Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-02-10-Speech-2-328"
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"en.20040210.13.2-328"2
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".
Mr President, Mr Bushill-Matthews and Mr Pronk, on behalf of the PPE-DE group, have submitted a series of questions to which I shall reply. Of course, I too hope that the answer to the last three questions will be yes, which means very close cooperation and decisiveness by the Commission and, more importantly, the Member States.
Your first question concerns what the Commission intends to do in order to achieve the objectives of the Lisbon Summit, as far as demographic trends are concerned. The demographic problem is, at the moment, at the epicentre of our three basic policies, economic policy, especially public finances, the policy on employment and the policy on social cohesion. The question of ageing is now, as you will see, the basic element in the general orientations of economic policy and the guidelines of the strategy for employment, with specific targets. I particularly want to tell you that this year, in the spring 2004 report, we have set three priorities, one of which is the promotion of active ageing, which essentially means the extension of professional life.
We have three categories of action. One relates to abolishing economic disincentives, which essentially discourage workers from delaying their retirement. In many countries, the regime which exists today is that it is more profitable to retire than to remain in work, because you earn less. So there is the serious question of disincentives. The second is the promotion of access to training for all workers, but especially elderly workers, and here we have set specific quantitative targets. The third is improving the quality of work. The Commission, within these frameworks of efforts to put demographic ageing at the centre of its policies, is proposing to extend the open method of coordination to modernising the care system and the social protection system. Here we have a particular problem, which concerns the increased burden both from the economic point of view and from the workload point of view and, hence, from the point of view of serving very old people since, due to the changes in our society, it would appear that the health systems cannot play the role which they played in the past.
Your second question concerns flexibility in retirement rules and is particularly topical. As you yourself said, we have set specific targets. We have set the Lisbon targets, to increase the employment rate of the elderly to 50%, and the Barcelona targets, to increase the average age at which workers leave the job market by five years by 2010. These targets are being monitored by the Commission. Every year, as you know, we publish indicators and tables and it is clear that the Member States are not making efforts to the same degree to give us results. At the moment, we are examining, together with the social protection and employment committees, how social systems obstruct or favour easy retirement. The final report is at your disposal, it will be submitted again in 2004, and we can see what the problems are in each system as regards incentives to retire, disability benefits, unemployment benefits, older workers and dependents' pensions, and how the logic of incentives rather than the logic of integrating these people into the job market has also distorted the job market, as well as efforts by people themselves to enter the job market. We believe that this report, which will be submitted to the European Council, is also an important tool in the hands of the Member States. I must of course tell you that the European Commission has constantly recommended the introduction of flexible retirement systems since 1980 and the response has not been as we expected.
As far as your third question on the results of the Wim Kok committee is concerned, we consider that they are extremely important, mainly because they go into detailed recommendations for each Member State. We have already included the Kok report in the strategy on employment and our recommendations for all the countries will take account of this report. I think that it is interesting that, in cooperation with both Mr Kok and the ministries of employment and social partners, we are presenting the conclusions of the committee to the Member States in an effort to achieve greater publicity and galvanise not just the governments but also the social partners into implementing them."@en1
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