No progress on EU eighth summertime directive

[Peter Ilieve]

There still doesn't appear to be much action on getting the next (eighth)
EC Directive on summertime arrangements finalised. My contact in the EC
Information Office in Edinburgh produced the following response from
Brussels in mid November:

`Theoretically the proposal should be adopted by the end of the year.
 Nevertheless European Parliament having not adopted its opinion yet,
 we do not know if the Council will be able to adopt a common postion
 by this date. In this case the final adoption might be in early spring.'

She also sent me some newspaper clippings from 29 Nov that said the
European Parliament had `backed plans to have the European Union change
to summertime on the same day to end the disruption caused when some
states are out of phase with the rest'. As we are already in this state
this can only be a reference to the French proposals to opt out of
Summer Time altogether.

I didn't think that the European Parliament had much role in adopting
directives. I was going to point to the Commission's UK web pages at
http://www.cec.org.uk for a page which explained the directive creation
process but it seems to have vanished since I last looked.

I am pretty sure that this directive is controlled by the EU transport
ministers. They had a meeting on 12--13 December. They did not discuss
the issue, or at least if they did it wasn't mentioned in the press
release after the meeting, and they certainly didn't decide anything.
The next (informal) meeting is on 31 Jan 97. The next formal meeting
is on 11 Mar 97. Lots of diary publishers are probably getting worried.

I hope that the EU isn't organising any sort of Millennium event. I
would hope that even they would be embarrassed by missing that deadline. :-)


		Peter Ilieve		peter at aldie.co.uk