Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-01-16-Speech-3-150"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20020116.11.3-150"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
"Mr President, I would like to congratulate you on your election, by a large majority, as Vice-President.
I shall describe a case which relates to these Directives, and which concerns my home city of Helsinki. Some time ago the Helsinki public transport corporation, being the public procurement authority, put out to public tender certain bus routes and set criteria stipulating
that the buses to be procured were to have the lowest possible emissions; in other words, that they had to be environmentally-friendly. And so the City of Helsinki consequently opted to procure buses which run on natural gas and whose emissions are very low.
A competing bidder was not satisfied with this, but appealed to the national court, claiming
that the City of Helsinki had selected a bid which was not the most advantageous one economically, in other words it was not the cheapest. The advocate-general of the European Court of Justice has recently issued his opinion on this matter, which may be adopted as the judgment of the Court. In fact the opinion of the advocate-general supports very strongly the view of the City of Helsinki that a public procurement authority should have the right to set environmentally-friendly criteria which it will use in its competitive tender, and also to select products in compliance with this. It is interesting that the position of the advocate-general is precisely the same as that of the Commission's Directorate-General which is responsible for environmental matters, and different from that of the Directorate-General which is responsible for the internal market. Now I would also like to draw the attention of Commissioner Bolkestein to this decision, which may well in fact become final; we do not of course know this as yet.
These Directives are of great economic significance: our obligation is to enable the rules of the game to be as transparent and straightforward as possible, and competitive tenders to be as open as possible, and also to ensure that public authorities are able to promote solutions which are environmentally friendly and also socially favourable.
To my esteemed and dear colleague Astrid Thors I would like to say that of course social legislation is different in the different countries, but perhaps this is the precise reason why we should also permit a public authority to comply with its own social criteria, and why we should find sustainable compromises between the political groups in these questions."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples