§ Baroness Crawleyasked Her Majesty's Government:
What was the outcome of the European Union Internal Market Council on 24 September. [HL3483]
139WA
§ The Minister of State, Department of Trade and Industry (Lord Simon of Highbury)I represented the UK at the Internal Market Council in Brussels on 24 September.
The Commission reported to the Council on member states' progress towards implementation of the Single Market Action Plan, which aims to improve the operation of the Single Market. The Commission reported that the number of directives not yet implemented in all member states had been cut from 35.5 per cent. in June 1997 to 15.4 per cent. currently. The Council adopted conclusions which reaffirmed its commitment to the implementation of the action plan, noted the importance of making the Single Market rules more effective and welcomed the Commission's communication, Making the Single Market rules more effective, which set out some ideas for achieving this.
The Council had an initial orientation discussion on a proposal for a directive on the protection of inventions by "utility model". This is a form of intellectual property protection right, which does not currently exist in the UK, for technical innovation, which is aimed, in particular, at ephemeral products with a short shelf life, and for use by small businesses.
The Council also discussed the issue of parallel imports and trade-mark rights, following the European Court of Justice's recent judgment in case 355/96 (Silhouette).
The Commission made presentations of its Green Paper on patent protection within the EU; on its communication on statutory audit in the EU, addressing the supervision of auditing and auditing standards within a Single Market context; and on its progress towards development of an action plan to follow up the report of the Business Environment Simplification Task Force (BEST).