Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-10-25-Speech-1-069"
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"en.19991025.5.1-069"2
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"Mr President, I am now putting on a different hat to present my report to Parliament. I would very much like to thank my colleagues on the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market for entrusting me with this job a week after I assumed my mandate, and I see a number of colleagues are here in support.
To conclude, Mr President, the final element of this proposal is the committee procedure for maintaining and enhancing the technical nature of this directive, and I referred to this earlier. Parliament, at second reading, proposed a change to the commitology arrangements but, in the light of the Treaty of Amsterdam, I have not recommended that those amendments be supported. I am proposing that the Council and Commission’s proposal for a regulatory committee be endorsed. This issue will come up when we discuss Mr Ferri’s proposal later.
In conclusion, I commend this proposal to the House. It is a sensible, straightforward single market proposal with a number of important features and I hope it will have your unanimous support.
I will try to make this a simple presentation. It is an important piece of single market legislation that establishes uniform technical requirements on a key component of the motor vehicle fuel tank. The proposal achieves four important objectives. The first is that it introduces uniform test standards for plastic fuel tanks; that covers all types of motor vehicles, both cars and commercial vehicles. Some of you may be aware that plastic material is increasingly being used across the motor industry and this uniform test standard will allow designers to concentrate on meeting one single standard, instead of having to divert their efforts to meet a whole range of different standards.
It is often felt that these technical directives may not mean a great deal to consumers, but I must point out from my experience as an engineer in the car industry that if we allow engineers to concentrate on making safer and cleaner vehicles instead of having to meet a whole series of different regulations, that in the end will be very beneficial for customers and users. That is the first objective.
The second is the provision for the technical requirements to be extended in future through a regulatory committee procedure to introduce new standards for fuel tanks containing gaseous fuels. This is an important and forward-looking proposal because gaseous fuels are increasingly being used – and I refer for example to things like liquefied natural gas and petroleum gas – and there is also the prospect of hydrogen becoming a fuel in the future. This is a sensible measure; yet this relatively straightforward technical measure has already taken 18 months to get to this point of second reading. That does not seem to me to be a very sensible use of administrative time. That is the second point.
The third point is that it provides for type-approval to be extended in cases where motor vehicles are fitted, after they have been built, with additional fuel tanks for additional fuels or additional larger tanks. That again is increasingly important for safety.
Those three principal objectives were in the original proposal that came from the Commission to Parliament on first reading and has subsequently resulted in the common position. Parliament, at its first reading, was particularly concerned to add an important extra objective, namely to address the problem of diesel fuel spillage on the highway, which has been posing an increasing safety hazard for road users, particularly riders of motor cycles.
Parliament proposed that this should be addressed. This was rejected by the Commission, but the common position from the Council did contain this measure. This fuel spillage has resulted from inadequately fitted fuel filler caps, and the directive that we are now putting before you, with Parliament’s amendments at second reading designed to tighten up those provisions, addresses this question by requiring motor vehicle fuel tanks to have positive closure mechanisms so that the cap is always securely closed.
We have added recitals explicitly setting this out as an objective of the legislation and tightening those technical requirements to make sure that provision is effective. I am sure that will have the full support of the House.
In presenting that to you, I would like to say that this is not the only solution to the problem and our committee wishes to draw attention to the need for other committees to address this safety hazard through the forthcoming emission directive for heavy commercial vehicles and also through vehicle test standards, to make sure that faulty fuel filler caps are picked up, either in roadside or annual testing of commercial vehicles."@en1
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"Harbour (PPE ),"1
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