Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-02-04-Speech-3-273"
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"en.20090204.16.3-273"2
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"Mr President, yesterday in my home city of Birmingham we held a car crisis summit. I was sorry I was unable to be there because I started work in the automotive industry 40 years ago. I have been through many crises, but nothing like this.
There has never been a situation where sales have collapsed so quickly. I want to say to my Green colleagues that if they go and look at the unsold cars they will find that the smaller, lighter, greener models are of a higher proportion sitting out there. This is not a failure of business models: it is a failure of the whole economic system.
One of the statistics from our summit – from Professor David Bailey in our Birmingham Business School – estimates that 300 000 consumers in the United Kingdom were refused a car credit application over the last six months. Now some of them would probably have been refused any way, but that is the nature of what we are facing.
As regards some of the things we have talked about – and I agree entirely with what Stephen Hughes said about Nissan, and he knows them very well – we can do things at a national and a European level to help the industry through this restructuring. It is much better to help the industry keep those core people on the payroll and retrain them than to let them go and then to hire them back again later.
We have the incentives to invest in those new cars that Ms Harms and others want. The fact that the Greens are talking about electric cars as being a solution shows simply how out of touch they are with the real world – those are 10 or more years away, and we all know that.
The problem is actually getting buyers and demand back into the economy. We need to tackle credit; we need to help public buyers back into the market to buy the green buses, the green trucks, the green cars – after all, there will be things following through there. We do not want a competitive race between businesses. Mr Vondra was absolutely clear that this is a single market, and we do not want competitive activities there.
But, above all, we need to face up to the fact that the car dealers have to be out there selling and looking after cars.
My final point is to you, Commissioner, and you talked about Ms Kroes working on this earlier: please tell Ms Kroes to take off the table this entirely unwanted and destabilising proposal to change the whole structure of dealer contracts. Nobody has asked for it, and we do not want it."@en1
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