The European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions have engaged in a unique form of interinstitutional cooperation, pooling significant quantities of their human and other resources in a series of joint services (translation, IT, logistics) in order to achieve synergies and economies of scale. By so doing, they not only save the taxpayer a considerable amount of money but through careful planning enhance the overall efficiency of their resources. Such a unique exercise between two autonomous institutions requires a set of joint governance mechanisms and this afternoon the political-level mechanism, the Political Monitoring Group, met. The PMG is jointly chaired but the Committees take it in turns to host the meetings, so the Chair today was the EESC’s Waltraud Klasnic (Employers’ Group, Austria). On the agenda were such items as activity and performance indicators, priorities and work programmes and the 2013 budget. Though the meeting was long and detailed, all went well.