Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-02-07-Speech-4-056"
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".
Mr President, I should like to start by saying that this report will help enormously in improving how we use an important tool. As Mrs Smet said, it is vital that we understand that this is the first social policy tool we have had at European level, a tool achieved with a great deal of hard work and sensitive negotiation. The report and the amendments tabled by the honourable Members touch on three issues: content, time and procedure. As far as the content is concerned, I would remind the House that the Commission highlighted the need for a binding Social Agenda in the spring of 2000 and spent 6 months making important policy preparations in close collaboration with the French presidency and Parliament, in the person of Mrs Van Lancker, resulting in Nice in agreement between the leading countries, for the first time ever, on a long-term, five-year Social Agenda. The Commission was specifically instructed to implement this Social Agenda and it announces a programme every year so that the commitments made will be fulfilled by 2005. I should like to remind the House that I presented the results of the first year's implementation of the Agenda to the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs in October 2000. It was 100% efficient; there was a 100% correlation between commitments and implementation. In October 2001, I again presented a table of actions in 2001 to the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, and again there was a 100% correlation between commitments and results. The question is, does the Agenda remain constant or does it absorb new factors over the course of time?
The Commission is basically – or rather absolutely – committed to the Social Agenda as adopted in Nice on the basis of the Agenda agreed in 2000. In the meantime, we have promised to review it in 2003 and, of course, I agree with the report that Parliament will need to play an important part if we are to have the facility to adjust it.
My second comment concerns time. First, the report on the Agenda and the Commission's summary report to the spring Council need to be submitted at the same time. This always creates problems, which we are trying to resolve. Secondly, our criticism is based on the results of the first year of the Agenda, as Mrs Hermange says in her report, so we must bear in mind that the report in question had to be submitted two months after the decision taken in Nice.
This brings me to the procedure. I agree with the report on three points: first, that the Social Agenda and the table of results cannot simply be a statement of past action and should make a careful examination of broader achievements and look to the future. Secondly, it must refer back to the wider review of the factors involved and look forward to future expectations, these factors being, of course, the social partners, together with women's organisations and civic society organisations, as described by the honourable Members.
The third point is that the stability and cohesiveness of the Agenda are not written in stone, i.e. we must intervene wherever there is an emergency or new elements create problems at social level with social repercussions. As was the case recently with the initiative on restructuring, to which the Member in question has already referred, where we had 350,000 redundancies in a year due to corporate restructuring in the European Union. We had no choice but to intervene, even though there was no commitment in the Agenda.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am positive that this report and the close collaboration with the committee in question will help to improve consistently the performance of the Social Agenda which, I would again remind the House, is a completely new tool and which close cooperation will help to make even better."@en1
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