Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-01-30-Speech-3-140"
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"en.20080130.19.3-140"2
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"Madam President, the accomplishment of the internal market in postal services amply illustrates the truth of the saying ‘Good things come to those who wait’. Even I can support this draft on the table, the result of fifteen years of hard bargaining. I happen to be one of those who would rather have preserved the monopoly of national postal administrations for letters below the 50-gramme threshold. Now this last stage in the controlled deregulation of the postal market is set to take effect on 1 January 2011.
In view of the structure of the postal services in Luxembourg, the statutory requirement to employ volunteers from the armed forces in the public service and the resulting costs, I could not have subscribed to rapid and insufficiently controlled deregulation of the market in postal services, because that could have had intolerable consequences for postal staff and customers.
For the first reading, I therefore asked the rapporteur, Mr Ferber, to allow for a two-year extension of the transposition deadline for small countries with relatively few inhabitants so that they could continue to limit the provision of certain services to the universal-service provider, and I thank him for his understanding. I had discreetly circumscribed this arrangement in order to ensure that Luxembourg benefited from the exemption, but the Ministers preferred to preclude any misunderstanding by naming the relevant countries. This keeps us safe.
The important thing is that the universal-service requirement guarantees the collection of mail and its rapid delivery to the designated residential or business address on each working day, even in remote or sparsely populated areas. The external funding that might be needed to cover the net cost of the universal service, and hence the question of affordable rates, has also been satisfactorily regulated. Lastly, the best possible measures have been taken to safeguard permanent skilled jobs with universal-service providers and to guarantee adherence to terms of employment and social-security schemes based on existing legal provisions or collective agreements, contrary to what the Left would have us believe. They ought to read the wording of the draft. It also expressly stipulates that preparations for the deregulation of the postal market must take account of social considerations.
On the motion tabled by our philanthropic missionaries regarding free postal services for the visually impaired, I personally do not see why wealthy people with impaired vision should send their mail free of charge at the taxpayer’s expense. In any case, those who propose this amendment are barking up the wrong tree, because it is the Member States that guarantee such arrangements."@en1
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