Mr. Ivailo Kalfin:

I thank the Deputy for the questions. On how we work with governments during the Presidency, usually during the Presidency every government will have something in the pipeline, whether legislation or something like that. Each Presidency also has freedom in different areas to choose topics they would like to highlight. Usually, this happens at the informal Council meetings.

We are mostly working with the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council. The European abbreviation is EPSCO. The Presidency decides what the priority will be for the formal meeting and what it would like the ministers to discuss. The other possibility for the Presidency is that it will usually organise a ministerial-level conference on some particular topic, inviting the others to participate. How do we participate in that? Usually, for the informal EPSCO meetings we prepare a brief and very often, we are invited to kickstart the discussion, presenting that brief. There is then a discussion between the ministers, social partners from Europe, etc. The conference is more or less the same. Again, we prepare the background papers and if needed, we are ready to present them in order to set the scene. As an example of topics, the current Danish Presidency is interested in cross-border mobility and in the general mobility of people. What we do is prepare, present, and feed the discussion. The Polish Presidency was focused on ageing workers.