Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-02-13-Speech-1-119"
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"en.20060213.12.1-119"2
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".
Mr President, I should like to thank our rapporteur, Mr Gunnar Hökmark, and all of our fellow Members. We are in fact dealing here with a non-legislative report, and I believe that the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs has done a good job in terms of voicing the European Parliament’s strong position. On the whole, we have managed to end up with a fairly clear outlook on things.
I am one of those who believe, along with the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, that we do in fact need to review the State aid system. This system is more than ever at the heart of the Commission’s powers, since Europe remains essentially a Europe of the internal market and competition until further notice. I am not sure whether the ‘No’ vote in the French referendum offers other prospects for the long-term future. We are therefore truly at the heart of Community powers here, and it is true that, with the enlargement of Europe, the European Union and the Commission are at risk of thrombosis if the State aid system and arrangements are left in their current state.
Parliament has above all stressed that the internal market and competition should not be regarded as representing every aspect of European society. We are not just a market society; there must, as the texts stipulate, also be room for public action, not only on all those occasions when the market is failing, but also on all those occasions when we need to reduce social or territorial inequalities, manage external effects, promote innovation and, should the need arise, give a boost to industry. When, at times, we shift to a free market way of thinking, we sometimes find ourselves wondering: ‘Would we be in a position today to build the
or would we be in a position to build the
rocket, given the dominant ideology?’ I believe that we must retain this opportunity to intervene very forcefully in the industrial landscape and in public research.
I should like to say to the Commissioner that the main contribution of Parliament is to ensure that State aid is not assessed as something merely to be borne but, rather, is assessed in a balanced way, that is to say that not only are the negative aspects, such as distortions of competition, considered, but so too are the positive effects. We, in the European Parliament, wanted the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality to be clearly applied and, more specifically, wanted State aid that has no obvious impact on the internal market to be considered as compensation. We also wanted market failures to be better understood.
Finally, I should like to mention the issues that still need to be discussed and that are referred to in the 21 amendments tabled. With regard to public services, we need clarification on those aspects to do with compensation, with the legitimate funding of public services and with subsidiary funding and, above all, we need clarification on what constitutes the fourth criterion set out in the
judgment, a criterion that, by the Commission’s own admission, is actually extremely vague and very difficult to handle.
With regard to innovation, Mrs in 't Veld will soon present us with her report. We believe that it is a very good text and we hope to enhance it. The question that must be asked concerns the scope of the report: should it be strictly confined to innovation, or should it branch out a little further into the area of research and development? With regard to the regions, some excellent amendments are focused on preventing relocations from being funded by State aid. This is an extremely serious problem because it gives Europeans the impression that they are being pitted against one another, and this in terms, furthermore, of the amount received by way of public subsidies.
Finally, I should like to conclude by saying that we are obviously totally in favour of State aid being considered in the framework of the Lisbon Process and the Gothenburg Process, that is to say not only in terms of the knowledge-based economy, but also in terms of helping the environment."@en1
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