Ministers bid to spice up rigid Ecofin meetings

By Stewart Fleming

Date: 16/03/06

EU finance ministers are to discuss possible reforms to the working procedures of their Ecofin Council in an attempt to inject life into the sterile meetings.

At their informal gathering in Vienna next month, the finance ministers will discuss how to give more purpose to the monthly meetings, which have been overshadowed by the more intimate and less rigid meetings of eurozone finance ministers that precede them.

Gordon Brown, the UK's finance minister, has not attended an Ecofin meeting since the UK presidency ended.

"The main reason for considering reform is to try to make the Ecofin Council meetings more attractive; if nothing is done ministers will stop attending and start just sending top officials," said a senior EU finance ministry official who regularly attends the meetings.

"Ecofin Councils have already turned into a session in which agreements hammered out by officials earlier are just rubber-stamped," said another participant.

A spokesman for the Austrian presidency said: "The working methods of the Ecofin Council will be discussed at lunch at the informal Ecofin Council meeting." The aim, he said, was to make Ecofin meetings "more rapid and focused".

A spokesman for Dutch Finance Minister Gerrit Zalm said: "We need to make the meetings more interesting."

Germany is also said to be pressing for changes.

Among the possible reforms to be discussed on 7 April are proposals to set aside half an hour for ministers to have a free-ranging discussion on economic policy issues, to shorten time-consuming deliberations on individual countries' convergence and stability pact programmes by focusing debate only on the more interesting cases and to widen the range of issues which are debated to include, for example, trade policy questions, budget positions and, for those outside the eurozone, currency values.

Participants said that in recent months more strenuous efforts had been made to cut down the number of people attending the meeting, including issuing special passes to participants, changing the locks on doors so that they can only be opened from the inside and removing chairs from the meeting room.

These manoeuvres have cut down the numbers attending the Ecofin from close to 200 to nearer 150.

But there is still very little real debate among the ministers themselves. The three-hour meetings are largely taken up with formal statements of the positions which governments have adopted on the issues on the agenda, said one participant.

By contrast, meetings of the eurozone finance ministers, the Eurogroup, are limited in size. No more than 35 ministers and senior officials from the EU12 are allowed into the room where the meetings take place. The president of the European Central Bank and the economic and monetary affairs commissioner also participate.

According to officials, in this more intimate atmosphere, a serious debate, with plenty of cut and thrust, takes place among people who have come to know each other well and share similar concerns. What makes things doubly frustrating for Eurogroup outsiders is that the full Ecofin gets at best a cursory report about what went on at the Eurogroup the night before, over lunch the following day.

The fact that Eurogroup meetings are seen to be so effective and to host serious debates on economic policy issues means that countries, particularly smaller countries, which are not members of the eurozone, feel excluded. "Some of the new member states feel like second class citizens," said one non-eurozone official.

At their informal meeting in Vienna on 7 April 2006 EU Finance ministers were to discuss possible reforms to the working procedures of their Ecofin Council in an attempt to inject life into the sterile meetings.