Parliament committees face shake-up

Date: 15/04/1999

By Gareth Harding

THE number of specialist committees in the European Parliament will be cut after June's Euro-poll, for the first time since direct elections to the Strasbourg-based assembly began 20 years ago.

Although the changes are not as radical as originally planned, they amount to a significant shake-up in the way MEPs carry out their day-to-day business.

The changes are being introduced to coincide with the first meeting of the new Parliament in July, with the number of committees tasked with scrutinising European Commission proposals reduced from 20 to 17 and three subcommittees abolished altogether. However, this reduction has been largely achieved by reshuffling responsibilities rather than abolishing them.

Under the shake-up, the Parliament's committee on external economic relations is being merged with its energy counterpart. It will also take over responsibility for industrial policy from the previously all-powerful economic and monetary affairs committee (EMAC).

In turn, EMAC will become more of a European Central Bank-tracking committee. Regional and transport policy will be dealt with under the same umbrella, the institutional and rules committees will be merged, and the legal affairs committee will lose responsibility for citizens' rights to its civil liberties counterpart.

Most of the other committees will retain their current format, prompting one Parliament official to comment that "the basic ingredients are the same; they have just been cooked up in different ways".

The changes agreed by the Parlia- ment's most senior figures are certainly a far cry from the revolutionary reforms proposed by UK Socialist MEP Ken Collins in October.

Collins, the Parliament's longest-serving committee head and chairman of the 20 committee chiefs, had originally suggested slashing the number of committees to 12 or 14. Under his plan, the women's and petitions committees would have been scrapped, the budgets and budgetary control groups merged, fisheries teamed up with agriculture and the energy committee swallowed by its environment counterpart.

But after fierce lobbying from the committees concerned, none of these changes now appear likely.

Collins accused group leaders of "giving in to specialist lobbies" when they decided on the new committee structure last week. Parliament officials also expressed dismay that group leaders had not been bolder.

However, parliamentarians are confident that the new structure will ensure a more even share-out of the legislative workload and better reflect the assembly's new powers under the Amsterdam Treaty.

They also hope it will stem the costly growth in the number of committees.

MEPs are set to vote on the changes today (15 April), but no last-minute hitches are expected after leaders stitched together a compromise late last week.