Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-09-06-Speech-4-023"
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"en.20070906.2.4-023"2
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"Mr President, I welcome very much the work done by Ms Patrie and my colleagues on the committee in producing an extremely well-balanced and clear report for the Commission. I am sure that is really going to help Ms Kuneva move forward as quickly as possible with the proposal for the first stages of the so-called ‘horizontal directive’.
I particularly want to thank Ms Patrie for her contribution to this. I have worked with her in the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection on consumer protection issues for many years. She has great expertise, which I think has worked through in this. I am sorry we will not be seeing quite so much of her, but this report shows her commitment to this area.
I also want to thank the Commissioner for her energetic promotion of consumer protection and the profile she is giving to this. Mrs McCarthy referred specifically to issues surrounding products and toys. They are not part of this debate, but we will have a chance to discuss them with the Commissioner at the committee meeting next week.
I want to mention a previous piece of work we were all involved in that has not been mentioned so far, which is the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. That was a landmark piece of consumer protection legislation, because, for the first time, it set out the harmonised rules on unfair commercial practices to be applied across the European Union. In many countries, that whole area of dealing with unfair practices was not really developed at all in national legislation.
A number of colleagues have referred to the issue of compliance, and let us not forget that is a foundation which is still being transposed in many Member States, including the United Kingdom. So we have to keep the pressure up on this, along with the follow-up to the Green Paper. I want to highlight the fact that the Commissioner has a clear direction from this Parliament, which I am sure she will have in the vote today, to move quickly on the horizontal directive – we have clear agreement on that. There are, clearly, other areas we wish to debate, particularly the issue of cost and compliance with different standards in different markets. Let us not forget that, on the one hand, we want to ensure consumer confidence – as the Commissioner highlighted in her speech – and for consumers to feel that they have a well-developed set of rights that are really meaningful. But, at the same time, we want to encourage innovative, new businesses to come and put products and services onto the market and not to be discouraged by the legal regime they are faced with. I have to say that on some of the issues – and I have raised this with the Commissioner – that are being talked about in other areas, on the reform of Rome I, for example, small businesses are extremely concerned about the potential costs of compliance with extensive requirements under 27 jurisdictions. If we provide high levels of consumer protection but we discourage companies from entering those markets, then we are not doing consumers a favour. That is the balance we intend to seek.
I was delighted that the Commissioner specifically mentioned that mutual recognition will be an important part of this. On the unfair commercial practices, we argued for an internal market clause and it was voted through. We have been entirely consistent for this side. That is part of the balance that we seek and I am confident that we can achieve it."@en1
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