Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-04-11-Speech-1-133"
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, speaking on behalf of the Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats, I, too, would like to thank Mr Markov for his cooperation and also for the willingness to listen that he demonstrated in discussions that were certainly not always straightforward and in dealing with an over-abundance of amendments.
Members of the Committee on Transport and Tourism were united in aiming for regulations that would improve both road safety and drivers’ quality of life, regulations that would be not only correct but also practical and capable of being monitored. Differences of opinion may well have arisen over this or that point of detail.
The Committee also raised the fundamental question of whether a new directive is actually needed at all. It is, in any case, clear that it is not acceptable that those hauliers that do not comply with the minimum standards should be getting an ever-larger share of the market. This is something on which I think all groups in this House were agreed. There may be doubt about whether this aim can be achieved by way of more comprehensive legislation, but one thing is clear – and that brings me back to something on which we are all agreed – that monitoring was and remains the most important thing.
The directive can be as good as you like in black and white, but that alone will not achieve very much; what is needed – and here I am appealing directly to the Council – is regular checks and harmonised penalties. You can imagine what we will end up with if people can choose, from among various countries, one whose penal arrangements are ideal from their point of view. That is something we are eminently familiar with, particularly in the border region from which I come.
We had over 240 amendments to deal with, and some 60 of them are left, along with an additional 16 of them. The Committee on Transport and Tourism has done a good job. I do not, of course, want to discuss all the amendments right now, but I would like to stress that our proposed date for the digital tachograph is intended to achieve legal certainty with what we regard as greater stability than what might otherwise come to pass if we were perhaps, in September, October or November, to adopt a directive that ought to have been applied in August of the same year. It therefore appears to me that the proposed date of 2006/2007 makes the legal basis rather more secure, and so we have to be able to debate this date and send a clear message to the world at large.
The ‘three and a half tonne question’ was a major issue. We regard this as a safety issue, but we also do not want what are popularly called ‘sprinters’ to interfere with mobility in urban areas. This led some of us to believe that a limit of three and a half tonnes was something we could in any case work with. Another consideration is that it would not distort competition.
Among other things, we were aiming at flexibility, and what has been proposed today by way of daily rest periods and ways of regulating them, are, I think, capable of being more readily monitored than what the Council proposed. The figures are quite straightforward: 4.5 hours on the road and three breaks of quarter of an hour each, to be taken at times of the driver’s choosing. That is just an example of what we were trying to achieve.
We too have tried to be flexible, and we hope that the Council and the Commission, when they look at these amendments, will be able to follow Parliament’s thinking."@en1
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