Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-27-Speech-2-294"
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"en.20050927.22.2-294"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, in my view the third railway package – which I hope is the last – represents something of a final opportunity for European railways; the last chance to reverse a negative trend which is seeing rail as a mode of transport losing market share at a rate which, if it were to continue, would virtually wipe it out in the space of a few years.
There is one final point: the Commission has insisted on the need to keep the measures of the third railway package unified. On this point, adequate assurances have been sought and obtained by the UK Presidency, which will work to ensure that the Council completes its examination of the Sterckx report and continues to work on the Jarzembowski and Meyer reports.
However, apart from the formal aspect, the unity of the package has a deeper logic: liberalisation, as we can infer from various earlier experiments, requires various checks and balances, one of which is undoubtedly consumer protection. If consumers are protected, liberalisation can be effective and efficient; if it does not work, or if there is any risk of it becoming dangerous, consumers will not be protected. In my view, the Zīle report should have been considered in these terms, but the decisions have already been taken, and I will abide by them.
In the belief that there is a functional reason to keep the package together, I hope that, on the basis of these considerations, we can achieve the result we are all seeking.
Time is not on the side of the railways, although European policy continues to claim that shifting the transport balance in favour of rail is strategic, because of the negative impact of increasing road traffic in terms of fatal accidents, damage to public health and the environment and the increasing cost of congestion; and yet this trend is occurring despite the fact that priority projects to develop the trans-European network are primarily focused on investment in the railways.
We therefore have one last chance to take radical and urgent measures which will allow the objectives of the European treaties to be met – objectives which go back to Rome and 1956 – in which Europe, the Union, set itself the goal of achieving integration of national transport networks at European level, making them interoperable technically and economically and liberalising access to them; an objective devised as a physical prerequisite for the development of Europe, either as a market or a political entity.
Today we have this last chance, which requires great vision on the part of this Parliament and its co-legislator the European Council, because it requires the European institutions, the political institutions, to take responsibility for something which the national rail undertakings lack the courage, skill or ability to do, namely to stop defending shrinking monopolistic market segments, which are increasingly unable to generate traffic revenue to cover their costs, and instead seek to expand the total market, with potential benefits for all.
This can only be achieved if conditions are created for competition among railways, which would also give them the ability to compete with other modes of transport and enable market share to be recaptured, leading in turn to further competition among railway companies within a virtuous circle. To achieve this we need to accelerate both technical interoperability, the lack of which today creates an artificial barrier separating the individual domestic rail markets, and economic interoperability, by liberalising access to the networks.
The third package is a vital component of that strategy. The way ahead in terms of technical interoperability is clear, but we must acknowledge the contribution of the third package in its proposal for a directive on the certification of train crews, contained in the Savary report; only by training the staff can we make the system interoperable, even before it becomes technically interoperable.
However, the third package requires Parliament and the Council to assume their respective responsibilities in terms of the ‘if’ and ‘how’ of liberalisation. The issue of market liberalisation has been left to the proposed directive on the development of the Community's railways, which it is planned to apply to passenger transport from 2008 on international routes and from 2012 on domestic ones. This is the crucial point for Parliament to add value to the proposal: these facts and deadlines, particularly the second of 2012, do not match the urgency of the situation, even if the compromise may be a reasonable one, taking account of the concerns of national railway companies less able to face up to market challenges in what will, in any event, continue to be their natural monopolies.
These concerns should not be accorded such importance that the type of authorisation is overlooked, with the possibility of awarding domestic public rail transport contracts and services directly and without a competitive process, which is what the revised version of the proposed regulation on public service transport obligations implies. Parliament views that proposal favourably, as it offers the possibility to move ahead on the Meijer report, which has been awaiting the Council’s common position for years.
If Parliament today, and the Council tomorrow, reject on other fronts those proposed regulations on the rights and obligations of passengers, a similar compromise may eliminate the artificial distinction between international passengers and domestic passengers. Will the latter, perhaps, continue to be treated as second class citizens, with fewer rights than international passengers? There is no justification for this distinction, except to continue protecting markets, while passengers are not receiving due protection – to the short-term benefit of the national companies."@en1
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