Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-04-Speech-3-150"
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"en.20021204.9.3-150"2
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"Madam President, I would like to congratulate the rapporteur on her work and I very much welcome the outcome of conciliation on the subject, but I think we have several causes for complaint as well. Four subjects were covered by the original physical agents directive, noise was one, but the original 1986 directive on noise was due for revision in 1991. Here we are almost at the end of 2002 before we finally have a revised text.
Vibration was another subject but it took Council eight years to reach a common position on vibration, and, as we have heard from the Commissioner, we still have the aspects concerning fields and waves and optical radiation to be dealt with. Progress is painfully slow. Yet, all around us in this high-tech era we are increasingly being bombarded by fields and waves from wireless local access networks, from blue tooth devices, from class I lasers and the like. I hope we will see a renewed sense of urgency on the part of Council.
The directive is to be welcomed. It will bring about direct improvements. Workers will be exposed less to noise at work. Then their representatives will play a part in risk assessment in the choice of hearing protectors. Our preventative audio-metric testing will be made available under certain circumstances. All of these things and many others are to be welcomed.
For the music and entertainment sector, I think we have established a very good approach. Member States will, as we have heard, draw up a code of conduct in consultation with the social partners and will give practical guidelines on how employers and employees can meet their obligations in that sector. The approach has been very much welcomed by the Musicians Union of Great Britain who acted to coordinate the work of musicians' unions across the European Union.
In the interests of time, I will make just one other point. Many voices were raised in conciliation about the importance of business impact assessment on proposals of this sort – rigorous impact assessment. I will pose the question here that I posed in Committee: what value should we place upon whether a person in their 40s or 50s can actually hear and communicate with their infant grandchildren? Because that is the part of the hearing spectrum industrial hearing loss often destroys. So, let us have a cost-benefit assessment by all means, but let us take all of the costs and all of the benefits into account, not just narrow financial ones."@en1
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