Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-11-14-Speech-1-077-000"
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"en.20111114.17.1-077-000"2
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"Madam President, honourable Members, good evening to you all. I would like to thank you for giving me the floor in order to raise an extremely important issue at a time when our discussions are centred on our citizens, the single market, and the human dimension of that single market, which we wish to enhance. Recognition of professional qualifications is of vital interest to our citizens. Twenty-eight per cent of them today envisage working in another country at some point in their career.
My third point concerns preserving automatic recognition. Automatic recognition is a system that currently promotes mobility. It is an
that we want to maintain. I am very pleased that Parliament supports this view. Nevertheless, I shall propose to modernise the system and go even further by extending it to other professions, particularly through common frameworks for training, which could be useful in replacing the previous concept of common platforms. We need to modernise, certainly, but without undermining automatic recognition.
It was with that in mind, Ms McClarkin, that you just mentioned the issue of language requirements for health professionals, which should be approached with a certain amount of caution. The problem is not the directive itself. I believe this directive establishes an obligation for professionals to have a knowledge of the language of the host country, which is clearly needed if they are to properly exercise their profession. We believe that the problem stems from the implementation of this obligation for health professionals in Member States. I have two comments to make on this point. Firstly, as far as salaried professionals are concerned, I would highlight the role of employers, who should verify their employees’ language skills, and also I would point out that the best solution we have on this matter is severing the links between language skills testing and recognition of professional qualifications.
I have a fourth and final point to make: points of single contact (PSCs). For businesses and self-employed professionals, the Services Directive was a major step forward. I would also like to say that, in my visits to the Member States and my dealings with national governments, I endeavour each week to check for proper transposition and, above all, implementation of the Services Directive, which has more potential than is currently being exploited. The Services Directive represented real progress, with the establishment of PSCs in order to obtain information and complete administrative procedures electronically. Salaried workers and health professionals should benefit from those same advantages. We should therefore establish an online central information point, as you have suggested yourself, based on those PSCs, enabling professionals to carry out the recognition procedure online.
Those are the four points I wanted to mention, and may I sincerely thank you once again, Ms McClarkin, for the quality of your report, which is going to be of great use to me and my services in the coming days, before we put forward the legislative proposal on 20 December.
Between 2007 and 2010, the automatic recognition of professional qualifications allowed more than 100 000 Europeans to make that personal goal a reality. We believe this mechanism has even greater potential. Today, it applies to some 6.4 million professionals, of whom 5.7 million are health professionals, 160 000 are veterinary surgeons, and more than 435 000 are architects.
Ladies and gentlemen, these sorts of figures clearly show what free movement of professionals could mean for the internal market as a whole.
That is why we want to, and should, facilitate that recognition, making it simpler and faster. The recognition of qualifications is a vehicle for greater trust, and goodness knows we need our citizens and businesses to trust more in the European project right now.
I would like to follow these general remarks by saying how happy I am that the own-initiative report you have just presented, Ms McClarkin, shows real convergence with many of the ideas proposed in the Commission Green Paper published last June. This confirms once again the strong cooperation between our two institutions, which I value greatly. I also witnessed the quality and sincerity of our relationship at the public conference organised by the Commission on 7 November in Brussels, at which many of you were present, particularly the Chair, Mr Harbour, as well as Ms Turunen, Ms Vergnaud and Ms Le Grip, who were all keen to speak in the panel discussions.
I should particularly like to thank you, Ms McClarkin, and the Chair, Mr Harbour, and to welcome the work carried out by the other Members of the European Parliament who, as part of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection, the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety, and the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, contributed to the discussion you have presented in a highly constructive manner.
I would like to state that, as far as I am concerned, the report you have just presented provides clarification and makes a very significant contribution right at a time when we are putting the finishing touches to the legislative proposal that will be presented by the Commission on 20 December. Our positions are not always identical but, apart from a few subtle differences, there are no major differences of opinion.
I would just like to emphasise four important points. First of all, the professional card. The main aim of modernising the directive is to promote mobility by simplifying the procedures involved in the mutual recognition of qualifications, and by making them more efficient. As I have already said, that is why we are considering creating this European professional card, which should be simple, practical and specific. It is not a traditional smart card, which could prove very expensive and, in any case, difficult to bring out at a reasonable cost. The card we are proposing would be more like an electronic certificate based on an information exchange between the competent authorities. This card would be optional for professionals but compulsory for the competent authorities, and could reduce the time required to process a recognition request from several months to a few weeks. Of course, the Member States of origin would need to be much more involved, and, as was said earlier, the internal market information system (IMI) would have to be used in order to help reduce costs for all concerned.
The second point is the number of regulated professions. I am aware – and you also mentioned it a moment ago, Ms McClarkin – of the debate on the number of regulated professions, which some consider too high. On this sensitive issue, I would like to put things in context. Of the 800 categories of regulated professions, 43% are health professionals, and 9% work in education or are professionals from the social sector. If I may give my opinion objectively, I do not think it is unreasonable that, given the sensitive nature of these sectors, the professions included within those sectors should be regulated. I therefore believe that we should first look at what exactly is being regulated and why. I have not excluded the idea of initially applying a compulsory, enhanced transparency measure for Member States. It is up to those Member States to endeavour to make a critical analysis of the number and type of regulated professions. The other day, I attended the Competitiveness Council, where one of the ministers around the table, the Portuguese minister, explained that Portugal had taken the decision to eliminate around 15 regulations that were considered unnecessary. However, while we are waiting for Member States to take the steps we have encouraged, we shall propose solutions such as partial access, which could reduce the difficulties experienced by some professionals in terms of mobility."@en1
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