Day overhauls policy department

By Simon Taylor

Date: 27/04/06

The European Commission Secretary-General Catherine Day has overhauled the institution's policy-planning and co-ordination department to focus on President José Manuel Barroso's drive for better regulation.

As part of the changes the new deputy secretary-general Alexander Italianer, Barroso's former deputy chief adviser, will be responsible for better regulation programming and co-ordination. Previously, a single unit was in charge of better regulation in the secretariat-general.

Following the changes, which will come into force from 1 May, there will be a directorate with main responsibility for better regulation while three other directorates will have a stronger focus on the issue.

"Better regulation was spread among three directorates and this was confusing [for other parts of the Commission]. I wanted to bring together all parts of the policymaking cycle from planning to impact assessment," Day told European Voice.

She said that the aim of the reshuffle was to work on "more upstream policy co-ordination" because better regulation was a "mindset" rather than a policy in itself.

Other changes include giving each of the units in Directorate D (now called "better regulation and co-ordination") responsibility for one of the Barroso Commission's strategic objectives: prosperity, solidarity and security.

Asked how she saw the role of the secretariat-general for the Commission, Day, a former environment director-general, said that the department had to deal with "cross-cutting issues" and policies for which the president took direct responsibility, such as the Lisbon Agenda and sustainable development. "They are horizontal in nature so only the secretariat-general can deal with them," she said.

She pointed out that the secretariat-general was responsible for the Argus network which co-ordinates the various rapid reaction systems for dealing with crises. This involves, for example, bringing together the expertise of DG Health and Consumer Safety for food safety crises like avian flu and the external relations instruments for dealing with foreign policy emergencies.

Asked whether with its emphasis on co-ordination the secretariat-general would no longer play the role of developing new policy areas such as foreign policy and justice and home affairs as it had done in the past, Day said "there could be new tasks which are incubated here".

She also rejected suggestions that the fact that the old unit dealing with the EU constitution will disappear meant that the Commission had given up on the text. There would be a unit in Directorate E dealing with the constitution and Plan D (for democracy, dialogue and debate), she said.

Comments by the European Commission's Secretary-General, Catherine Day, who overhauled the institution's policy-planning and co-ordination department to focus on President José Manuel Barroso's drive for better regulation. The changes were to take effect from 1 May 2006.

• Primary Source

European Commission: Secretariat-General http://ec.europa.eu/comm/secretariat_general/index_en.htm

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