations in the trialogue are led by the rapporteur. I did not make that sufficiently clear. As to my second point, I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said about the future of committees. I realise that there are always demands for more committees. All I would say, without wanting to be too supportive of the European Union committees, is that this structure of committees appears to be serving the House well and I hope that we will look very carefully before we change it for something else. No doubt we will have to return to this issue on another occasion. On the issue of scrutiny overrides—a matter which concerns us—I was interested in what the noble Lord said. In fact, in this House the total number of scrutiny overrides for all departments for the first half of last year was 14. We were pleased that that was down from 21 in the second half of 2008. Unfortunately the figure went up in the second half of 2009 and we are trying to pursue this issue with departments. We have tabled Questions for Written Answer to get the total numbers on the record and one was answered in last Monday’s Hansard. We have tabled Questions for Written Answer to name and shame departments responsible for overrides which could have been avoided. One involving the Foreign Office was answered on 8 December. Last year Sub-Committee B summoned the Permanent Secretary of Defra to give evidence about her department’s failure to meet its scrutiny obligations. Last week, in a positive way, we had a meeting for the scrutiny co-ordinators, the officials, in all departments. They met the staff of the European Union committees, who encouraged them to improve their performance. That shows the way in which we are attempting to address the issue of overrides and ensure that they are reduced. If it was not for the lateness of the hour I would have liked to have responded to what the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, said about the toothless tabby. We can provide him with information on the way in which we have had impact. I cited earlier the way in which our report on the timeshare directive in 2008 was well received by the European Parliament. In her evidence to the committee, Arlene McCarthy said that she had drawn from it to move quite a number of the amendments which were in the final text of that document. We have a number of other equal examples. There is one other matter to which I should like to refer. There is a concern, which the European Parliament shares, about the risk of lack of transparency. That is why in its new standing orders it issued a code of conduct for negotiating in the context of the ordinary legislative procedure. In this, it makes clear that there has to be a period of time between the agreement in the negotiations and the decision in the committee in order to, ""allow political groups to prepare their final position"." This is so that the political groups, if they do not like the deal that has been done in the negotiations, will vote against it when it comes up for consideration at First Reading. That has happened on occasion. I should correct the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, that nothing could be done once agreement had been reached in the trialogue—it can; a decision still has to be made by the European Parliament, and there have been cases where the Parliament as a whole has rejected the agreements which were reached in the trialogues. This has been a useful debate. Motion agreed.