‘Obsolete’ European Parliament committee structure set for shake-up

BRUSSELS — The European Parliament is planning to modernize the structure of its committees to keep pace with legislation emanating from the EU executive.

Under the tentative plans, outlined in a September 13 “reflection paper,” the number of full committees would be slashed from 20 to 15, and include new dedicated panels on enlarging the EU, digital policies, health and defense.

The paper was prepared by civil servants working for the Parliament and seen by POLITICO.

“The world has changed, everything has changed, so has the way the Commission [presents] legislation with very huge and cross-cutting proposals and our structure cannot cope any more,” European Parliament Secretary-General Alessandro Chiocchetti told MEPs last month. “Our structures are obsolete.”

One of the motivations behind the proposal is to neutralize time-consuming infighting between the MEPs chairing the committees over who takes charge of different legislative files that cross into their terrain.

“The complexity of legislation has increased and therefore sometimes it’s not totally clear which committee is responsible for what, and therefore it makes sense to improve the situation as it is,” said Bernd Lange, a German Social Democrat MEP who chairs the conference of committee chairs.

“Partly as a consequence of how the European Commission is organised, the number of conflicts of competence … has dramatically increased in the last 15 years,” the reflection paper, first seen by Euractiv, states.

In a bid to avoid these disputes, the Parliament should form 15 new full committees covering a mishmash of policy areas, the paper suggests. A new mega-committee on digital policies “would eliminate the biggest source of conflicts of competence.”

The subcommittee on security and defense would become a fully fledged panel that would also take charge of the arms industry and combating foreign interference, thus eliminating more sources of tension between senior MEPs.

The document also suggests merging climate and energy into a single committee, merging international trade and development into a single entity, and putting the expansion of the EU front and center in a new committee on international affairs and enlargement.

However, the paper says that some of its ideas — such as mixing health and food safety in a brand new panel — would likely lead to new infighting.

Anna Cavazzini, a German Green MEP who chairs the internal market committee, said though she’s in favor of reform in general she did not think the mooted restructure would solve the conflicts of competence.

“I think it’s all probably to make it all look a little bit sexier,” she said.

Cavazzini also warned that this could be an attempt to weaken more progressive committees like the ones on the environment and civil liberties that deals with migration. “Some of the proposals are politically motivated to my mind,” she said.

Fellow German Green MEP Daniel Freund has criticized a suggestion to mix the budgetary and budgetary scrutiny committees, saying this would mean less time for scrutinizing the way the EU spends its money.

The document is “food for thought for the political groups to kick off the discussions within the groups,” said a European Parliament official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Parliament 2024

The Parliament 2024 Working Group of MEPs and senior civil servants chaired by Parliament President Roberta Metsola has met 18 times since January to cook up internal reforms that should be in place by the time the next assembly of MEPs take their seats after the June 2024 elections.

“The big reform requires us having gone into a very in-depth debate as to where do we see Parliament in 2024, how do we become more effective, how do we become more efficient, how do we become more modern?” she told POLITICO in a recent exclusive interview.

She said that the EU Parliament has taken inspiration from national parliaments in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., and will now establish its committees before vetting the nominees to be the next EU commissioners, rather than after.

“In all other parliaments when a government is elected the committees are set and that is what we want to do,” Metsola said.

The document also proposes axing the four subcommittees and replacing them with “special committees,” on topics like human rights, gender equality and constitutional affairs.

Another document dated September 8, also seen by POLITICO, suggests scaling back the practice of committees sending “opinions” to leading committees and also suggests the creation of ad-hoc committees to handle legislation that would naturally fall into the remit of three or more committees.

Lange, who is part of the working group on parliamentary reforms, said these kinds of structures would be able to handle legislation on topics like artificial intelligence or corporate due diligence in supply chains.

He also wants to put an end to the “totally senseless” squabbling between committees for exclusive competence over a paragraph or even a single sentence of a legislative text.

“Therefore we want to have more easier possibilities to have joint committees on specific files,” he said.

All the reforms from the working group need to be considered by the heads of the Parliament’s seven political groups, before being wrapped up in April next year.