Yes. Thank you for the invitation, convener. It is a great pleasure to meet the committee formally. I know that you are in constant touch with our office in Scotland, and I take the opportunity to reiterate that it stands ready to assist you with information in any way that it can.
I plan to speak briefly to some changes in the way in which the Commission, in its new formation following the appointment of President Juncker and his team of commissioners, intends to go about business in the next five years. I will then refer briefly to a number of the key initiatives, rather than running through the entire work programme. I have the advantage of having seen the detailed notes provided by your secretariat and the responses to them, and it is obvious that you are familiar with the content of the work programme.
If you cast your minds back to May 2014, you will remember that the European Parliament election slogan was “This time it’s different”. The question that probably still lingers in people’s minds is whether it really is different and, if so, how. In many ways, it has been different. The appointment of President Juncker emerged as a result of the European elections. He was the candidate who was put forward by the political group that emerged as the largest in the European Parliament, and that argument eventually carried the day in the Council of Ministers.
When we look at his fellow commissioners—the other men and women who have been appointed to serve in his college—we see that there are five former prime ministers, four deputy prime ministers and 19 former ministers. That is a mark of the importance that member states now accord to their representatives and the persons they appoint to the European Commission. The average age is 49, which is younger than in many Governments. In particular, if we look at the vice-presidents—I will come back to them—we see that their average age is 43, which is a significant change from previous Commissions.
President Juncker has made it clear that he intends his Commission to be more political, more top down and more focused. He has talked about being big on the “big things” and “smaller and more modest” on the smaller things. That was in the personal political manifesto that he presented to the European Parliament before it endorsed his appointment; it is a red thread that runs through all the decisions that have been taken so far about the Commission’s working methods and it underpins the work programme for 2015.
What does President Juncker mean by being more political, more top-down and more focused? I think that it means that the Commission will address the key challenges for Europe, which are jobs, competitiveness and growth. That is reflected in the 10 priorities that President Juncker put to the European Parliament. I think that it also means—again, I think that we can see this reflected in the work programme for 2015—that the Commission has understood the message that some national politicians have communicated to it and which is probably implicit in the outcome of the European elections, which is that the European Union has become too intrusive in terms of the rules and regulations that it makes and their impact on the daily lives of citizens. I think that there is a determination to address that concern.
How has that been done in the structure of the Commission? There are six vice-presidents and the high representative, who is by reason of their office necessarily a vice-president. Contrary to previous practice, the vice-presidents have a real delegation of powers. In former Commissions, the title of vice-president was mainly honorific and based on seniority, and the main responsibility attached to being a vice-president was to deputise for the president of the Commission should he be absent from meetings. However, we have now seen real power being given to vice-presidents to co-ordinate their areas of responsibility and to lead project teams on key legislative and other initiatives.
We can see that the choice of vice-presidents was dictated by their prior political office: all who were originally nominated were former prime ministers. However, one of those did not survive the hearings in the European Parliament and Commissioner Šefcovic, who is now serving for the second time, was appointed to replace her.
It is also worthy of note that, when the vice-presidents were appointed, the words “for now” were attached to the announcement of their appointment, which carry with them the possibility that at some time in this Commission there will be a reshuffle, which has never been the practice of Commissions so far. There is therefore the interesting prospect that at some time portfolios might change and the overall distribution of files will be reshaped.
One effect of the creation of the vice-presidents is that there are now really substantial portfolios for the other commissioners—the so-called “team commissioners”. With 28 members of the Commission, which becomes 26 once we take out the president and the high representative, it becomes quite difficult to ensure that each of them has a really substantial and serious job. However, their having substantial portfolios is one of the beneficial side-effects of creating vice-presidents and team commissioners.
The project teams are variable, so there are no permanent reporting lines between team commissioners and vice-presidents; the reporting lines will depend on the initiative, because everybody can be drawn into the realm of a particular vice-president for a particular initiative.
I want to emphasise the role of the first vice-president, Frans Timmermans, formerly the Dutch deputy prime minister and foreign minister, who has been given a very special responsibility for better regulation, agenda planning and relationships with national Parliaments and the European Parliament. I think that he will be a key interlocutor for the United Kingdom. Before he was appointed to the Commission, he was very much aligned with views across the political spectrum in the United Kingdom as to the need for change within the European Union.
Frans Timmermans’s role will be to ensure that nothing gets on to the Commission agenda that has not been thoroughly impact assessed in relation to its regulatory burden and administrative cost. There have already been changes in how the Commission goes about its impact assessments prior to tabling proposals.
You can see Frans Timmermans’s influence in the work programme’s shape. There are 23 items on it compared with an average of 129 items over each year of the Barroso Commission. He is very much part of the Commission’s thinking on discontinuity, which is the decision to withdraw up to 80 proposals, and the determination to pursue the refit process, which is the better regulation programme.
In the allocation of portfolios, the prior tradition was that the Commission representatives of countries with an obvious and particular interest in certain policy areas were not given that portfolio. However, a number of commentators have been surprised that Jonathan Hill, the United Kingdom commissioner, has been given responsibility for financial stability and financial markets.
I will pick out one or two significant elements of the programme, although I stand ready to answer questions on anything. On jobs and growth, the most important issue has been tabled—the investment package. The idea is that Commission funds should be used more smartly than has previously been the case. To date, a lot of Commission funding has taken the form of grants and the co-financing of projects. The investment package would make use of that funding to create a guarantee fund to leverage and crowd in private sector investment for key infrastructure and research projects. The plan is to deliver more than €300 billion of growth-heavy, intensive projects.
Other issues, which will certainly appear in the early months of this year, are clearly of interest to the United Kingdom. The digital single market is one such issue. UK businesses have a key role in the online internal market. They have an in-built language advantage because the most-used language on the internet is English. It is very much in the British economy’s interests that the digital single market should become a greater reality than it is as present.
In that package, we can expect to see reforms to align copyright rules with consumer expectations. It is quite surprising to many consumers that when they travel abroad they are not able to use the internet in the same way as they can do at home. Famously for Brits, the iPlayer does not work once you leave these shores. The correlative is that, aside from copyright, you need a consumer protection regime that works in the digital environment. The consumer protection rules that offer consumers guarantees when they buy across borders are conceived in terms of tangible goods. We need to think about how they would work for intangible services, such as software, music downloads and so on. There are some infrastructure questions there, too.
In the next few weeks, the energy union package will be tabled. That will consist of a number of things. The document will cover the energy union as such, with a focus on energy security and how we will ensure that the European Union retains its autonomy or at least secures as far as possible its autonomy in energy. It will also relate to the completion of the internal market, decarbonisation, better energy efficiency and investment in research and development of alternative energy sources.
Work will press on with the single market. It will not necessarily be legislative, but there might be some selective legislative proposals in relation to business services. Again, that is an area in which the UK has significant interest given our service-based economy.
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Lord Hill will be very prominent in the capital markets union. Having had five years of restructuring and re-regulating the financial markets, how can we ensure that they work to support the real economy? How can we connect the capital that everyone says is available within the European Union with the businesses that need it to grow and to scale up? I think that we will be seeing a consultation document on that around Easter.
Trade is also a British priority and there will be a big push to conclude the discussions and negotiations on the transatlantic trade and investment partnership. You will have seen that last week, in a bid to encourage transparency, the Commission released documents that encapsulate all its negotiating objectives and some of the draft texts that it has submitted to the American side. Later last week, it also released the results of the consultation on investor-state dispute settlement, which has become a contentious issue in the context of TTIP.
Those are just a few highlights. In so far as I can, I will be happy to reply to questions on the work programme or any more general questions that you might have on Commission policy and working methods.