The Task Force on subsidiarity and proportionality (also known as “doing less, more efficiently”) presented its 50-page report to the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, on Tuesday 10 January. Nine recommendations are made therein, including the need to revise the European treaties in order to lengthen the time allowed for national parliaments to respond to a legislative proposal, the famous “yellow card”.
The first vice-president of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, said “this is just a beginning and not an end”. He hailed the content of the report in which he played a part, developing notions of “active subsidiarity” and ensuring that “this new way of working” will revolutionise legislative and decision-making work as part of multi-level governance, to bring the EU and citizens closer. The president of the Committee of the Regions, Karl-Heinz Lambertz, was swift to back this, as was Kristian Vigenin of Bulgaria, and also members of the Task Force: the former welcoming the fact that local and regional authorities are taken more into account, and the latter that national parliaments are taken more into account.
On this point, the nine members of the Task Force propose review of the European treaties, especially Protocol No2, in order to increase from 8 to 12 weeks the time allowed to national and regional parliaments to respond to a European Commission initiative in the event, in particular, of failure to comply with the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality.
Timmermans, however, was not in favour of this proposal during the debates. He took the view that the national and regional parliaments often and regularly misuse this mechanism (see EUROPE 12029). Pending possible review, the authors of the report suggest that the Commission should have flexible reading of the treaties on the question and also take into account the vacation periods. The Commission, for its part, must respond to national parliaments within 8 weeks.
The other recommendations include the strengthening of impact assessment studies on legislative proposals. As Timmermans pointed out, for the time being only a complete impact study is conducted by the European Commission upstream of the initiative, but such a study seems to be lacking on the legislative act once it is amended by co-legislators. “The citizens deserve to know the impact of the final product”, he said. The report draftees thus suggest that the territorial impact should be taken systematically into account.
They also suggest the creation of a common method, an “assessment grid” that would be used by all European bodies and institutions, as well as national and regional parliaments to sound out whether the new acts, like those already existing, fully comply with the principles of subsidiarity, proportionality and the legal bases used. The European Commission and the member states are invited to engage local and regional authorities more actively in the legislative process, from the time when the legislative text is conceived.
Trialogue
The Committee of the Regions was heard on another point: one of the recommendations proposes that co-legislators invite representatives of local and regional authorities during their interinstitutional meetings “when this is appropriate”.
The Austrian presidency will be organising a conference on the issue of subsidiarity and proportionality this autumn. Furthermore, a summit of towns and regions will be held on the sidelines of the Sibiu summit end March 2019.
The Task Force report is available at: https://bit.ly/2Ja19iU . (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)