Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-03-Speech-3-120"
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"en.20031203.9.3-120"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, the Commission welcomes the two reports by Mr van den Berg and Sir Neil MacCormick. The Commission is grateful for Parliament’s support for its initiatives seeking to produce better regulation, by for example arranging impact assessments, setting minimum requirements for the consultation of stakeholders, laying down guidelines for the collection and use of expertise and simplifying Community legislation. Next week the Commission will table its annual report entitled ‘Better Lawmaking 2003’, which will for the first time provide an overview of all of the work currently underway to improve regulation and policy-making in the EU. With the same intention, Parliament, the Council and the Commission recently concluded the 2003 Interinstitutional Agreement on Better Lawmaking. This is a major step in the right direction and ensures that the competences of all of the institutions will be fully respected in our future work to achieve better regulation.
Today, however, I should like to focus on the two key issues that have been raised by Mr van den Berg, namely the consultation of stakeholders or interested parties and the advice that experts should contribute. What are the principles and minimum standards for the consultation of interested parties? Our first task is to provide a coherent and transparent framework for the consultation of these groups. Here the Commission fully shares the European Parliament’s opinion that consultation cannot be a substitute for parliamentary democracy and emphasises that the aim of having minimum requirements for consultation is to give stakeholders a voice, but not a vote. In other words, this is not about deciding, but about being heard. The representatives of the people of Europe will still have to decide. Neither will these measures impact on the institutional role of the two advisory bodies, the EESC and the CoR.
The general principles and minimum requirements for consultation set out by the Commission could also serve as a basis for a further interinstitutional agreement. The Commission also agrees with Parliament that the consultation process must not be allowed to slow down the legislative process and stresses that the minimum eight-week consultation period for public consultations strikes a good balance between the need for efficient decision-making and gaining the necessary input from external parties. To make the consultation process more transparent, the Commission has published a formal and structured list of advisory bodies. This information can be retrieved from the database of advisory bodies.
Establishing guidelines for the collection and use of expertise is a further important Commission measure to improve the way in which initiatives are prepared. As we have underlined in the White Paper, European governance standards for the collection and use of expertise need to be improved. The guidelines, which apply to any Commission services calling on and using expert advice, seek precisely to guarantee that high standards and tried and tested practices form an integrated part of the working culture of all of the Commission services.
Careful preparation, however, is not the only way in which the Commission needs to improve the quality of its work; it must also make this process more transparent. For this reason, next week the Commission will be adopting a new standard explanatory memorandum for all of its proposals, which will make it necessary to explain the reasoning and facts underlying each one. This decision also covers expert knowledge and the consultation of interested parties.
I should now like to turn to Sir Neil MacCormick’s report on tripartite contracts and agreements. The approach adopted in this report is in tune with the Commission proposal and is as ambitious as it is sensible. It is ambitious, because it seeks to enhance the status of local and regional authorities and to give them increased responsibility for implementing Community regulations and measures, something which is being advocated increasingly vociferously. This should bring the Union’s regions closer to each other. The conclusion of tripartite contracts or agreements may be an interesting development when implementing particular Community policies. At the same time, however, it is also a sensible approach, because we do not question the need to proceed step by step. The Commission had the same idea in mind when it adopted the communication on tripartite contracts and agreements last December, as it had promised to do in the White Paper on European Governance. There too we proposed first to have a trial period. This phase has already begun. In environment policy, work is already underway in three European cities on an initiative to conclude a tripartite agreement.
Tripartite agreements might also soon be concluded as part of measures to implement the Sustainability Pacts initiative. In regional policy, the Commission is convinced that greater decentralisation is needed. Tripartite contracts between the Commission, the Member State and the region might possibly form part of a new system to implement the Structural Funds. In addition, this would also transfer even more responsibility to the regions and those involved in regional development.
We must, however, exercise a degree of caution. Firstly, as the rapporteur has requested, we must take stock of the pilot phase and evaluate the results. Secondly, we need to consider what legal, political or institutional stumbling blocks might in certain cases lie in the way of using such agreements. In regional policy in particular, I should therefore like to draw a distinction between two phases: the phase of determining the development strategy, where greater involvement on the part of authorities below the State level is desirable – provided that it is compatible with the constitutional system of the Member State concerned – and then the implementation phase. Here we need to consider what impact these new contracts might have on applying the rules on the use of budgetary resources and on the obligations that the Commission has to discharge as the guardian of the treaties. In addition, we need to check to what extent there is a danger of the Commission having to take on extra administrative and monitoring tasks.
Finally, I should like to assure the rapporteur that, in accordance with his wishes, the Commission fully intends to involve Parliament in the implementation and evaluation of future tripartite agreements."@en1
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