Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-09-Speech-2-360"
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"en.20040309.13.2-360"2
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"Mr President, this report illustrates the need for Parliament to put in place a systematic approach to impact assessment. In this instance, the rapporteur Mr Kronberger with, as he admits, slim support by two votes from the members of the committee, is proposing to change non-mandatory target values to mandatory limit values for arsenic, cadmium, nickel and benzopyrene.
The Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy informally sought – and this was the first time it was carried out – a cost-benefit analysis. There is no mechanism yet within Parliament for this. The trouble is that it is inevitably incomplete, given the time pressures within which we had to operate. It concludes, and Mr Kronberger has drawn comfort from this, that some of the proposed limit values are achievable – 'feasible' in his words. That is a technical assessment. When the study comes to look at the costs of reaching the target, as the Commissioner said, things are not so rosy. In the study drawn up for Parliament, the precise costs of reaching the limit values that Mr Kronberger wants are not analysed in any systematic way. The study itself says that, for arsenic, some plants might be able to comply but some could not and that 'a more detailed analysis of the reasons why compliance by the other plants will be impossible seems to be justified'. The rapporteur, faced with the impossible, prefers to ignore this stark verdict.
In the case of the application of limit values to cadmium, the study again draws attention to the lack of detailed information on the impact of what Mr Kronberger proposes. In the case of limit values for nickel, the study notes that applying limit values on the Kronberger lines would require investments beyond best available techniques.
What Mr Kronberger now has to demonstrate is how far what the Commission proposes constitutes a proven danger to human health, how this danger is inadequately dealt with through the provisions of the IPPC Directive and why therefore it is worth pursuing his idea for mandatory limit values irrespective of the cost. In my view, he has completely failed to demonstrate that and all we have is the bald observation in his explanatory statement that 'no limit value can be set below which these substances constitute no risk to human health'. There is no way in which he is capable of going in the direction of what the Commission is proposing.
If Parliament is unwise enough, in a first reading compromise or in a second reading – which might be a long way ahead – to endorse what Mr Kronberger wants, then it will only have itself to blame if the Council, or perhaps the Commission, carries out the real, extensive cost-benefit analysis that Mr Kronberger does not have. Arriving at a point where cost-benefit analyses are on our agenda is not a sign of obstructionism, it is a sign that Parliament is at long last moving from seeing itself as a pressure group for the environment and evolving into a responsible part of the legislative process. But with the Kronberger report as it is, we clearly have a long way to go.
Mr Kronberger and the Commissioner have mentioned the possibility of a first reading agreement. I cannot see how on earth there can be a first reading agreement between Mr Kronberger's approach and that which, I imagine, the Council has endorsed. I would like to think we could have a first reading agreement, but somebody has got to move and I hope it is Parliament."@en1
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