Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-03-Speech-3-354"
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"en.20011003.12.3-354"2
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"Mr President, I should like to thank Mrs Berger very much for her clear statement of support for this proposal this evening. Those of you who have looked at the report will know that she withdrew her original explanatory statement. I was delighted to hear this evening that she had confirmed her full support.
This report, with the support of the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy and my colleague, Mr Beysen, and with Mrs Berger's assistance also, now strikes the right balance by giving the Commission a clear indication of the support of our committee and others for this important initiative. I am delighted that Mrs Berger is going with the flow of that for many of us felt that her initial report really did not do full justice to what we regard as an imaginative proposal, a wide-ranging proposal, and one that is of crucial economic importance to the future of the European Union.
We must not ignore the continual structural change in the world economies, in particular in developed economies like the European Union. We are seeing services and manufacturing business starting to converge. We are seeing more integration of traditional service providers, with their manufacturing arms looking to focus on customers in a very different way. Therefore, opening up the single market for services is going to be of great importance.
One thing I particularly welcome from the Commission's analysis – something it has indicated in the report that it will now do more work on – is that it highlights the importance of a highly competitive service infrastructure in the overall competitiveness of European industry. So many businesses depend on high-quality, effective, low-cost, efficient services to deliver their businesses. Indeed the whole of the electronic commerce area, which we talked about in financial services earlier on, is facilitating and opening up these sorts of markets. Therefore, this communication is extremely welcome. We look forward, in the Legal Affairs Committee as well as in the Industry Committee, to working with the Commission and to moving forward with the necessary legal framework and the other actions that will be necessary to achieve it.
I want to reinforce what Mrs Grönfeldt Bergman said about the role of the small- and medium-sized enterprises in this sector. Again we are seeing the combination of increasing importance of services combined with electronic commerce and the electronic means of delivering those services. That is an area, particularly crucial in the business-to-business sector, where small- and medium-sized enterprises have a crucial role to play in the European economy. Again, these provisions will help. I refer back to the country-of-origin principle. I share Mrs Berger's view that by a happy coincidence we have a set of reports tonight with a common thread running through them.
I do not regard the country-of-origin principle as a magic bullet to achieve market integration at a single stroke. Clearly there is a lot of work to be done. Yet, by operating the country-of-origin principle vigorously and consistently we will actually achieve competition and higher standards for consumers more quickly than by any other means. Consumers are going to be well-informed and intelligent enough to know where the best standards of consumer protection are. They are going to demand them from other countries. This is not a question of harmonising down. It is an effective means of making the market operate in the interests of consumers, which is exactly what Commissioner Monti told us in addressing the competition report earlier on."@en1
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