Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-02-02-Speech-1-211"
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"en.20090202.21.1-211"2
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"Mr President, it is particularly appropriate that Mrs Reding is responding for the Commission tonight because my report is focused on a proposal that has been developed over a number of years with her services. It is an extremely important proposal, which has wide-ranging possibilities for the whole of the European economy. My first message to the Commissioner tonight is to thank her services for their leadership on this, but to say that I think this initiative needs to be much better known. It needs to spread out widely from DG Information Society – as I think it is now starting to do – because it is of such importance, particularly in the economic times we are in at the moment.
So, what am I talking about? Well, the core of the issue is that public authorities in the European Union spend huge amounts of public money on buying products and services. It is estimated that EUR 1 800 billion is spent on public procurement every year. How much of that procurement is actually spent on investigating, researching and encouraging the development of new solutions to the big challenges that public authorities and indeed society face every day: a better health service, a better transport solution, dealing with climate change, more energy efficient buildings? EU procurement spending linked to research and development is less than 1% of that total procurement budget.
Bearing in mind that we have an explicit objective in the Lisbon Strategy to move our R&D spending up towards the 3% target, there is huge potential here.
That is where the whole mission of pre-commercial procurement comes in. Essentially, what we are looking for are intelligent, research-focused public authorities to generate a demand for innovative solutions and then work with innovative companies large and small – but particularly small enterprises who really can benefit from this – to fulfil those requirements. We want those intelligent customers to really think ahead, to be demanding, to think about the solutions for which no commercial solution yet exists, but where there are basically a range of solutions which can then be developed with the financial contribution from the public authority to do just that – to fund research and development, perhaps through a first competing stage of ideas, and then take those development solutions to a next stage towards the viability of a product or service that can then be launched.
The benefits of having that backing, for a small enterprise in particular, and giving that commercial support will be really important to that business. Indeed, where this has been already rolled out, we see the experience where businesses, even if they do not produce the winning solution, have had an element of their research and development funded that they can then go on and use to develop other revenue-generating products.
This also ties in with the second initiative from the Commission covered in my report, the ‘lead market initiative’, where we are looking for public authorities to lead in a number of key technology areas around health and climate change in transport. There are signs of an integrated policy emerging, but my report says that we need more training, we need more best practice, and we need more dispersion and dissemination of this proposal. I hope that the Commissioner, and indeed the College, will pick up on this and that this Parliament will show it is right behind this solution.
In conclusion – and if you will allow me a short amount of extra time because this is, in a sense a point of order – I want to point out first of all to this empty House that I had two opinions for my report from Mr Sakalas from the Committee on Legal Affairs and Mrs Podimata from the Committee on Industry. They are of course not allowed to present those opinions here, which seems rather a shame since they made valuable contributions which I have added to my amendments. I also want to thank my shadow, Mr Hasse Ferreira, for working with me, and he has also contributed extensively.
Just to wind up, this is a solution where everyone will be winners: society, citizens, public authorities, business, innovators and the European economy. That is why it is so important and why, when we are looking to public authorities to continue investment in this time of economic crisis, this proposal is even more important than it was when I started this report a few month ago."@en1
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