Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-11-15-Speech-3-070"
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"en.20061115.3.3-070"2
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"For the record, I confirm that the Commission will accept Amendments 40, 41 and 42, which relate to comitology and introduce the regulatory procedure with scrutiny. The Commission rejects all other amendments.
Concerns raised in these amendments have been addressed in the statements I made at the beginning of the debate. Various Members have commented on legal certainty and whether or not this directive will lead to a long list of disputes that will need to be settled by the European Court of Justice. I do not share this concern. There is broad consensus among Member States on this text. I recall that no Member State voted against the common position. The vast majority of Members of this House indicate that they will support it in the vote that will take place in a short while. Given this broad consensus, I do not see why Member States would seek not to respect the directive. Everyone agrees that we need to give the services sector a boost. This is exactly what this directive will do.
At yesterday’s debate on the Commission’s work programme, Mr Harbour and others made a very valid point about implementation and the resources to be attributed to that. At the Commission, we will start to focus immediately on the transposition and implementation of this directive. Simplifying life for service providers and their customers is hard work. Member States have three years to implement the directive. They should start immediately, not because I say so but because their economies need this directive, and the Commission will hold the Member States accountable.
The broad level of consensus that has manifested itself today is the result of a number of important innovations in our approach to lawmaking in the European Union. Firstly, Parliament took on its role as co-legislator and, instead of taking the easy option of rejecting a very controversial proposal, MEPs rolled up their sleeves and reached agreement on essential modifications to the text that made it acceptable across the political divide. For me this was an important signal of the maturity of this institution.
Secondly, the Presidency is building on your approach and it worked hard to build on this consensus. As well as bringing MEPs to the informal Competitiveness Council, which engaged directly in discussions with ministers, the Presidency organised a series of meetings with the social partners. All of this greatly contributed to the agreement that you will vote on later today. It is appropriate that it was under the Finnish Presidency that some of these innovations were introduced because that is the motto of the Finnish Presidency.
Finally, two points. In thanking Mrs Gebhardt and Mr Harbour and everybody else – many MEPs from all sides of this House were involved in achieving the broad consensus that we reached and an enormous amount of hard work was done and great tribute has been paid to the MEPs here – I would also like to note that various Commission officials worked extremely hard to effect the changes and to get from the text Parliament produced at its first reading to the text that went to the Council. I want to acknowledge that as well.
For those of us who occasionally engage in the odd wager – not that this would be something that most Members of this House would want to do! – I do not think that one year ago you would have wagered a lot of money on our reaching the position we are going to reach today. That is thanks to a large number of people, both here in Parliament but also in the various Member States and in the Commission. I want to pay particular tribute to that.
Lastly, there has been at least one additional, unplanned benefit for me personally: I have got to know a very large number of Members of Parliament across all groupings over the last two years. This would not necessarily have been the case if I had not had to deal with this very controversial Services Directive. So I thank you for that."@en1
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