Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-05-16-Speech-3-221"
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"en.20010516.9.3-221"2
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"Mr President, for years the European Parliament has been arguing for Community initiatives on pensions and consequently we are pleased with the principles agreed in the Council and the work prepared by the Commission. The task now is to use the texts in front of us in order to promote the convergence of the systems through cooperation and coordination between Member States. There are two ways of approaching this. On the one hand, there are a series of common challenges, the ageing of the population and the dearth of younger people or the relation between younger and older people, the changing degree of dependence or the ratio of active to inactive people, etc., limited budgetary resources, technical potential in health care, and so on. On the other hand, there are number of cross-border complications: the mobility of individuals or the option of working in another Member State and drawing a pension, the mobility of capital or the option of saving in another Member State and drawing a pension, the supplementary pension funds, which unlike the compulsory pension schemes appeal to people in various Member States and even in other countries. For all those reasons, the systems must be made sustainable so that they can withstand common challenges and cross-border complications.
The report of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs indicates current thinking in the European Parliament and also in the European People’s Party on the convergence of pension systems. It is not for the European Union to prescribe to Member States how pensions should be organised and financed. The Member States themselves choose the appropriate ratio of compulsory scheme to supplementary schemes, between an apportionment method and capitalisation, between contributions and payments or between social security or index-linked prosperity. But, on the one hand, solutions must be found for difficulties that hamper the free movement of pensions and pensioners and on the other efforts must be made to monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of systems with budgetary resources in the service of social aims and not the other way round.
For the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs and for the PPE-DE Group too the combination of cooperation between Member States and coordination between the systems seems the appropriate way of safeguarding pensions and reassuring pensioners and consequently this point must be clarified at the European Council in Gothenburg.
I think that years ago the Luxembourg Summit on employment, where the open coordination method was effectively introduced, showed us an excellent way but of course a link must be made between pensions and employment. For as long as Europe and the various Member States do not succeed in solving the difficulties surrounding the employment of the over-55s and for as long as the case is not pressed more urgently, more opportunities are not created and more things are not made virtually compulsory, the pensions problem will not be solved. It is essential to link the two. This should be one of the guidelines in the framework of the coordination and indicators which is about to be drawn up."@en1
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