Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-07-07-Speech-1-220"
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"en.20080707.22.1-220"2
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"Mr President, I hope colleagues will bear with me yet again taking the floor on a question of changes to the Rules of Procedure, which always seem to be on a Monday night.
With this rule change, that will be possible; we will, of course – that is the compromise – still put the report to the chamber to give a yes or no to it. We will also allow groups that disagree with it to table an alternative motion for a resolution, but we will not start voting for hours on hours, paragraph by paragraph, to redraft a committee report of that sort. That, then, I think is a first, very important change.
Another change, of a completely different sort, is to liven up our debates and the way we conduct our speaking time. The role of the rapporteur will be enhanced: the rapporteur will present the committee’s report which is in response to the Commission’s legislative proposal, immediately stating what the Parliament thinks of the Commission proposal, and will wrap up the debate at the end, perhaps answering the points that different Members have made in the way that I attempted to do just now in our previous debate. That is something that should liven up our debates and is well worthwhile.
There is, however, one detail which seems to have attracted a lot of comments: this is the suggestion that we should have guidelines for written parliamentary questions in the same way that we already have guidelines for questions at Question Time to the other institutions.
I do not see why there is such a drama about this. It is not an attempt to create a power of censorship over questions. It is simply saying in the guidelines that written parliamentary questions, just like questions for Question Time, should be within the remit of the institution that is being asked to answer the question. That seems logical and rational, yet it is missing at the moment.
The fact that it is missing has allowed one Member of this House to table over a thousand parliamentary written questions on subjects that have nothing whatsoever to do with the European Union. That has clogged up the system, making all the rest of us wait longer for our answers, costing a fortune because all such questions have to be translated into every language, circulated around the Commissioners for a collective reply and collegiate reply, and is a waste of our time and resources. Simply laying down guidelines to say that questions have to be within the remit of the European Union and of the institutions seems to be sensible.
And who should judge this? Under my proposal, our President, the President of Parliament, should judge this. If we lay down guidelines, we will not leave it to the Commission to judge that and say: ‘No, we are not answering that question or this question’. No, we will decide – and that is something to protect Members and should be a guarantee for Members. I am surprised that some Members who are not here tonight have seen fit to attack that in an e-mail to all Members of Parliament.
These are modest, sensible proposals coming out of the working group of vice-presidents and Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, and I commend them to the House.
As colleagues will be aware, Parliament has had a working group very ably chaired by our colleague Dagmar Roth-Behrendt which has been looking into improving the workings of our Parliament.
We have shifted from being a talking shop to a co-legislature. Whatever happens to the Lisbon Treaty, that change has already essentially taken place. It is therefore rational and logical that we should look at how we organise our work.
One major aspect of that is inevitably and rightly a shift away from own-initiative reports from committees, with no legislative impact, to focussing more on legislation.
That is the first and perhaps most important part of the package of proposals that I tabled before you today. The working group’s proposals, of course, were wide-ranging: only a few of them require adjustment to our Rules, but this is one of them.
The idea here is that we should differentiate between the types and significance of own-initiative reports. Some, of course, will continue to merit full discussion and voting in plenary; but perhaps some really do not.
We should not turn this Chamber into a drafting committee that rewrites, paragraph by paragraph, a detailed own-initiative report on a specialist subject by a specialist committee.
I would have liked to have gone further and ask: Why do such reports, that type of own-initiative report, not stand in their own right as a report of the committee?
Reports of the House of Lords, that we all talk about, are reports of House of Lords’ committees: they are not voted on and rewritten by the chamber of the House of Lords, they stand on their own merits – often very good, deep, analytical reports. They do not use the Lords as a revising chamber, paragraph by paragraph. We should not do that either for this type of own-initiative report."@en1
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