The Employment and Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Informal Council was held on 19 to 21 January in Villach, Austria.

My hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry Gerry Sutcliffe and I attended the working session for the UK.

The Austrian presidency posed two topics for discussion on Friday 20 January. The morning session discussed "Flexicurity—flexibility through security". The afternoon session discussed "The social dimension of the revised Lisbon strategy and the streamlining of social policy processes".

My hon. Friend represented the UK during the morning discussion of "Flexicurity". This session explored new ways of balancing flexibility and social and employment security in Europe.

Member states took examples from their national reform programmes to illustrate the balance they had struck between flexibility and security. For the UK, my hon. Friend suggested that legislative measures were for the national level and the EU could add value by sharing experience and good practice and by promoting better regulation principles.

The Commissioner noted that "Flexicurity" would be addressed in the Commission green paper on "Labour Law", due in the first half of the year.

Overall, Ministers agreed that there is no 'one size fits all model for flexicurity', but disagreed whether legislative action should be taken at the EU level.

The afternoon session asked Ministers to focus on the presidency question about the social dimension of the strategy for growth and jobs and the desired role and outputs for streamlined open method of co-ordination of social policies.

For the UK, I called for practical discussion about real policies rather than theoretical debate of principles. I suggested that the aim should be to integrate social policy making within an overall reform strategy where it could contribute to the delivery of employment aims.

There was a consensus that a visible social dimension to the Lisbon strategy must be maintained and that streamlining open method of co-ordination would help.

The presidency then proposed that Employment Ministers should feed these messages into the spring European Council.