Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-13-Speech-2-194"
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"en.20070313.20.2-194"2
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".
Mr President, honourable Members, I am most warmly appreciative of your contributions. If I have not misunderstood any of them, there is a great deal of agreement in this House as to the goal that we have set ourselves, which, indeed, we did a number of years ago, when we also accepted certain obligations. We have also seen that we have not yet succeeded in achieving these objectives in all the Member States, and that relatively little time remains to us to discharge those obligations before 2010.
It is also important that the debate on the Alliance for Families should be revived, and I will say quite deliberately that this needs to be done not only in Germany, as Mr Andersson said in the opening words of his speech. Different views were expressed on the particular subject of whether it might be made obligatory that children be put in childcare facilities, so what we are talking about is freedom of choice.
Freedom of choice is a very important thing to aim for. Nobody is stipulating in whose care children should be placed or how many children people have to have. That is not what we are here to debate. It has to be said, though, that there are special cases in which there is no such freedom of choice, because the specialised care facilities are not there, and that is why it is important, as has been said by the Commission, by you in your speeches and also by the presidency, to hold fast to this goal when there are so many different aspects to be considered.
Some of you have spoken about equality of opportunity, and others about the balance between work and family life, demographic change or children’s education. Something else that is important is that we have undertaken to increase the proportion of women at work, using flexicurity as one of the means to that end. It follows that diverse considerations have been taken into account in this debate.
I would like to reiterate how very glad I was to hear Commissioner Špidla announce his intention of submitting a document next year in order to find out what will have resulted from the debates in the Council and in your House and what will have been done about achieving these objectives.
In thanking you for the frankness of this debate, let me also say that it is for every one of us, in any Member State in which the targets have not yet been met or in which there is a risk of them not being met by 2010, to take appropriate political steps in order that the goals we have set ourselves may – as we indeed hope – be achieved before that date."@en1
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