Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-06-16-Speech-3-509"
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"en.20100616.33.3-509"2
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"Mr President, freedom of movement is an essential right for all citizens of the European Union. If this right is to be exercised in practice, it is vital that we have access to safe, high-quality, environmentally friendly transport that is affordable for all. That requires an efficient, well-linked and interconnected public rail transport service serving all regions. That means publicly owned, integrated rail companies to achieve both standardisation between regions and services and cooperation at European level. That means we should treat passengers as citizen-users with rights and not just as customers, where the only thing that counts is the thickness of their wallets.
Unfortunately, the Commission, the Council and the majority of this Parliament have dogmatically chosen to make rail transport not an instrument of freedom, but a commodity like any other, left to the mercy of the market and of competition. We have ruined national rail companies by separating infrastructures and transport services, passengers and freight, operation and safety. We have forbidden cross-subsidisation, which allowed for standardisation across regions and services. We have taken this ridiculous approach so far that we have spent millions of euro so that locomotives, which were previously able to pull freight trains and passenger trains, can no longer pull both.
The outcome is damning: a deterioration in the quality of service and an increase in prices for users, line closures, infrastructures that are falling apart, and, above all, a significant decline in the level of safety. When you separate infrastructures and services, when you increasingly give a third party responsibility for safety, you take risks with the lives of users. The number of accidents, including fatal accidents, has increased in recent years. That is one of the terrible, logical consequences of your irresponsible policy.
With rail packages, instead of modernising railways in Europe and giving them the resources for their ambitions, we have disorganised this means of transport in order to launch it into foolish competition with air transport, and unfair and unequal competition with road transport, to the detriment of the coherence of networks and the development of local services. Thanks to your package, with the exception of the high-speed lines, we are now moving slower on French rail networks than we were a hundred years ago. We were promised that competition would bring prices down, but the complete opposite is true. As in the energy sector, competition is causing a sharp increase in prices for users.
I will give you one last example by way of conclusion. SNCF, France’s main consumer of electricity, used to purchase its energy from EDF at a specific tariff. However, in order to introduce rail competition, the Commission is forcing France to legislate so that, in June 2011, SNCF’s electricity bill will be 25% higher. Thank you Commission, thank you competition. In the midst of the crisis, job seekers and families will pay much more for their train tickets."@en1
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