Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-01-17-Speech-3-159"
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"en.20070117.9.3-159"2
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".
Mr President, Madam President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, many years ago we agreed to create a common European area characterised by free movement within its borders of persons, goods, capital and services, and we have unquestionably made progress over the years since then, but we still have a lot to do in order to make what we proposed a reality.
One of the outstanding tasks is precisely the one we are discussing today: opening up passenger services by rail to the common European area. We are talking about a service that affects the citizens directly and we must therefore act prudently in order to prevent the achievement of our objective from creating so much harm that the expected benefits are no longer worthwhile. As in the case of other kinds of liberalisation, we must be careful and patient so that our decisions allow for a sufficient margin to adapt to the changes and do not have a negative effect on any basic public service.
The Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe is entirely in favour of opening up international services to the market, as the Commission proposed, as did the Council in its common position, but we also want other national services to be liberalised and for that to be included in this amendment of Directive 91/440/EEC that we are debating.
With regard to this last aspect, we know that many people, including our French colleagues and others, fear that free competition may have a negative impact on the provision of the less profitable internal rail services.
We share that concern and therefore, although we are going to vote in general for the Committee on Transport and Tourism’s amendments, we are going to vote in favour of Amendment 37 so that in 2012, on the basis of two years of experience in the liberalisation of international services, the Commission will present us with a report analysing, five years in advance, the state of preparation of the opening up of the market in passenger services within the States. We are also going to reject Amendment 18, because it seems to us to be reasonable to be able to limit for a maximum period of up to fifteen years the right of international services to cabotage when that means competing with another previous State concession awarded by means of a transparent and open public procedure.
We are going to argue that the introduction of new international services that represent competition should not affect the economic viability of the current regional and local rail services, and also that rules could be established to be met by both State and international services and which will be intended to compensate for public service obligations.
We also want to encourage private initiative to invest in the development of railways and, to that end, we propose that framework agreements on the award of rail services may last for fifteen years, and more in cases of large investments in specialised infrastructures that present an annual repayment plan that justify that exceptional duration.
I would like to end by thanking the rapporteurs, Mr Jarzembowski, Mr Sterckx and Mr Savary, for the work they have done."@en1
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