Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-10-21-Speech-2-052"
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"en.20031021.2.2-052"2
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"Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, whenever we speak of the railways, we are compelled to refer time and again to the relationship between service provision and liberalisation. I must once more express my regret that we in Parliament have never managed to engage in a comprehensive discussion of this subject instead of focusing our deliberations on one mode of transport at a time, on the basis of the project under consideration. Had we been able to have such a discussion, I believe we could have broken down certain prejudices that rear their heads in every debate.
As I see it, liberalisation is something that can only take place – and road transport, I believe, illustrates this very well – if we accompany it with supporting regulatory measures. These measures relate to safety, working conditions, the right to practise a trade and other factors, including technical interoperability. It is our task to make this happen, and what we have on the table today is, in my opinion, a considerable step forward which will enable us to discuss not only the liberalisation of rail transport but also accompanying measures that will meet the requirements to which I have referred. Must liberalisation mean social dumping? Not in my view. Does it have to result in job losses? Again, the answer is no. And does liberalisation mean less safety? Not at all, as I believe is very clearly illustrated in Mr Sterckx’s report . Britain is not a good example for us, and no one in this House would want to follow it. What we have tabled here relates to the very thing that was not done in Britain, namely proper preparation of the liberalisation process. And let me say to the Members from Belgium and France that jobs are already being lost at the present time. In my own country of Belgium, for example, the railways’ share of the transport markets is falling; in ten years the number of private sidings has fallen to a third of its former level; this means that the rail industry has not furnished proof of its efficiency, and as a result of this it has been gradually shedding jobs. Anyone who warns us that jobs will be lost and forgets that they are already being lost now, when the railways are still in the public sector, has not, to my mind, assessed the situation fairly and objectively.
We have to grasp the nettle in our own countries too and acknowledge that our governments have been underfunding the railways and that we have not provided our rail operators with the resources they would need to organise tomorrow’s large-scale rail network. We must also recognise that the wage bills these institutions have to meet are far too high and that national governments must intervene here too in the first instance. I have no wish to become obsessed with dates, but I should like to point out that it would be bad for the railways and for our countries if we in this House did not set any deadlines, because we are convinced that tomorrow’s transport map will cover the whole of Europe, and this development must not be stopped in its tracks by special measures and special rules in the small countries."@en1
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