Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-04-Speech-3-291"
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"en.20030604.8.3-291"2
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"Madam President, I also wish to thank the rapporteur for her excellent report and very incisive explanatory statement, and welcome the Commissioner's statement this evening.
As we have heard, the open method of coordination is now being used in a wide variety of areas. At times it appears to be addictive, as that list gets longer and longer. There is an obvious need for a common approach and to edge very cautiously towards agreement, for example in the field of immigration and its close links to employment and social inclusion. However, as Members have said, this is certainly not a publicly-owned process and at times it has a very questionable democratic legitimacy, because it can appear to be almost a creeping backdoor assumption of competences by the European Union, and not sufficiently open and in the public domain.
There are interesting imbalances within it. I thoroughly concur with the Commissioner: when the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs has been on delegations to various Member States and met its partner committees or European Affairs Committees in the national parliaments and asked them about their involvement in the national action plans – on employment or social inclusion, for example – it has received blank looks, because they have never heard of it: it is not something in which their government has involved them. One British minister admitted that the trade unions and the Confederation of British Industry in the UK had more influence on the national action plans on employment than the British Parliament, which had never ever discussed them – although that situation is now changing, since the new Committee on Works and Pensions came into being – what an exciting name that is.
We certainly need a framework for the open method of coordination which is clear, is democratically controlled by this Parliament, national parliaments and sub-national parliaments – which in some Member States are those with responsibility for particular issues.
We get that clarity by the process currently being established, so that people have an idea of what to expect and where the points of intervention might then be for relevant NGOs, etc. The Constitution is probably the best place for this information in terms of public access and awareness. Our group is not convinced that an interinstitutional agreement is sufficiently known to and understood by the public.
There are issues about the timescales of consultation which our Committee on Employment and Social Affairs has certainly suffered from. Therefore, we need to build into this method time for real consultation, not just here in Parliament but also for NGOs to exercise their own internal democracy in making their contributions as well."@en1
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