Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-02-18-Speech-5-031"
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"en.20000218.3.5-031"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, this morning on French national radio, I heard that liberalisation of the French postal service was now only a matter of days or hours away and that it was irreparable, like the developments with our neighbours in Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany. This concerns us deeply and that is why we requested this debate today.
The Commission is committed to a universal postal service, as the European Parliament has shown on several occasions, the postal service is actually, as some speakers have already mentioned, a key factor in social and territorial cohesion. In this connection I should like to ask one of our Swedish MEPs for an opinion of the study which has been carried out and which shows that in fact in the most remote areas of Sweden the postal service was rather poor in terms of distribution. That is not the sort of postal service that we want.
The economic value of the postal service was recognised by the Treaty of Amsterdam and we consider that it goes far beyond the distribution of mail. It is the service which remains closest to the citizens and which we call a ‘public service’, which makes it possible for everyone resident within European territory to receive the service, and this entitlement must remain an acquired right, an
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The matter of the European Union’s recognition of a high-quality postal service, available to all, remains valid today, and we are increasingly concerned. That is why today we are asking not to have any nasty surprises in the Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism come Monday. Let us point out that Parliament’s positions were clearly defined and that the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance supported them. This resolution of 14 January 1999 required that, prior to undertaking any liberalisation of this key sector, involving 1.7 million employees after all, the Commission should provide impact studies for this liberalisation. Well, we are not convinced that the studies currently available make it possible to implement this liberalisation right now and we are concerned because it is well known that liberalisation without impact studies would cause thousands of job losses, something we certainly do not want.
We value our public service, our universal postal service, because we know, and here too we are acting as representatives of the citizens, that the citizens value this service and the Commission undertook, during Mr Bolkestein’s hearing, to maintain this universal service throughout the European Union. I shall not repeat all the various statements he made at his hearing, I think we all still remember them.
We further maintain that we are waiting for this proper evaluation before any definitive decision, as stipulated in the directive and the revision of the 1997 directive. We shall not accept a date for the liberalisation of all activities in the postal sector until the Commission has offered us a guarantee that the universal service will be integrated into this directive and that the public postal service will be maintained in the States which consider this service essential to the citizen."@en1
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