Single market action plan runs into opposition

Date: 23/04/1998

By Tim Jones

BRITISH calls for member states to draft action plans for completing the single market in goods and services have already run into opposition from officials tasked with drawing them up, just a month after the initiative was launched.

Some believe ministers who agreed to the move will change their minds as the size of the job becomes apparent.

"Ministers are not very keen to start drawing up another lot of action plans," said an official involved in negotiations over the employment action plans agreed by member states at last November's jobs summit. "The procedure is very cumbersome and time-consuming for officials, ministers and even heads of state and government."

The EU's employment policy committee (EPC) will meet next Tuesday (28 April) to hold its first discussion on the proposal, agreed at last month's informal gathering of finance ministers in York.

At that meeting, the UK's Gordon Brown reiterated his government's long-held view that the euro will not work efficiently unless key areas of the single market are up and running.

To achieve this, Brown called for Europe's action plans for jobs to be extended into product and services markets, pointing out that the prices of standard consumer items such as compact discs and white goods varied markedly across the Union.

The British government called on member states to coordinate the liberalisation of utilities such as electricity, gas and telecommunications markets, as well as allowing shops to open late and on Sundays.

But some diplomats are now pouring scorn on the proposals. "This is all a bit of a nonsense," said one. "Liberalisation of utilities is something that has already been negotiated under the Treaty of Rome and the Single European Act, and the retail markets are opening in member states just as fast as they feasibly can within the laws and cultures of those countries."

Officials' reluctance to begin work on another round of action plans stems from the time already spent drawing up employment proposals.

Work is shared between finance ministers and their officials who set out their macroeconomic policies and forecasts, and social affairs ministers who publish their programmes for encouraging work through labour market reform.

Most governments have adopted their national plans, which will be finalised for the Cardiff summit in June and published with the annual economic guidelines for adoption at the Vienna summit in December.

"It's a ridiculous procedure," said another diplomat. "Every year, they will discuss the employment guidelines in two Councils of Ministers and among prime ministers, and all that for policies which hardly change from year to year."