Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-23-Speech-1-064"
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"en.20001023.7.1-064"2
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"Mr President, as far as the Group of the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party is concerned, it is crucial that the Europe of the future should also be a social Europe. The political task is therefore to find the best way of achieving that objective. For us in the Group of the European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party, it is important that decisions should be taken as close to the people as possible. This applies especially to labour market and social policy. At the Lisbon Summit this spring, the EU’s Heads of Government adopted a far-sighted vision for the development of a social Europe. Importance was attached to promoting the EU’s position in the knowledge society, as it was to open coordination in pursuit of common objectives, but with flexibility and freedom in the choice of resources. This was established as a leading principle.
In its communication, the Commission has found a framework for the social agenda which I think admirably reflects the spirit of the Lisbon Summit. In our view, open coordination is the correct route to go down if we are to secure a social Europe. There may be a need for legislation in some areas, but we have no need for a host of bureaucratic and constricting rules which bring European cooperation into discredit without producing real results. I also want to express my appreciation of the major effort which Mrs Van Lancker has put into drawing up the report. Her contribution has been very constructive, and if my Group is sceptical about a number of the main elements in her report, that is because we disagree politically, and that is, of course, understandable.
We do not therefore share the report’s predilection for legislation at EU level. There are a number of areas in which we feel that too much detail is gone into. I want to emphasise that, in the EU countries, we have different traditions and different problems in the areas of the labour market and social policy, and the decisions of the Lisbon Summit acknowledge this. The Commission’s proposal strikes a good balance. Technological development and new methods of organisation call, of course, for flexible cooperation in which we concentrate more on objectives and on achieving results and less upon rigid regulation. Open coordination of this kind is not necessarily devoid of obligation. Of course, it must be binding, but it must be constructed from the bottom up and not developed by us specifying a host of rules and quotas centrally. Specifically, open coordination must be open both in the choice of resources and in the way in which everyone concerned is involved. It is therefore important that more public interest be created for open coordination and that the latter should be focused on to a greater degree, whether it be in employment policy or with regard to the issue of social exclusion which we are now addressing and to which open coordination can also be applied. It should not be secretive. The process should be much better known, and it is here that I think Parliament has something to offer. It can make the process more transparent and give it more public focus."@en1
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