Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-04-06-Speech-3-010-000"
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"en.20110406.4.3-010-000"2
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"Mr President, Mr Barnier, ladies and gentlemen, Parliament has responded to the Commission’s request concerning the measures needed to revitalise the Single Market by means of the report that we are debating and voting on today.
We also acknowledge that the proliferation of Commission initiatives on this subject, together with Europe 2020, the industrial policy and the Europe of innovation, runs the risk of blurring the central issue of revitalisation, which is to make the idea of the Single Market not only more friendly but also more appealing to Europeans.
Consensus, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, was most difficult on two issues. Firstly, with regard to respect for social values and rights, we came up against the reluctance of Members on the right and in the Group of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe to accept the need to permanently safeguard Europeans’ social rights so that they can never be swamped by market considerations in any future legislation. We especially regret the failure to prioritise a reference to the revision of the Posting of Workers Directive.
Secondly, with regard to safeguarding social services of general economic interest, the aim was to prevent the content of the activities of those services from being subject to purely market considerations or, at least, to eliminate the possibility of turning public social services into private monopolies or oligopolies in areas such as water supply, urban transport, education, health and social support.
Although it would appear to be useful to introduce competitive management and internal market mechanisms to those services, the social values associated with universal access will need to be safeguarded, since the principles of solidarity outweigh mere market considerations in such cases.
In this, we encountered reluctance from the parliamentary groups on our right to accept European legislation on this subject, and they only agreed to ‘using all the options available [...], based upon and consistent with Article 14 [and] Protocol 26’ to the Treaty.
The group to which I belong abstained from the final vote on the three reports in committee since no progress had been made on the social dimension of the Single Market. After the vote in committee, however, a number of positive points were included which improved the report considerably. Consensus was reached through a succession of compromises, with final amendments being subscribed by the main parliamentary groups without winners or losers.
All the parliamentary groups contributed to the end result – which does credit to the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and to those who worked on the report – through 266 amendments, as well as the opinions of five committees. All the contributions were useful. I would like to thank the shadow rapporteurs Róża Gräfin von Thun, Jürgen Creutzmann, Malcolm Harbour, Emilie Turunen and Kyriacos Triantaphyllides, as well as the group coordinators, for the productive criticism and spirit of cooperation that enabled the negotiations to reach a positive outcome. I particularly thank Mr Harbour for the generous, forward-thinking attitude that he has stamped on the committee’s work throughout the last four months.
From the set of 19 proposals relating to the Single Market Act for Europeans, for which I have been rapporteur, we have identified five priorities, using tangibility and feasibility in the short term as criteria.
Firstly, we need to increase the mobility of European citizens through the mutual recognition of professional qualifications, professional identity cards, the European skills passport and the regular measurement of mobility within the EU.
Secondly, we must improve border controls on goods imported from third countries and draw up a multiannual action plan for market surveillance and product safety.
Thirdly, the Roaming Regulation should be extended until June 2015, with price caps for roaming in order to reduce costs for the public and businesses.
Fourthly, we need guaranteed access to basic banking services, with improved transparency and comparability.
Fifthly, the obstacles encountered by mobile workers must be removed in order to ensure the full portability of their pension rights.
This exercise was simple and consensual, but it was more difficult to reach agreement on measures to address the Single Market fatigue mentioned in the Monti report and to achieve the holistic, concerted approach to respond to citizens’ needs and mistrust, which were clearly identified in the Grech report adopted by this House in May last year.
We certainly consider it artificial to divide Parliament’s work into three separate reports, despite the efforts of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection to unify the analyses and actions. The three components – businesses, Europeans and governance – have to progress simultaneously in order to produce a competitive Single Market, with smart, inclusive and sustainable growth making Europeans central to that market’s concerns."@en1
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