Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-30-Speech-1-074"
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"en.20030630.10.1-074"2
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"Mr President, it is a very important matter that we discuss tonight, as Mr Bolkestein said. He urged us, in his closing words, to make sure that we modernise and simplify European Community law and endow it with appropriate flexibility. With this I believe we can all agree. The issue is: which exact text will best achieve that?
To establish the general orientation of the Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance, we thought that the Commission's original proposal was unduly timid and grudging on points such as the environmental and social points. We, and others in Parliament, urged a broader and more generous view – the one that was in due course confirmed by the Court of Justice in the Helsinki tramways case. That was a real advance. It was not just our view, but Parliament's view at first reading.
Then we have the common position. To us, the common position seems to be in some measure a retreat from the high-water mark represented by Parliament's first reading position. We would like to see some aspects of that retreat again reversed. I accept Mr Bolkestein's point that the text, as it came to us from the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, is internally inconsistent. I would put that down to the fact that in committee we had an unstable and varying majority, which meant that there was no clear golden thread running through the text that came from the committee. But there is a way of restoring it to consistency, coherence and environmental and social sensibility, which is to adopt the string of amendments, which will pull it back towards Parliament's first reading position and again exhort the Council and the Commission to take a bold step that will continue to serve these valuable goals of modernisation, simplification and flexibility.
My own group will put forward two amendments in particular relating to Article 53 where, for example, we will object to the idea that it must be a tender most economically advantageous for the contracting authorities. We are told that sometimes social or environmental criteria are vague. That seems to be fraught with vagueness – the insistence that it be, as it were, self-referentially back to the authority which is contracting. That would give rise to all manner of disputes. Leave it as we suggest: various criteria linked to the subject of the public contract in question. Do not leave out characteristics, including those relating to production methods or the tender as equal-treatment policy. If these are unacceptably vague then the whole of Community law is unacceptably vague because we are exhorted in the horizontal clauses of the Treaties to attend to these very values!
Let us be brave! Let us go forward, colleagues! Let us restore the kinds of values that we asserted in the first reading position. Let us get rid of the inconsistencies, but let us get rid of them in the right direction."@en1
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