Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-03-13-Speech-2-340"
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"en.20010313.19.2-340"2
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"Mr President, I report to the House at the end of a long and not wholly satisfactory saga. The European Parliament's delegation wanted to see this recommendation on environmental inspection cast in the form of a directive. We were very forceful about that and we tried to persuade the Commission to sympathise with us. It did not. We tried to persuade the Council of Ministers to agree with us and it did not. This is very sad but it is a situation which we have unfortunately had to live with because, if we had not agreed to the texts which we now have in front of us, we probably would not even have had a recommendation.
Many of my colleagues – I hope all my colleagues – feel that we are dealing with a very unsatisfactory situation. In effect, we are constantly adding to the burden of European Union legislation on the environment, with the very good intention of improving our environment, but the Member States are signing up to legislation which they are in many cases unable to put in place in the form in which they adopt it. They may in the end be able to reach the standards that they agree to, but we have to ask how long this will take. In some instances the Commission is still very much in the dark about whether Member States are really complying with legislation because the Member States are very slow in telling the Commission about the state of implementation in the reports that they are obliged to send to Brussels.
So, if you want to put it at its most dramatic, the European Parliament finds itself complicit in a deceit on the people of Europe. We are telling them that we have very forward-looking environmental legislation but in instances such as the nitrates directive and the urban waste water directive we find that in fact Member States are taking much longer than required to comply with legislation. Indeed the case of the fine that the Greek Government is still paying to Brussels for failing to comply with a waste directive shows that it can be a quarter of a century before a Member State is even taken to court for failing to comply with legislation effectively adopted in the 1970s.
Parliament felt that the way to deal with this was to take what was originally a recommendation on environmental inspections and use it as a way of enforcing common standards throughout the Member States by upgrading it to a directive which Member States would, we had hoped, want to take more notice of. As I say, the Member States were against this. It was rather enlightening to go to the meeting of the Conciliation Committee where it was quite clear that some Member State delegations were not interested in the subject at all, let alone in that particular meeting that we went to that night. This is a situation in which only a minority of Member States are really interested in compliance. For most it comes very low down on their list of priorities.
So I am afraid we have settled in a sense for second best. We still have hopes that we will be able to return to this issue. Indeed we intend doing so because, although we have a recommendation, within it we have a revision clause which will mean that the Commission comes back to Parliament within the lifetime of this Parliament – I think I am right in saying in 2003 – in order that we can try to assess how the Member States are performing in relation to this particular recommendation.
That would mean that Mr Davies and I, if we are spared and have managed to survive foot-and-mouth, BSE and everything else that seems to be afflicting the United Kingdom, will be able to make sure that we move to a directive if we feel that the recommendation is getting us nowhere. We hope that we will have the support of the Commission in making that reassessment in 2003 a really serious exercise. I am sure that Mrs Wallström, who is very keen on getting better compliance, will want to support us in that.
We also managed to get into the recommendation the idea that the reports on inspection must be publicly available within two months of their completion and submission to the Commission. We want to make sure that more people in Europe are interested in the issue of compliance – more people throughout the Member States, not simply in a selection of the northern ones. And finally, might I draw attention to the fact that, although we could not formally record this, we have said that we will put a standard clause into directives that will simply say "Member States undertake to have in place, by the date of entry into force of the directive, systems of environmental inspection which will enable them fully to comply with the provisions of this directive". We do not see how any Member State can possibly oppose that."@en1
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