Outcome of the closing meeting of the Council Working Party on Statistics

On 4 December 2024, the final meeting of the Council Working Party on Statistics took place during the Hungarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, chaired by Ms Eszter Nagy.

The aim of the meeting was to discuss the progress made so far and the way forward on the Labour Market Statistics for Businesses (LMB) regulation. Member states had the chance to reflect on the compromise text previously agreed at the opening political trilogue on 21 November 2024 and the following three technical meetings.

The discussion was structured around three set of topics. First, Ms Eszter Nagy summarised the politically mandated agreements. The agreements reached fully represented the interests of the Council mandate in the following areas: new data requirements for sensitive data, collective pay agreements and minimum wage monitoring, quality of data sources, social enterprises. In the second group of topics, Ms Eszter Nagy presented a compromise proposal on the combination of the topics of safeguards and ad-hoc data requirements which were only partially covered in the first trilogue. The third group included landing zones on the following topics: back data, derogations, feasibility studies, financing, and processing of personal data, which were discussed in advance during the technical meetings without a political mandate.

In the last item, Ms Eszter Nagy gave a brief summary of the work carried out in the working group on the renewal of tourism statistics.

The presidency team would like to thank all delegates for their participation and contributions and looks forward to receiving written comments until 10 December.