Internal Market Council (Hansard, 26 November 1992)

§ Mr. Needham

I chaired the Internal Market Council on 10 November. The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for National Heritage also attended the Council.

The Council reached agreement on three important items. A resolution was agreed emphasising the importance of ensuring that the single market will work in practice; measures covering trade in cultural goods were 822W agreed with amendments which meet essential UK interests; and a future medicines licensing system which will compete the single market in pharmaceuticals now seems certain to be agreed during our presidency.

The Council adopted our presidency resolution identifying steps which the Commission, member states, and the Council need to take to ensure the effective working of the single market. The resolution stresses the importance of even implementation and enforcement of single market legislation across the Community, and encourages co-operation between administrations to achieve this. Member states have through this resolution, underlined the importance of working to fulfil all single market obligations. The Commission will publish annual reports on the working of the single market.

Political agreement was reached on the directive, and the regulation on cultural objects. We won important concessions on three issues of immediate concern to the Government—a definition of "public collections", a legal base on which to license goods coming from outside the Community after 1 January 1993, and a practical solution to the requirement to license archaeological items of limited importance, regardless of monetary value. A satisfactory resolution of each of these was agreed for inclusion in the texts of the proposals. In addition, the burden of proof in Article 10 of the directive is now clearly stated as being governed by the legislation of the requested Member State".

Broad political agreement was achieved, subject only to waiting reserves, on future medicines licensing systems. Final agreement on the proposed regulation and three directives is now expected to be reached this year.

Four intellectual property items were taken by the Council. Discussion on the proposed Community trade marks regulation focused particularly on the language regime for the Community Trade Marks Office operations. No final agreement was reached, but we still hope that decisions can be reached on the proposal at the December Council. This Council had a short orientation debate on the Commission's draft directive on harmonisation of the duration of copyright and we hope that decisions can be reached on the draft at the December Council. The Council also noted, and remitted for further work, a Commission paper identifying a series of principles intended to ensure that intellectual property rights are not infringed by the work of international standardisation bodies. Finally, the Commission expressed its intention to bring forward proposals for a blank tape levy.

A brief discussion of the European company statute proposal achieved progress on some technical points, but confirmed that substantial problems still remain. There was no discussion of the linked worker participation directive.

Finally, the Council agreed final adoption of the third life assurance, and vehicle noise type approval directives.