Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-12-Speech-1-104"
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"en.20070312.18.1-104"2
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"Mr President, in this House we talk constantly about the Lisbon Agenda, which is supposed to make the EU the world’s most competitive knowledge-based economy by 2010. The Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, likes to boast about his plans to control excessive regulation to help enhance the competitiveness of European economies.
Yet this report, as originally presented, sought to create mandatory regulation of a wide range of areas of corporate activity, including employee relations and the environment. But these areas are already heavily regulated, indeed massively over-regulated, by EU legislation already on the statute book. What we were proposing to do here was to double up on existing regulation with all the potential for ambiguity and confusion that would have created.
Mandatory CSR would be hugely damaging to competitiveness, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises, to which we constantly pay lip-service but which we constantly seek to strangle with oppressive, intrusive and unnecessary regulation. However, there are now agreed amendments which firmly establish the voluntary nature of CSR and I for one strongly support those amendments. I agree with the rapporteur that we need to promote CSR, but we also need to protect the enterprise, productivity, competitiveness and wealth-creating capacity of European businesses.
We should also be aware of existing best practice of CSR amongst existing major businesses. Last summer, I had the privilege of visiting the Gates Foundation in Seattle, which of course is run by Bill Gates of Microsoft. This Foundation’s spending on philanthropy exceeds the GDP of a number of small countries. Arguably, it does more to relieve poverty and hardship in Africa than EU aid does and, because it is a private sector organisation, its spending is hugely more efficient. I believe that, with the amendments that we are proposing to put in place here, we should be able to support this report."@en1
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