Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-30-Speech-1-076"
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"en.20030630.10.1-076"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I endorse the approach taken by the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, which has tabled a large number of amendments to the Council’s Common Position on the new rules for public contracts. We have already had many discussions in this House which have highlighted the need to support small businesses and the self-employed, along with the need for bureaucracy in tendering procedures to be reduced at the same time as transparency and comprehensibility are increased. Further economic and social progress in the Member States will depend on the fulfilment of both these important demands. Parliament’s demand for threshold values for public contracts – depending of course on the utility involved – to be increased is absolutely justified if we want (a) to reduce the very high costs involved in tendering on a Europe-wide basis, and (b) to give small and medium-sized businesses better opportunities in the European Union. It goes without saying that this heading includes the amendments aimed at reserving 10% of the expenditure on public contracts for small and medium-sized enterprises and at increasing the threshold values in the event of authorities being parties to contracts for the work to be carried out.
Commissioner Bolkestein, I really cannot see what you are getting at! I think my group, along with the others, did the right thing in emphasising the importance of invitations to tender containing conditions relating to the management of the environment and guarantees of workers’ health and safety. In principle, this is in line with the sustainability for which the Council opted in Göteborg in 2001, with the economy, ecology, and the social dimension being given equal priority. That someone should argue against that is something that I find utterly baffling. This must apply not only to the way in which the main contractors meet the specified criteria; it goes without saying that it must be binding on the sub-contractors as well. If firms do not produce evidence of how they deal with finances and with their staff, their tenders should be rejected.
I do, though, have doubts about compliance with data protection provisions when contracts are put out to tender electronically. We also support the demand that enterprises or persons who have been declared bankrupt or against whom court cases are pending should be excluded from tendering for public contracts. Rather than this being merely a permitted option, there should be binding rules on this. It stands to reason that exclusion from tendering for public contracts should also be extended to enterprises that had breached the conditions of tender on previous contracts.
I also ask my fellow Members of this House, when plenary votes on Article 27, to adopt the version of the text included in the Council’s Common Position, for if we do not, then 98.5 % of German collective wage agreements would be excluded as a criterion in invitations to tender, which would put German workers at a disadvantage when competing for the award of contracts."@en1
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