Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-19-Speech-2-021"
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"en.20070619.5.2-021"2
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Mr President, for us and for my fellow members of this committee of inquiry, an 18-month journey comes to an end today. This document can leave my desk and come to your desk, Commissioner.
Where is the coherent system of cross-border access to justice in the EU? Well, it might be there for those with deep pockets to understand the complexities of what goes on, but we feel that in order to answer this, you need to allow citizens to act collectively, cross-border and that we need a mechanism to do this. I know many people get scared about this, but it was quite clear to us that at the moment there is inequality of outcome and lack of access to justice cross-border. We must do better.
The petitioners in this case who came to us originally were persistent, patient, dogged. They did not give up, although they knew that they were taking on the UK state. Indeed, at first the Commission told us that nothing could be done here. But we have learnt a great deal in this journey about the implementation process. In the future, it must be much more proactive, not just about checklists and tick boxes. We know it is getting better. The quality of our legislation must be more transparent. We must have citizens’ summaries, so that citizens can understand what is about, and correlation tables so that we know where our legislation has gone in the Member States. Better implementation means a proactive Commission combined with a watchful Parliament.
I would like to thank all my colleagues and the Secretariat who have worked together with us on this report. We have had a once in a lifetime opportunity as parliamentarians. I believe this report will assist the victims in a pincer movement with the UK Parliamentary Ombudsman, perhaps finally to deliver compensation. More importantly, I hope it will deliver a huge jolt to our institutions about our lawmaking processes and the European system of justice.
Commissioner, this is now yours – but not just yours, I hope. It is also for the Commissioner for Justice and the Commissioner for Consumer Affairs. We are waiting for your answers.
Last week, in preparing for today, I was asked by a journalist whether I would buy a financial services product cross-border. That rather set me thinking, because I hesitated in my answer. I said, ‘Well, perhaps I know too much’. I know too much as a result of this inquiry and it makes me somewhat concerned – indeed, more than somewhat concerned. Would I even, after this, buy a financial services product at home, in my country, the UK, where all this occurred? And that is a financial centre that is meant to be among the best in the European Union.
This whole issue of the sad crisis of Equitable Life goes very much to the heart of the issue of consumer confidence in our internal market. It goes to the heart of the issue of whether we will have confidence as European citizens to save for the future, for our pensions and other investments. If we, as legislators, cannot get the regulatory regime right for the internal market, then we are storing up huge problems for the future.
So, what happened here with Equitable Life? One and a half million policyholders from 15 Member States were victims of the crisis at Equitable Life. This is truly a crisis on a European scale and one that also has to be dealt with at a European level. I think we all understand and appreciate the importance of financial services companies – and indeed other companies – being able to trade and do business across the European Union on the basis of what is sometimes called home/host country of control, or country of origin control. But if we are going to do this – and it is clear that we are – we have to be absolutely crystal clear who is responsible for what. It certainly was not clear in this particular case.
A few weeks ago, Commissioner, I was involved in a conciliation where we spent several hours on another piece of legislation known as Rome II, trying to get right the relationship between country of origin and other Community instruments. But this is not just a semantic or a drafting exercise for us. Somebody said to me at the end of the process, ‘Well, every side can read into this what they would like’. That should not be the case. We have got to be clear where responsibility lies, for the sake of the people whose lives are affected by this.
What I and my colleagues saw in this Equitable Life case were victims, say in Germany or Ireland, going to the regulators in their countries and the regulator there saying, ‘Sorry, not us, not our responsibility’. Then those victims wended their way to the UK regulator, who said, ‘Sorry, not me, you are not my problem’. That must reveal either a fault in our primary legislation or a fault in the way it has been implemented in the UK or other Member States. We have got to sort this out. We have got to have clarity in the future as to who is responsible for our citizens who end up suffering at the end of this.
So, we found that there was failure in the UK regulatory regime combined with a lack of clarity about home/host problems, perhaps; about being too deferential to a financial institution which had existed for hundreds of years; about a regulatory regime that was, perhaps, in the general parlance, too ‘light touch’. We know that we cannot eliminate all risk but we can certainly do better.
We have opened up the market, but let us be clear: no mobility without liability. There has to be this balance. There has to be the protective side. And what have we put there, on the protective side? We have a European group of regulators, CEIOPS, who meet. It is getting better but it is a kind of voluntary meeting or early-warning system. It is not the hard black-letter law that allows the entry into the market. So, we know that cross-border cooperation is getting better, but we believe that there is still more that can be done and that, when they look at this in renewing the Siena Protocol, they can do better.
Then, of course, we are meant to have systems of alternative dispute resolution to help our citizens when things go wrong. I am a great fan of ADR, but, frankly, what we have put in place, up against an open market, is pathetic. The Irish and the UK systems are meant to be the best! I do not doubt that they are, but it worries me about what happens in other Member States. Let us get FIN-NET, the network of ADR in financial services, working properly in every Member State so that our citizens can be assured that there is something there to help them when things go wrong."@en1
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