View from Europe with Peter Skinner: Strasbourg stress

For those who don’t already know the European Parliament actually sits in two places: Brussels in Belgium, and Strasbourg, which straddles the French and German border.

We MEPs spend three weeks every month debating issues in Brussels’ committee rooms before making the 400km trip South to ‘Stras’ for the final week to vote on key policies.

The four day round trip is, to put it mildly, a massive waste of time and money. Thousands of EU staff plus the hundreds of politicians, national representatives and political staff have to be shifted halfway across a country. Special trains are chartered and a fleet of lorries move all the files and hardware. Most wasteful off all are the carbon copy buildings – another Parliament building sits empty for three weeks just waiting to burst frenetically into life for the space of a few days.