Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-05-16-Speech-2-155"
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"en.20000516.7.2-155"2
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"Mr President, I would also like to add my thanks to Mrs Smet in particular for doing an excellent job of work on the working time directive and also, of course, to Mr Rocard and to you, yourself. I would agree with Philip Bushill-Matthews as well. I think the strength of having all-party support throughout the UK on our delegation was very, very useful.
I would like to talk specifically about junior doctors. I am very pleased that they are going to be brought in line with the working time directive. There are 270 000 junior doctors across the EU who will be affected by this. 50.1% in my constituency work over 72 hours a week as do 10 000 in the UK as a whole. You can see from those figures that it is extremely important that all Member States actually meet those objectives and I mean the nine-year objective. The present situation is not good for patients or doctors alike – they have our life in their hands. We would not want to be treated by a drunken doctor and I do not believe that we should be treated by an over-tired doctor. Evidence proves that somebody who is impaired by tiredness is impaired in the same way as drunkenness. The British Medical Association was saying that 15% of junior doctors were leaving the profession citing stress, overwork and length of hours. A lot of those were going to Australia and New Zealand where the working practices were better. We have to stop that drain.
The nine-year timetable, of course, is an improvement on what the Council of Ministers wanted. It is made up of four years' implementation and five years to bring down the working time from 58 to 48 hours. It is far better than what the Council wanted which was the 13-year period. I, of course, would have preferred a shorter time. As I have said before, our life is in their hands and it is important that we get this right.
The UK Government, of course, was part of the problem. They maintain that they cannot achieve the reduction in this timescale. I believe that they are wrong and that is why we have the extension for two years and also the extension after that for one year. But as everyone else has said, it has to be in exceptional circumstances. There must be rigorous notification and justification procedures and I hope that the British Government, and other Member State governments who feel that they can delay further by seeking two years and then another will feel so embarrassed that they will not seek to do so and meet the goal in nine years. It is not twelve years – it is nine years and we must state that very, very clearly. It is long enough – I would have liked it to have been shorter, but let us hope the governments, and the British Government in particular, adhere to that."@en1
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