Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-26-Speech-2-035"
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"en.20060926.3.2-035"2
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"Mr President, Mr President of the Commission, it is a wide-ranging area that we are discussing today. Although it was of the municipal graveyard that Mr Schulz chose to remind us, municipal organisations can also reach the size of major corporations – such is the extent of this spectrum, and it is open to question whether such big structures are always right.
Why, though, are we actually discussing this? The reason is that we are balancing the rules of the market, on the one hand, against subsidiarity on the other. That can certainly be a thorny issue, and what comes out at the end is not always rigorous. I am very much in favour of subsidiarity, of locally-made rules, but a standardised definition in a Europe that may well – to pre-empt today's decision – end up with twenty-seven Member States would be a mess of standardised pottage, and that I reject. Europe, though, must always be asking itself what added value accrues from action at the European level, and in what way it benefits the public. Why, then, are we putting such effort into discussing the idea of a framework directive, when the rapporteur himself says that his report is not calling for one in this area? The impression I get from some speakers is that they are doing no more or less than attempting to use this debate as a means of creating competition-free zones that will have a derogation from the services directive. Quite apart from the abolition of market rules, the risk is that we end up with a European standard-issue concept of what services of general interest are, and Europe is too heterogeneous for that to be our goal.
What the public, communities, and local politicians need, though, is legal certainty. They want to know what is possible and what is not, and that is where there is great confusion. Take, for example, Munich, the city where I was born. There, at the moment, four major hospitals are being brought together in one company, and nobody knows what has to be submitted to the Commission and what does not. This is where the Commission must work together with Parliament, for what is very disturbing, not least to my own group, is that the Commission still retains a degree of ‘licence’, in the sense that it always takes decisions on the basis of what it thinks right and does not consult the voters or their representatives in the manner to which they are entitled. What is crucial with regard to the latter point – and this is where these debates in this House are actually long overdue – is that the public must understand why what we do is for their benefit. In this field in particular, that is not always clear to them, and what we do in this place is perceived in a quite different way. This is an area where the communications strategy might accomplish something."@en1
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