Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-05-03-Speech-3-107"
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"en.20000503.6.3-107"2
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"Mr President, first of all I would like to thank our colleague, Dirk Sterckx, who has put an enormous amount of work into a report which is extremely important as it is a policy document that will lead to a great deal of further discussion. Personally, I fully agree with the committee’s report, in that there is a need to open up the European skies, and with the need to unify them, since, although roads have been unified, the railways, the sea and the skies are not yet in that position. It is extremely important that we move in this direction, but this should not be limited to the creation of a new market.
Personally, for several reasons, I feel that the tone of the report is excessively smug with regard to the liberalisation that has already taken place. Firstly, the competition with which we are familiar has created two air spaces: that of the major routes on which we see congestion, delays, queues and broadly inadequate consumer protection laws, although prices have, of course, fallen. And then there is the air space of the smaller routes, which is expensive and which has largely been overlooked by the market. I live in Bordeaux, but it is more expensive for me to fly from there to Lisbon than to fly to New York via Paris, and if I wish to fly to any other French city, I have to change aeroplanes at an airport in Paris. I feel that these effects of liberalisation should not be ignored.
Secondly, I think that it is important to point out, as certain honourable Members have during this debate, that safety is not something that should be haggled over, and that European harmonisation of air traffic control must include this aspect of safety and it must not be handed over wholesale to businessmen. This is extremely important. I am one of those people who think that a European system of specifications should be introduced, some kind of agency, of course, but which would not necessarily involve privatisation and competition between the various air traffic control centres that exist at the moment.
Lastly, my third reason is that the Union’s regional policy, which accounts for the Union’s second largest budget, is meaningless without an effective planning policy. Airports are highly decisive factors in influencing the location of businesses, senior officials, management, and therefore jobs to an area. I fail to see why subsidies should be banned both for routes and for infrastructures, when certain remote regions do not have access to airports. I feel that this aspect of regional planning should be taken into account."@en1
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