Back to work it is and my answer to the question 'how was your holiday?' is 'not long enough!'. But the summer seems a distant memory as we take the longish train journey to Strasbourg, where on arrival I find they have been doing things in our offices such as installing motion sensors on the lights in the little entrance lobby, a similar arrangement in the office itself and a new air conditioning control. The latter did not seem to be working so I used a soviet style solution to overheated rooms, I opened the window. A nice touch was the flower left for me by the City of Strasbourg in my new capacity as vice-president.

Monday evening sees me make a token appearance at the trialogue meeting for RSPP (Radio Spectrum Policy Programme) in my capacity as shadow rapporteur for our group. Token because brief because I have to go on to the Bureau of the Parliament meeting. That lasted from 6.30pm to 10.15pm. I felt I ought to sit out the whole thing unlike my former Conservative colleague who is now a Lib Dem and a vice-president.

Tuesday morning I meet with representatives of Unilever who are very concerned about a possible effect of the revision and updating of the SEVESO Directive. This Directive followed a major explosion at a chemical plant in northern Italy years ago and it put in place a regulatory regime aimed at preventing chemical explosions. They are worried that the scope of the Directive might be extended so as to include the storage of risk chemicals which are in consumer sized containers or bottles but kept in bulk. The point being that the risk of anything happening is minimised by the dilution into many bottles of, for example, bleach.

After that I have a shadows meeting for my report on ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency). The final version of the text has gone for translation but we circulated the English version to be going on with. Actually, the report is quite radical and in effect proposes a new agency with a new name, new management structures, enlarged list of objectives and a new seat or location. This will make people in Greece unhappy but if this agency is to function more efficiently and more effectively, they have to cut down the time and cost spent on travel and anyway the Greeks have other, more urgent worries to tackle.

In the afternoon in our UK delegation of Conservative MEPs meeting, we have a long discussion about the 
 

2012 budget of the EU. Our budget ace, James Elles MEP, has done sterling work in identifying many under-spent budget lines and many candidates for cuts while diverting some of the money saved into science, research and innovation i.e. jobs. We can all come up with the odd horror story of waste or worse but persuading our colleagues, not to mention officialdom, of the merits of freezing the budget is a challenge.

Wednesday morning I see a representative from Austria Telekom about the Data Roaming Directive. They, as a small operator relying on roaming for up to 20% of revenues, have an interest in the outcome. But instead of the old attempts to protect their operation that I would normally expect, they are keen for the proposal on unbundling to succeed. Unbundling in this context means separating roaming from the other telecom services so consumers could have one contract with their home mobile supplier and the possibility of another with a separate provider for roaming i.e. for use in other parts of the EU. They are itching to go in and compete in southern Germany. Sounds good to me.

Later I see representatives from Union Française de l'électricité, the trade organisation for electricity in France. They want to talk about the Energy Efficiency Directive and the danger that it might promote generating technologies or conservation technologies which are wildly expensive. They showed me a draft bar chart showing the cost of a whole range of technologies from nuclear to solar photo voltaic and from double glazing to cavity wall insulation. Most of them are above the current cost of electricity in France. I can't wait to see the final version. Chris Huhne beware!

Thursday morning I have my second stint in the chair of a plenary session in the hemicycle. The topic was about famine in East Africa. Later, during votes we had a number of MEPs, including the German MEP leader of the Socialists, complaining that their voting machine was flashing up the green or red light, to show which way we vote, but before they had voted. Sinister work afoot? Not a bit of it, just new technology which remembers the last finger stroke before the electronic vote. Easy when you know how, just like my new printer/fax/scanner in my office. I needed expert help to get that working though.