The European Commission has responded to criticism of its controversial expert groups with a new proposal to make the external legislative advisory panels more transparent.

The reform proposals have been sent by the Commission to the EU’s top governance watchdog, who welcomed them Tuesday as “encouraging.”

European Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly said the proposed changes “should help to secure the full range of expertise needed and increase transparency in the process” and help restore public trust in what are known as “expert groups.”

O’Reilly, who investigates administrative complaints against EU institutions, was responding to a letter she received from Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans in which he accepted the need for some reform.

In January, O’Reilly had sent the Commission a detailed list of recommendations for reforms to expert groups — Commission-appointed panels made up of industry associations, corporate representatives and non-government organizations (NGOs).

Expert groups are established at the initial stages of the legislative process and provide often highly technical advice to help the Commission shepherd a bill from conception to implementation. There are hundreds of such groups operating at any given time.

As reported by POLITICO last week, the Commission has decided to adopt a number of the Ombudsman’s recommendations, hoping to add transparency to the way the expert groups are appointed and members’ disclosure of interests.

While the Commission says it uses the panel members’ expertise to help formulate better policy, the system has come under fire in recent months amid claims that business interests are dominating the process, with NGOs claiming they do not have the resources to keep up.

Timmermans’ letter to O’Reilly, dated May 29 but released by the Ombudsman on Tuesday, reveals that the Commission has agreed “in principle” to make the call for applications for every expert group public.

While the Commission’s proposal comes with a number of exceptions, allowing the EU executive to appoint “public authorities” such as union groups and member state representatives without them having to apply, the move effectively opens up a process which had previously been managed by officials behind closed doors.

In another partial victory for the Ombudsman, the Commission has agreed to compel two categories of expert group members (organizations and self-employed individuals appointed to represent a “common interest shared by stakeholders”) to sign up to the EU Transparency Register.

This proposal falls short of the Ombudsman’s call for all expert group members to be required to sign up to the Register, yet it marks an overall strengthening of the links between the existing expert group register and the more detailed Transparency Register, which includes disclosures by anyone seeking official lobbying access to the EU institutions.

The Commission has rejected outright a number of the Ombudsman’s other recommendations, including two which called for the publication “in a timely manner” of all documents and minutes of expert groups meetings.

In his letter to the Ombudsman, Timmermans argued that current arrangements which allow for a delayed publication of documents already “ensure sufficient transparency” and the Commission saw no reason for documents to be uploaded immediately.

As for the minutes of meetings, the Commission argued that the publication of detailed information which reveals the positions of individual group members could compromise the “mutual trust” of members.

“Experts should be able to contribute freely to the work of groups, without any risk of external pressure,” the Commission argues.

The Commission also rejects one of the Ombudsman’s key transparency recommendations that the expert groups be a “balanced representation” of interests and that the Commission outline its definition of “balance” for each group.

“Various factors may determine the membership of an expert group, some of which are not possible to foresee in advance,” the Commission argued, saying the process should be flexible rather than an “exercise in arithmetic.”

In a paragraph likely to anger NGOs, the Commission says that because the selection process will be open to outside applicants and will no longer be a Commission prerogative, it will not be able to vouch for the balance of the groups.

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“[T]he Commission considers that it should not introduce a set of rather rigid definitions of ‘balance’ for each individual group if at the same time it does not have full control over implementing such definition,” Timmermans wrote.

While broadly supportive, O’Reilly’s response to the Commission’s letter points to some concern over a lack of action on a number of key recommendations.

“The Commission still needs to do more to open up the important work of these groups to public scrutiny, in particular by publishing detailed minutes of their work,” O’Reilly said in a statement.

The Ombudsman will now examine the detail of the Commission’s changes, while also pursuing a separate investigation into whether DG AGRI, the Commission’s agriculture department, has properly implemented its self-imposed, legally binding expert group framework.