Verbatim report of proceedings

Wednesday, 5 July 2006 - Strasbourg

15. Implementing powers conferred on the Commission (Interinstitutional agreement) Implementing powers conferred on the Commission (procedures) (debate)

  President. The next item is the joint debate on

- the report (A6-0237/2006) by Richard Corbett, on behalf of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, on the conclusion of an interinstitutional agreement taking the form of a joint statement concerning the draft for a Council Decision amending Decision 1999/468/EC laying down the procedures for the exercise of implementing powers conferred on the Commission (new regulatory procedure with scrutiny) [10126/1/2006 – C6-0208/2006 – 2006/2152(ACI)], and

- the report (A6-0236/2006) by Richard Corbett, on behalf of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, on the draft Council Decision amending Decision 1999/468/EC laying down the procedures for the exercise of implementing powers conferred on the Commission [10126/1/2006 – C6-0190/2006 – 2002/0298(CNS)].

  Margot Wallström, Vice-President of the Commission. Mr President, first of all I would like to thank the European Parliament’s rapporteurs, Mr Daul and Mr Corbett, for their unrelenting efforts in reaching a compromise. I would like to highlight the very good cooperation that has prevailed between our two institutions, especially in the last ten months.

In these difficult and complex negotiations, the Commission, as you know, has been a forceful advocate of the European Parliament’s reinforced control rights over comitology. Tribute also has to be paid in this context to the energy deployed by the UK and Austrian Presidencies.

As a result, the European Parliament and the Commission have succeeded in convincing even the most reluctant Member States to make a major breakthrough in terms of parliamentary control. If the compromise package is endorsed by Parliament tomorrow, Parliament will have a right of veto on the substance of most implementing measures. This applies of course to implementing measures concerning acts adopted under codecision. We can safely say that a decisive battle has been won in favour of more democratic control.

To respond to Parliament’s concerns, the Commission has made several additional commitments. We will further improve transparency and access to comitology documents. We will make sure that the period for consultation only starts when Parliament has received all language versions. We will screen all existing acts adopted under codecision, and, where appropriate, make proposals for adaptation before the end of next year.

Finally, as stated in the trilateral declaration, we have agreed to adapt 25 codecision instruments as a matter of urgency. The Commission will make the corresponding proposals before the end of the year.

The two reports by Mr Corbett were adopted by the Committee on Constitutional Affairs by an extremely large majority, but I wish to say a few words about the sole amendment tabled, in view of your vote tomorrow. This amendment refers to a resolution, a crucial point of which was the systematic adoption of sunset clauses. I believe that this amendment goes in the wrong direction. It undermines the mutual trust that has guided the three institutions during the negotiations. It contradicts the content of the joint declaration, whereby the legislator agrees that the implementing powers should be conferred without time limits. I hope that you will take the Commission’s view into consideration when you vote tomorrow.

I will limit my introductory remarks to these points. I am keen of course to listen to the honourable Members’ comments on this major reform.

  Richard Corbett (PSE), rapporteur. – Mr President, I suspect that there was a plot in this House in scheduling this debate right now, because it was expected that this would be the time at which England would have been playing against France. Mr Daul and I, having been involved in these negotiations, felt we were the victims of this plot. But, as we know, England did not qualify, so perhaps it matters somewhat less – at least for me.

We have before us technically two reports for procedural reasons, but they concern a single package: the proposed revision of the 1999 Council decision on comitology and the joint declarations which, because they constitute a sort of interinstitutional agreement, are subject to a separate report. They are globally a package and together they represent a huge step forward for Parliament – a major transformation of the comitology system.

My constituents back home in Yorkshire would be asking me what comitology is. It is not exactly the subject they are talking about day in, day out in the pubs and clubs of Yorkshire. Every legislature has a system of delegating powers to the executive. In national parliaments that is typically legislation that confers on the government powers to adopt further measures: the statutory instrument in the UK, the arrêté royal in Belgium, decrees in various other countries. The systems change slightly, but it is quite normal to confer powers on the executive, not least to deal with technical details and complex matters once the main legislation has laid down the general principles.

What is unusual in our system in the European Union is that, when we confer such powers on the Commission, we oblige it to act in conjunction with a committee of national civil servants. In many cases those committees have the power to block the Commission and refer the matter back to the Council. We have always found that objectionable: firstly because only committees of national civil servants and not Parliament have the right to scrutinise the Commission and refer questions back, and secondly because matters are referred back only to one branch of the legislative authority – the Council – even when the basic act has been adopted under codecision.

We also found the system to be thoroughly untransparent and complex with the numerous committees that give rise to the name of comitology. Only an expert could study it and understand it.

Over the years we have obtained small concessions. We now receive every document that is sent to a comitology committee. Since 1999 we have had some power to object within a certain time limit if we think that a measure goes beyond the powers that have been delegated. However, up to now, our fundamental objections have been unanswered. With this agreement there is a transformation of the situation: henceforth Parliament will be able to say no to any implementing measure of a quasi-legislative nature adopted through the comitology system, and if we say no the measure cannot be enacted. The Commission will either have to put forward a new proposal or table new legislation under the codecision procedure. That is a huge step forward for Parliament – and not just for Parliament – in terms of the accountability and transparency of the whole Union system. That is why this agreement is so important.

Nonetheless, there have been some issues with which we have been ill at ease and where we had to negotiate to ensure that our position was fully safeguarded. For instance, we have in this agreement a reference to the Lamfalussy acquis. Indeed, by mentioning it, as regards the Commission, we are actually upgrading that acquis from a mere statement in Parliament by the Commission President and a letter from the relevant Commissioner to the relevant committee chairman, to a declaration by the whole institution. So we have upgraded the relevant parts of the Lamfalussy acquis. That is also important.

We have gained satisfaction on time limits: it is an important step forward that three months can be extended to four, especially – as Commissioner Wallström pointed out – as the clock starts running once we get the text in all the languages. That will give us adequate time to consider these matters.

There has also been this issue of sunset clauses. I think that with this agreement Parliament will not normally need to use sunset clauses. We used them before, because when we delegated powers to the Commission we lost those powers for ever. With very loose control over how they were exercised, it was quite normal that we wanted to use sunset clauses as a way of reasserting control if need be. However, with this agreement we can say no to any implementing measures we dislike, even every single one of them, if we are dealing with quasi-legislative measures.

We therefore do not need to use sunset clauses. The agreement reflects that – in that we acknowledge that the principles of good legislation mean that powers should be delegated without a sunset clause, without a time limit. But the principle that the legislature should, if necessary, be able to set a sunset clause – that is a power we have under the Treaty – is recognised to the extent that the agreement says very clearly ‘without prejudice to the rights of the legislative authority’. As is said, we do have the right, but I believe that we will not need to use it except perhaps in exceptional circumstances that we cannot foresee at present. We recognised that de bonne foi as part of the negotiations, because the other institutions felt very strongly about it, but also, in my opinion, because as a parliament we realised that we will not need to do so.

With this agreement we should be more relaxed about delegating matters to the Commission because we will have that control afterwards. We have the ludicrous situation in our Union where we sometimes have two or three readings on subjects such as the width of tyres for tractors, which in any national context would have been delegated to the government to deal with – this is because we have been reluctant to delegate. With the assurance that we can control what we delegate, there is no reason for us not to delegate much more and more frequently. That is another reason for welcoming this agreement.

That is why my group and our committee, the Committee on Constitutional Affairs, rejected the amendments to which the Commissioner referred. It is only a recital – Parliament is not reaffirming the resolution to which it refers – but I do not see the need for a reference. My group – and I think other groups too – may be voting against this amendment if it is indeed confirmed by the group that tabled it. I will be listening to other speakers with interest in a minute.

There is a remaining issue: the adaptation of existing legislation. Commissioner Wallström referred to the package of 25 measures that will be adapted urgently, with a proposal by the end of this year. Beyond that the Commission has undertaken to carry out a survey of all existing legislation to see what needs to be adapted and will make a proposal. But we have no undertaking from the Council to act within any given timetable, so we as a Parliament will have to watch that very carefully. We have a ceasefire. I do not want to break the ceasefire, but we will have to watch very carefully that the Council looks at this seriously within the necessary timetable. So this may not be completely the end of the story, but nonetheless I think it is a huge breakthrough, a huge advance for Parliament.

I would like to finish in the way that Commissioner Wallström began, which is to thank all those involved. Certainly my thanks are due to the Commission. Its position is completely different to the Commission’s position of a few years ago and I think Commissioner Wallström can take much of the credit for that. The Commission has moved to a position where it was very supportive of our position. I think our positions were virtually identical for most of these negotiations.

I would like to thank the British and the Austrian Presidencies: the British Presidency that initiated the resumption of the Council’s consideration of this matter, the Austrian Presidency that took it forward so ably. Of course I would like to thank my fellow negotiator, Mr Daul, the Chairman of the Conference of Committee Chairmen. We went through many meetings together over a six-month period. I am very glad that tonight I can report to this packed House – at least those Members who are not watching the football! – that we have a very important result which I think is not just good for this Parliament, but is actually good for our Union.

  President. Mr Corbett, I have finally understood what comitology means and when I am in Yorkshire I will go into all the pubs to explain it.

  Alexander Radwan, on behalf of the PPE-DE Group. – (DE) Mr President, first of all, let me, as a German, congratulate Commissioner Frattini on yesterday’s football result and then, rather quickly, move on to the matter in hand. There is nothing at all personal about what I shall say about it; all I want to do is counteract some misconceptions that are becoming current.

We are not debating this issue today because the Commission wanted us to, nor, indeed, out of any desire for it on the part of the Council, which, lamentably, left the Chamber before the debate began. We are discussing this issue because the committees that have to work with these agreements – and on this there are major differences in this House – decided that we would.

Reference has been made to the British Presidency’s putting this subject on the agenda, and that it indeed did, and because – and this is where comitology comes into it – certain Committees of this House, the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs being one of them, were no longer willing to write out a blank cheque and to delegate something without having the right to check up on what was done with it, and that is what we are talking about today; not about giving this House a present, but about something that is the least that it is entitled to in a democratic process.

I am, then, all the more astonished by what has been going on recently. At the outset, Commissioner, you said that you were in favour of democracy, and you ended up saying that the sunset clause was less than appropriate. Any parliament is perfectly entitled to place time limits on legislation, and I think it intolerable that the Commission or the Council should make statements of that sort or try to deny this House that right.

I would just like to remind the Council that, with reference to the draft Constitution and in the debates on it, it went so far as to agree to the delegation having the right of call-back, yet today, it wants nothing to do with it. Progress has been made – yes, there is no disputing that – and now we have to build on that progress. The agreement must prove its worth in practice. For example, the committees – and here I am talking about my own – received the first consultative draft from the Commission as late as just before the summer break; after the summer break, the eight-week deadline had expired, and we were then told that our decision was expected in three months’ time. It is practice that will demonstrate that the agreement works and that we do not have to abandon our rights.

What I would like from the Commission, and even more so from the Council, would be to see those who, in the developing world, plead the cause of democracy and the right of codetermination – and that is mainly done by the foreign ministries – at least applying that same standard in their dealings with the European Parliament; that really would be a great step forward.

  Pervenche Berès, on behalf of the PSE Group. – (FR) Mr President, my colleague, Mr Corbett, spoke of a good result. Having just seen a television screen displaying a score of one nil, I consider, in a thoroughly European spirit, that, yes, it is a good result. Mr Corbett spoke of the situation of the people of Yorkshire. Far be it from me to discourage him, but I should nonetheless like to convince him that he still has a little bit of work to do in bringing each of the Members of this House around to the idea of the crucial importance either of comitology or of the results obtained within the framework of the negotiations that have just been completed. On this point, I place my faith in his powers of persuasion.

I should very much like to thank not only our negotiators, Mr Corbett and Mr Daul, for the result at which we have arrived, but also Mr Radwan and all the members of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, without whom these negotiations would not have been begun.

Basically, I wish to put the Commission on its guard. From this point on, you have an important duty in respect of Parliament, that of getting the implementing measures under way in a framework that has now been clearly redefined. We are regularly questioned about the need to monitor the way in which the Member States apply or implement the legislation on which we deliberate in this House. In the same spirit, then, we shall have to check that the Commission, for its part, is doing what it has to do to ensure that the implementing measures are ready within reasonable periods of time. We shall also have to review the European Parliament’s Rules of Procedure so as to adapt our procedures to these new rights that we have to be able to exercise in full.

Everyone will be delighted this evening with the outcome of the negotiations. That being said, I should like now to return to three issues that, in my view, remain unresolved.

The first is that of the status of European Parliament observers within the Commission’s expert committees. The fact is that if we want to exercise in full this oversight and right of call-back where comitology is concerned, we need to be able, under the same conditions as the representatives of the Council, to follow on a day-to-day basis the work of the competent committees where implementation is concerned.

My second question concerns sunset clauses. In the case of these, the minimum we obtained in the declaration constitutes the guarantee we needed in order to accept the agreement.

My third and final question is by way of a warning to the Commission. In a case where, in the quasi-legislative sphere, the European Parliament refuses an implementing measure as proposed by the Commission, the latter will have not only the opportunity to propose a new wording, but also a duty to do so. Otherwise, it will not be possible to implement level 1.

  Andrew Duff, on behalf of the ALDE Group. – Mr President, my group is pleased to offer its strong support for this important reform, which is a further signal that Parliament is making great progress with its constitutional development. I would like to add thanks to all the main contributors to the complex negotiations.

The Regulatory Committee has proved to be the most troublesome aspect of comitology and way beyond the effective scrutiny of Parliament. The present package has three consequences for Parliament.

First, it puts it on an equal footing with the Council. Second, it should encourage Parliament to trust the Commission more to exercise and make prudent use of the executive authority that properly belongs to it. Parliament can surrender some of its preoccupations with minutiae, opening up opportunities for it to focus on politics rather than the technical aspects.

Finally, the change will force Parliament to sharpen up and upgrade the way the committees sift and scrutinise the product of comitology. We need to be fully prepared to shoulder our greater responsibilities with skill and care.

  Satu Hassi, on behalf of the Verts/ALE Group. – (FI) Mr President, as the rapporteur Mr Corbett said, this is a breakthrough. It is welcome and I am glad about it. Parliament’s supervisory powers hitherto in the comitology procedure have been virtually a farce. The Commission has many a time even neglected its obligation to inform Parliament of its decisions.

Parliament recently took legal action against the Commission for exceeding its powers in comitology. The case began on an initiative by the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, when the Commission, exceeding its powers, had granted an exemption regarding the banned fire retardant Deca-BDE. Now this case is being rectified in two ways. Parliament will have the right to block future comitology decisions by a majority of Members. This Deca-BDE case was rectified at the end of June, when the Commission actually reversed its decision, which means that this hazardous substance will be removed from electronic equipment. I am glad about that.

  Maria da Assunção Esteves (PPE-DE). – (PT) I too am suffering at the moment because of the game between Portugal and France, not, incidentally, France and England, as Mr Corbett predicted.

This debate on the democratic control of regulatory acts signals a new era for European democracy. Europe is no longer intergovernmental and merely a negotiating area. It is an entity in itself and an area of integration. It wants to be a democracy with its own legitimacy, which is much more than the sum of the legitimacies of its Member States put together.

This path towards a new era involves decision-making and implementation procedures. Ultimately, these procedures will be at the sharp end of the legitimacy challenge facing all political ranks. I refer to the challenge of transparency, the challenge of responsibility, the challenge of effectiveness, and the challenge of ensuring acceptance and trust among those at whom this is aimed. Parliamentary control of regulatory acts already provided for in a Constitution in waiting is more than putting the democratic power to legislate on a par with the democratic power to control.

The European institutions are assuming that Europe must have the profile of a genuine European democracy and that a genuine European democracy is incompatible with implementing acts that are bureaucratically removed from the European citizens and their representative bodies. This is just a small step towards the sound construction of a strong, democratic European centre with decision-making chains that are permanently open to scrutiny as regards their legitimacy.

It would be a good idea to involve the national parliaments in appointing national experts to the committees. In a European democracy, which is our project and our desire, comitology would set out the reality of networking that strengthens and does not detract from the legitimacy of the political union.

  Friedrich-Wilhelm Graefe zu Baringdorf (Verts/ALE). – (DE) Mr President, it is good that we in this House can now get stuck into the Commission’s comitology procedure; that is progress and a great achievement by those who have been conducting the negotiations, and one for which we are grateful to them.

The only thing is that it does have a few blemishes. The whole thing has to do with the codecision procedure rather than the consultation procedure. It is the consultation procedure that still applies to our Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, and, now that it is considering the organic farming regulation, we can once more see how the Commission is attempting to encroach on the Committee’s powers, but we are unable to tackle these attempts head-on, and that must change. That is a defect in what has been agreed here.

When we get the proposed constitution, the codecision procedure will apply in agriculture too, but we do not have it yet. I hope this will not be another occasion for beating about the bush when it comes to implementation, so that we end up stuck with the consultation procedure and have to live with it and with a situation in which the Commission continues to enjoy rights that are incompatible with any democratic standard.

  Margot Wallström, Vice-President of the Commission. Mr President, the comments by Members here demonstrate how much thought and enthusiasm has gone into this important reform, and quite rightly so. We have injected more transparency and more democracy into the procedures.

From now on the European Parliament should be in a position to delegate implementing powers in all conscience to the Commission without giving up its legitimate rights of scrutiny. According to the new procedure, if Parliament were to object to the substance of an implementing measure, the Commission would be prevented from adopting it in that form.

With these substantially improved control rights we see no need for the legislator to set a time limit for the delegation of implementing powers to the Commission. On the contrary, I believe that this package should provide a stable solution for the future. This was, of course, the purpose of the negotiations.

Let me come finally to some practical issues, because if you endorse the deal tomorrow we will have to continue our good cooperation. This will be done in several ways: firstly, thanks to the Commission’s forthcoming alignment proposals; secondly, via the promised upgrade of the comitology register; and thirdly, through the revision of our 2000 bilateral agreement on the procedures for implementing the comitology decisions.

I look forward to continuing to work with you on these issues and I thank you for your contributions to the debate.

  President. The debate is closed.

The vote will take place tomorrow at 12 noon.