Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-10-24-Speech-3-240"
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"en.20011024.11.3-240"2
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".
Mr President, once again, I would firstly like to congratulate Mr Vatanen on this very good report, and to thank the other speakers in the debate, and also welcome the fact that all the institutions have studied this proposal within a very short timescale, and that it will be possible to reach an agreement in due course on this subject as we did on the previous one. This demonstrates the importance which we all now attach to short sea shipping. For several years, the Community has been implementing a complete strategy aimed at making short sea shipping a viable and realistic alternative to purely road transport. This strategy has, furthermore, been reinforced in the White Paper on European transport policy until 2010. One of the elements of this strategy is to remove the obstacles preventing the development of short sea shipping. Our recent exercise in recording these obstacles showed that the complexity of the administrative documentary procedures was considered to be one of the main bottlenecks. Mr Vatanen was kind enough to say that the Commission was dealing with the paperwork, for once. I give credit for this U-turn to him. The Commission has therefore presented a proposal aimed at simplifying certain documentary procedures. We have chosen to deal with the routine procedures which ships have to go through each time they enter or leave a port. The procedures currently in force are not in themselves unreasonable, but the methods for conforming to them are so different from one Member State to another that they often lead to confusion amongst shipowners and operators. Moreover, the International Maritime Organisation has produced a number of standardised forms in order to harmonise these procedures, and we therefore believed that standardisation was necessary, so that ships may know what information they need to present to the authorities and the way in which they must do so, whichever port they are visiting. Given that there are already internationally recognised standardised forms, we have opted for the simple solution of using them. This will probably lead to the worldwide application of the IMO forms. This proposal, therefore, simplifies the necessary complex documentary procedures in the field of maritime transport. It does not impose new obligations on shipowners. Instead it allows them to carry out certain obligatory declarations in a harmonised and simplified fashion. Since these declarations will be identical regardless of the flag or sector of activity, there is no reason to exclude any of them from the scope of our proposal, which therefore applies to both short sea shipping and ocean navigation, and which will not distinguish between flags.
Thank you, once again, to Mr Vatanen. Thanks to the amendments which he has presented in his report, we believe we will be able to reach an agreement with the Council with a view to adopting this proposal at first reading. This is good news and we are grateful for it."@en1
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