At the meeting of the Committee of Permanent Representatives (Coreper II) on Wednesday 27 February, the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU presented delegations with the procedure for selecting the Member State to become the seat of the future European Labour Authority.
Following an interinstitutional declaration and the adoption in the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs of the Interinstitutional Agreement, it was expected that the Presidency would soon offer a proposal (see EUROPE 12194). The Presidency sent a document, dated 27 February, to the national delegations, and this document is now public.
In the document, it notes that there is no standardised procedure and so the procedure used is based on the common approach annexed to the 2012 Joint Declaration (see EUROPE 12083) on decentralised agencies; it has also drawn upon the transparency of the procedure followed for the relocation of the European Medicines Agency and the European Banking Authority (see EUROPE 11906).
To this end, the Presidency has suggested a series of criteria and first of all notes the willingness of European leaders to prioritise the assignment of agencies to Member States that joined the European Union after 2004; this will constitute criterion number 1.
The second criterion focuses on the Member State's ability to provide premises, complete with sufficient logistics and space to accommodate the 140 expected employees in the long term. Here, the Romanian Presidency points out the need for future premises to have a high-performance telecommunications system and a large-scale data storage capacity.
A third criterion is the accessibility of the seat, namely the quality of air and rail connections in terms of duration and frequency of journeys to all European capitals. In addition, Member States will have to take into account the quality and quantity of available housing.
The existence of a good structure of multilingual schools, a labour market with opportunities for spouses, and a medical and social security service will all be taken into account when examining applications. Finally, and lastly, the Romanian Presidency has emphasised the ability of the host State to ensure the continuity of existing tasks, in particular in respect of EURES, the portal for the European Employment Network.
The document will be submitted to Coreper I for discussion on 6 March, in view of adoption on 13 March. The deadline for submitting bids has been set for May 10 2019.
Potential candidates
Three countries have announced their interest in hosting the future authority: Slovakia, Cyprus and Latvia. Latvia is already home to the office of the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC), which is, however, a small structure employing a dozen staff.
Other Member States are also be interested, including Croatia, Bulgaria and even Romania – three Member States that do not currently have an agency on their territory.
To consult the Presidency document, please visit: https://bit.ly/2EiAUGF. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)