Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-12-19-Speech-4-036"
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"en.20021219.2.4-036"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, all of us – or the overwhelming majority of us in this House – view the single internal market and competition in a very favourable light. There are, though, many people who are affected by this issue of general interest, and we are indeed seeing a burgeoning commercialisation of what are called services of general interest. To a large degree, such commercialisation is justified, but thought ought also to be given to whether or not we should go down this road.
Much has already been said about the Green Paper and the Convention, and also about the question of whether we have left things too late. There is one thing that we can say with certainty, and that is that Parliament believes that the dialogue between the Commission and the European Court of Justice must come to an end. Parliament is being ignored to an extent that, in this area in particular, could scarcely be surpassed; hence the urgent call for the Commission to make some progress on laying down specific criteria for this.
There are two points that are of great importance to me, and that I would like to see resolved once and for all. One feature of the discussion on services of general interest is that the Commission is willing to get involved only where economic activity is concerned. I am sure that this is perfectly understandable in principle, but it always ends up being about questions of detail. Is an ambulance service an economic activity? Yes or no? We do not need decisions in individual cases, but we do need the Commission to at long last specify the criteria to which it will refer when it takes decisions in future. It is not acceptable for decisions – like those on savings banks – to be at short notice and always, immediately beforehand, forwarded only for information.
My second point relates to subsidiarity, which does, indeed, loom large in the Convention's deliberations. This is where the Commission's delay in making its presentation to the Convention has been crucial, but the regions and the Member States must continue to be given the option of determining these matters themselves on a local basis. What must not be allowed to happen is standards being imposed by the Commission through the back door.
Subsidiarity is about having scope to take your own decisions on a local basis, so that things may perhaps be different in Bavaria – where I come from – from what they are in, say, Luxembourg, where the Commissioner comes from, or in Spain, Portugal, Greece or, in future perhaps, in Lithuania. That is why definitions must not be imposed through the back door. At the end of the day, though, I have to say that what we and the public need is legal certainty, and that is not promoted by what one of your fellow-Commissioners occasionally gets up to, then going as far as to advocate the deregulation of water. That, at the moment, is not on the agenda, and has to be dealt with in a sector-specific way; it is for that reason that the Commission needs to get around to taking action on this."@en1
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