A growing challenge facing the Committee structure of the European Parliament is the increased number of issues that are cross-cutting. The REACH proposals on chemicals, for instance, were a matter of considerable interest to the Committees on the Environment and on the Internal Market & Consumer Protection and, indeed, others.
How does Parliament deal with such subjects? Traditionally, one committee is made the lead committee and other committees may be asked to give an opinion to that committee. However, the final decision on what to submit to the Parliament as a whole, lies entirely in the hands of the lead committee which may or may not take account of the opinions given by the other committees. Five years ago, a new rule was added to the Rules of Procedure when Parliament undertook a general review of the latter (Corbett report 2003). This provided for "enhanced co-operation" among committees where a question "falls almost equally within the competence of two committees or when different parts of the question fall under the competence of two different committees". This provided for close co-ordination and required the lead committee to accept without a vote amendments from the committee asked for an opinion when they concern matters which fall under the responsibility of the latter, and which do not contradict other elements of the report.
Opinion-giving committees have remained dissatisfied however. This is mainly because the final decision on whether a matter "falls under the competence of a committee asked for an opinion" lies with the chairman of the lead committee, and the lead committee inevitably remains in a stronger position in determining what is placed before the Parliament as a whole.
This led to some to suggest that opinion-giving committees should be able to table amendments directly in plenary when they are dissatisfied with the report of the lead committee. However, this idea was firmly rejected by the Constitutional Affairs committee (responsible for Parliament's Rules of Procedure), which was rightly wary of increasing further the number of amendments faced by Parliament in plenary. Its Rapporteur argued that, as all political groups have the right to table amendments in plenary, dissatisfied members of an opinion-giving committees had only to convince a group to table amendments in plenary. If no single group were willing to table such amendments, they in any case had little chance of being adopted.
Instead, the Constitutional Affairs committee proposed a modest revision of Rule 47 (which would be renamed "Procedure with associated committees"). This more modest change would require the chairmen and Rapporteurs of the committees concerned to meet and jointly identify areas of the text falling within their exclusive or joint competences. The chair of the committee responsible would have to take account of any such agreement when ruling on the final responsibility for different parts of the text. The rule would also allow the parties to agree, if they so wish, on more precise arrangements for their co-operation, which opens the door to possibilities such as a joint working group. The rule change also would guarantee that associated committees are represented in any parliament delegation in a conciliation procedure.