The Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (Vince Cable)
I wish to inform the House that, further to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Office oral statement launching the review of the Balance of Competences in July and the written statement on the progress of the review in 23 October 2012, Official Report, column 46WS, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has published its call for evidence for the internal market synoptic report.
The internal market report will be completed by summer 2013 and will cover the overall application and effect of the EU internal market, often also known as the single market. The internal market of the EU is designed to ensure the free movement of goods, services, capital and persons: the so-called four freedoms. It will explore the current state of competence in the internal market as a whole and will assess the strength of arguments for the need for other areas of competence to enable the internal market to operate effectively.
The call for evidence period will last 12 weeks. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills will draw together the evidence and policy analysis into a first draft, which will subsequently go through a process of scrutiny before publication in summer 2013.
The report will focus on the “classic” single market issues: the EU as an area without internal frontiers designed to ensure the free movement of goods, services, capital and persons (the “four freedoms”). It will look at articles 26 to 66 and 114 to 118 of the treaty of the functioning of the European Union (TFEU), using these articles and the jurisprudence emanating from them as a legal base.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills will take a rigorous approach to the collection and analysis of evidence. The call for evidence sets out the scope of the report and includes a series of broad questions on which contributors are asked to focus. Interested parties are invited to provide evidence with regard to political, economic, social and technological factors. The evidence received (subject to the provisions of the Data Protection Act) will be published alongside the final report in summer 2013 and will be available on the new Government website: www.gov.uk.
The Department will pursue an active engagement process, consulting widely across Parliament and its Committees, businesses, the devolved Administrations and civil society in order to obtain evidence to contribute to our analysis of the issues. Our EU partners and the EU institutions will also be invited to contribute evidence to the review. As the review is to be objective and evidence-based, encouraging a wide range of interested parties to contribute will ensure a high yield of valuable information.
The result of the report will be a comprehensive, thorough and detailed analysis of the wider functioning of the internal market. It will determine how the four freedoms operate together to create an effective single market and ultimately what this means for the United Kingdom. It will aid our understanding of the nature of our EU membership; and it will provide a constructive and serious contribution to the wider European debate about modernising, reforming and improving the EU. The report will not produce specific policy recommendations.
I am placing this document and the Call for Evidence in the Libraries of both Houses. They will also be published on the BIS website and accessible through the balance of competences review pages on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website.