The European Parliament
Corbett was a member of the Parliament's Constitutional Affairs committee and the spokesman for the Labour Party, as well as the whole of the wider Group of the Party of European Socialists, on European constitutional affairs. In 2006, he was elected Deputy Leader of the European Parliamentary Labour Party, which he remained until the end of his period as an MEP, declining (to some surprise) to challenge for the leadership when Gary Titley stood down in 2008.
In 2003 his proposals to re-write the European Parliament's Rules of Procedure were largely accepted. In 2004–05, he was the co-rapporteur (with Iñigo Méndez de Vigo) for Parliament on the Treaty establishing a constitution for Europe. This report formed the basis of Parliament's official position on the treaty, which he was then invited to present to several national parliaments.
In 2005, he was appointed as Parliament's negotiator (along with Joseph Daul MEP) to broker a new system of parliamentary scrutiny over Commission implementing measures (under the previously much-criticised "comitology" procedure), which led to an agreement among the Council of ministers, the Commission and the Parliament in 2006 giving Parliament the right to veto quasi-legislative implementing measures. This represented a major increase in Parliament's powers over the Commission.
In 2007–08, he was again co-rapporteur with Iñigo Méndez de Vigo for Parliament on the Treaty of Lisbon, which replaced the constitutional treaty after two member states declined to ratify it, and was again rapporteur for a new overhaul of Parliament's procedures in 2009.
Throughout his career, Richard Corbett has been a strong advocate of EU reform and has a particular interest in improving democratic accountability by continuing to increase the European Parliament's power within the EU institutional system. Professor Juliet Lodge of Leeds University has named Corbett as one of five "movers and shakers" in the European Parliament who "have brought the European Parliament from being a mere talking shop to a legislature with genuine power".
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