This afternoon I spoke, at the invitation of its Chairman, Councillor Gordon Keymer (picture), to the UK delegation of Committee of the Region members. The EESC doesn’t have national delegations in the same sense, though members of the same nationality may meet quite often. In our sister Committee, on the other hand, members work within two dimensions – their political allegiance and their national delegation. I spoke frankly about the challenges ahead but also about the undeniable success of the administrative cooperation agreement between the two Committees. It may take a lot of governance at all levels, but it works and, in my opinion it does so because it is predicated primarily (and somewhat paradoxically) on the complete institutional autonomy of the two advisory bodies, with very different compositions, roles and powers granted to them under the Treaties. Thus, there is no merging of identity but, rather, a full recognition of identity plus the pooling of resources in a mutually satisfactory way (that also happens to save the taxpayer a lot of money and brings with it a lot of synergies and economies of scale).