Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-01-28-Speech-3-051"
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"en.20040128.5.3-051"2
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"Mr President, I would like to speak on just one point – State aid for services of general interest. I am addressing you in particular, Commissioner. Through the Resolution of 14 January, Parliament has just confirmed its desire to legislate in this field. In our view, the Commission therefore urgently needs to say, ‘yes, we are going to prepare a legal act under the codecision procedure’. The aim is to increase the scope of public authorities to choose and to act, in particular local and regional authorities, and to ensure that the rules of the internal market and of competition are compatible with the inalienable rights in terms of services of general interest. With this in mind, we wish to establish common principles, criteria for specifying exemptions and derogations on competition rules and funding. We now have codecision power, with Article 95, interpreted in the light of Article 16 of the Charter. The draft constitutional treaty also aims to strengthen that power. I would like to point out that the Commission should implement the rules ex post, but certainly not decide on them itself ex ante. That is the job of the Treaty, the Court of Justice and the legislator. We are concerned about abuse of power by the Commission, in the name of its competence over competition, and we think that it has a degree of legal confusion, particularly as regards funding.
First of all, it is not up to you to say whether or not funding is legitimate and in particular what is aid and what is not. It is only after the rule has been made that you should ensure compatibility with competition. There is therefore necessarily an area of possible conflict between the legislator and you. That is why, after the Altmark judgment, we ourselves wish to clarify under what conditions financial compensation under public service obligations is not covered by the rules on State aid. You wish to interpret Altmark yourselves through a communication, and we wish to do it through a legislative act.
Secondly, the Commission, having been authorised by the Council, may decide to implement a rule of exemption from notification with regard to State aid. In fact, services of general interest have an increasingly economic dimension. However, our resolution rejects your use of Article 86(3) to decide everything yourselves, claiming an urgency that has been denied for many years. We are therefore asking you to establish a provisional derogation so that the codecision procedure can ultimately clarify the general conditions for validation.
Thirdly, taking into account the disputes that there already are against your services and the bodies responsible for services of general interest, we have grounds to ask you to respect our resolution that services such as health, social housing and even social services should be excluded from the scope of application of competition rules and only come under the control of the Commission in the event of abuse of discretionary powers. I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that we wish the future codecision act to establish a right to own production, so that the threat of intrusion from the Commission will not always be brandished under cover of the argument of distortion of competition."@en1
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