Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-15-Speech-2-352"
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"en.20010515.14.2-352"2
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".
Mr President, first of all I should like to thank the rapporteur for the work he has done. In my opinion this is one of the occasions when the institutions fortunately show their support for a new measure intended to do away with practices that might endanger the working conditions of professional drivers and safety on our roads.
I should like to thank you all for your productive cooperation in this matter. I hope you can accept the position I am now proposing, by which I accept Amendment Nos 6 and 7, and that on this basis we can at the forthcoming Council of Transport Ministers achieve a common position at first reading, if Parliament really does accept the Commission’s position.
Parliament, the Commission and the Council all affirm the real need for issuing a uniform document, the driver attestation, which will help the competent authorities in the Member States to ascertain whether a driver is regularly engaged in the haulier’s State of establishment.
Such a measure may help, of course, to ensure respect for working conditions in the EU and hence guarantee the level of road safety demanded by European citizens, and not just guarantee road safety but also put an end to unfair competition and therefore ensure that the internal market really operates properly.
The basic difference in position among our three institutions lies in the scope of this new measure. The Commission proposed that all drivers performing international transport operations, regardless of their nationality, should be required to obtain the attestation, so as to preserve equality of treatment for all drivers and specifically to avoid social dumping.
For its part the Council is concerned about the administrative burden that issuing this document would place on the authorities in the Member States and prefers to apply the Regulation first to third country nationals and leave a broadening of the scope of the Regulation for future consideration. I think this House has made a very constructive suggestion in this respect, and I should like to thank the rapporteur Mr van Dam and the rest of the Committee for this. Thanks to this proposal, I believe we can perhaps meet the need for quick results as regards third-country drivers and at the same time attend to the difficulties that the Member States of the Union have, and the Member States can thus commit themselves straight away to taking on the considerable additional administrative burden that applying the Regulation to European Union drivers as well would mean.
The Commission believes that rapid progress in this matter would substantially increase the value of the measure itself. The Commission has therefore already communicated its agreement in principle with the Council’s point of view, even though it departs somewhat from the Commission’s initial proposal. In fact Parliament’s position in favour of applying the Regulation to drivers from European Union Member States as well after a transitional period is interesting. Above all I am convinced that it is important for the Council and Parliament to adopt this much-needed legislation as soon as possible.
Thus – I must make this quite clear – I think Parliament’s idea of introducing a transitional stage may provide the basis for an agreement in the Council, and so I should like to accept its basic thrust in order to reach a solution; I can therefore accept Amendment No 6, which I believe may help combine the two problems.
With regard to the other suggestions made by Parliament, I want to declare my complete agreement with Parliament’s valuable proposal, formulated in its Amendment No 7, concerning the inclusion of certain additional driver details on the attestation, since in my opinion this will make the attestation itself clearer and more precise and will prevent or at least reduce the possibility of abuse.
I cannot, however, accept Amendments Nos 1, 2, 3 and 4 since they have no effect on the achievement of the objective of this Regulation. Neither can I accept Amendment No 5, because I feel it could lead to confusion instead of improving the text of the Regulation."@en1
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