Europe's autonomous agencies

What if Europe could work better without the commission, or less of it? What if there could be a network of pan-European institutions serving the European citizen and the member states that can do what the commission can't do, or do it better? What if there could be a Europe that was more efficient, cheaper, closer to the citizen and the member state? What if there were institutions that gave a better, higher quality of information for policy-makers - and better information to the citizens - than currently provided by the civil servants working for the commission?
These are some of the questions that could be solved by the growth of a new type of European institution, the autonomous agency, usually based outside Brussels. Starting in 1994, their numbers have now grown to 32, with policy areas covering European air craft safety certification certification and European food safety, and including several foreign policy and security areas. Their cost and staff numbers are relatively low - 1 billion euros a year, more than 3,000 staff - compared to national administrations, acording to Jacqueline McGlade, the coordintaor of the agencies and the head of one, the European Environment Agency, in her own right.
At their best, as McGlade and other agency heads demonstrated at a recent Friends of Europe debate, the agencies provide a powerful tool for making Europe more efficient.
One example is the European Medicines Agency, which provides a single authorisation point for the 50 medicines brought onto the European market each year, standardising medicines across Europe, reducing costs for drugs firms and bringing medicine to the patient more quickly. The agency is based in London, since 1995, is headed by Swede Thomas Lonngren, and operates in parallel with the long extant national medcines agancies. However, if drug makers want to authorise a drug in more than one country, and chooses the national authorisation route, it must repeat the same process 27 times - often with the same dossier. It is considerably more expensive, delays drugs to market Europe-wide, gives customers with non existent or poorly qualified medicines agencies a raw deal (since they might offer a less qualified outcome)and might offer customers a bewildering variety of almost similar drugs as they travel across the continent. The EMA is arguably one EU success story.
But not all the indpendent agencies under McGlade's wing are necessarily doing a good job. For a start, as MEP John Bowis said, there are too many of them. The reason being that they have become they latest focal point in the everlasting game of national prestige. "Every country just has to have one, or if they are a big country, has to have more than one." The new member states have become just as adept at playing the game. As Bowis somewhat sourly said, one new member state was less interetsed in his mental health report than in getting a mental health agency - which had never been proposed.:
The result, often, means that new, dubious agencies with diffuse or rather pointless functions come into being, perhaps of a politically correct nature. As Bowis put it; "The European parliament finds it particularly different to say no to gender or racism issues." The full list of agencies includes the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and drugs addiction. The European Training Foundation. The European Foundation for improvement in living conditions. And of course the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia..
Even those that are doing a good job, however, face three challenges. The public's disconnect with political europe is well known. Turn-out in the 2004 European elections was 45%, a far lower figure than in national elections. And it has nearly always been so: citizens in numerous polls attest to their sense of distance from the European project, culminating in the rejection of the European constitution in 2005 by the Dutch and French electorates. This sentiment is echoed by a similar sentiment of hostility by the administrations of some member states.
Bu whle it is good perhaps that t the agencies' ostensible function to be ambassadors to the rest of the EU is probably overstated, since few have heard of the agencies even in their home city. This is the lesser problem, since the European parliament itself cannot boat of high name recognitiion. A moer important problem might be they compete with ational bureacraciesa adn the commission itself, hampering their efficiency and ultimately leading to job losses.
As someone in the aerospace industry put it: "The European Aviation safety agency is replacing 27 'cops' with one 'cop' and the national agencies are not happy because this will lead to their ultimate demise." As John Bowis said: "People ask the European parliament all the time for European authorities, for instance a single pricing authority for the pharmaceutical industry - and that might make life easier for a lot of us -- but on the other hand you have civil servants in the member states who might feel threatened. If they sit on the boards, there will be a real mismatch."
A third problem is that, while the agencies' strength is their indepedence both fom goverments and the commission, theer still has to be ultimate political accountability if they are not to become laws uunto themselves - as the commission itself is often accused of being, but with less oversight still.
The agency concept does work, and could work better still, if some agencies had sunset preview clauses, more conulation regards new agencies were establisehed, if more MEPS with specialist expertise and fewer national agency representatives sat on the overseeing boards.
Their structural advantages of the better ones are many: in management flexibility (they can take people on on contracts on demand), their partial industry rather than taxpayer funding, their lack of burueacracy and the loyalty and elan they inspire in their small staffs, and yes, their locations abroad. Who knows? A new agency system could pose questions on whether the size, structure and Brussels base of the present commission ought to be maintained