Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-04-11-Speech-1-156"
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I am a newly elected Member of this Parliament, and this own-initiative report is therefore my first report as an MEP.
By way of conclusion, I would like to remind you of what I think are the three main reasons why I am asking you to support my report on short sea shipping and the motorways of the sea. First, widespread use of short sea shipping running through all sectors of the European economy would have an extremely positive impact on the development of all regions in the European Union and would be a fantastic way of creating hundreds of thousands of jobs across the continent. Secondly, short sea shipping is one of the solutions that will enable us to reconcile protection of our natural heritage with economic and social development in our regions. Finally, short sea shipping has an essential role to play in regional planning and in strengthening regional cohesion within the European Union. In that respect, I believe that the concept of motorways of the sea should be fully integrated into the issue of strengthening solidarity within the EU.
That is why this report proposes, on behalf of the Committee on Transport and Tourism, that consideration should be given to the option of recognising that high-priority projects in the field of short sea shipping, which plays an important part in improving regional cohesion within the EU, are services of general economic interest.
I hope I will be able to enjoy the widest possible support in Parliament on a subject as important as the growth of short sea shipping and of intermodal transport. In this way, the European Union’s policies on environmental protection, regional development and regional cohesion will be strengthened for the well-being of our fellow citizens and future generations. I therefore hope that I can count on your broad support.
Before setting out the main points, I would like to thank the Committee on Transport and Tourism, and my political group, the PSE, for giving me the task of working on the very important subject of short sea shipping and motorways of the sea. I would particularly like to thank the administrators of the European Parliament, Mr Darmis and Mr Préat, and my parliamentary assistants, Mr Caballé and Mr Polack. They have supported me throughout the process of consultation, analysis and drafting leading to this report. Finally, I would like to express my thanks to the services of the Commission’s Energy and Transport DG and to the main professional players working in the sectors concerned, in particular the ship-owners, logistics experts and ports that played an active role in our consultations.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my surprise at the lack of human and financial resources available to MEPs for investigations. The European Parliament, with the continual growth of its budgetary and legislative powers, has become the voice of the citizens within the European Union. I was therefore surprised to discover that an MEP, as a rapporteur, cannot organise observation missions financed by the European Parliament other than the official missions of the parliamentary committees, which take place only once or twice a year. As you know, the devil is in the detail and, if the European Parliament is going to be effective in its supervisory role, it will in future need to benefit from increased levels of in-house expertise, in particular so that the independence and impartiality of its Members can be guaranteed.
First of all, let me remind you of the context surrounding the issue of the development of maritime transport in Europe. In its White Paper on European transport policy for 2010, published in 2001, the European Commission highlighted the important role to be played by short sea shipping in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and stressed the need to simplify the regulatory framework. It introduced the concept of motorways of the sea, pointing to the need to promote mass rapid maritime transport links providing a way around the bottlenecks posed, for example, by the Alps and Pyrenees. The European Parliament supported these proposals for short sea shipping in its report on the White Paper, adopted on 2 January 2003. The rapporteur for that report was Mr Izquierdo Collado. The Commission’s most recent communication, which was published in 2004 and which we discussed, is primarily a mid-term document; its aim is to review the situation in short sea shipping, the obstacles it encounters and the actions taken to resolve them.
The intention of my report is firstly to provide you with an overview of short sea shipping in Europe. I would like to draw your attention to two main facts. Firstly, short sea shipping’s share of all intra-European transport rose by 25% between 1995 and 2002 and now accounts for 40% of all goods transported within Europe, as against 45% for road transport. Secondly, recent data regarding the environmental impact of short sea shipping show that it has a much smaller negative impact than road transport.
The conclusion to be drawn from this overview is clear. Our task is to promote short sea shipping, in order to reconcile protection of the environment, quality of life and economic growth. However, there are a number of obstacles to the growth of short sea shipping. I do not want exhaustively to list here all the obstacles that I stressed in my report, but I would like to point out to you two main issues. Firstly, this report stresses the lack of a real interventionist policy aimed at attracting and guiding the major road transport organisers and operators to short sea shipping.
Secondly, our meetings with managers within the sector have convinced us of the urgent need to set up clear, effective, adequate funding mechanisms for the actions that need to be taken. The various existing sources of funding should enable optimum complementarity, making it possible to launch durable new lines.
In view of these obstacles, my report lays particular emphasis on the need to settle the issue of the standardisation of intermodal loading units and to facilitate the integration of short sea shipping into the supply chain. We also suggest relaunching the Community debate on the unification of the legal system for the multimodal chain. This report was approved unanimously by the members of the Committee on Transport and Tourism. Our consultation work enabled us to reach compromises on crucial points. The report emphasises the potential for increasing the use of short sea shipping for passenger transport, the opportunities to create thousands of jobs, the importance of links between short sea shipping and inland waterways, the importance of short sea shipping for islands, compliance with Community competition rules and, finally, improving the environmental performance of short sea shipping.
As a correction and in the interests of consistency, I would like to propose a purely technical oral amendment. The aim of this amendment is to bring the definition of short sea shipping in recital A, in which we included passenger transport and inland waterways, into line with that in recital C, in which we neglected to do so. My amendment therefore adds the words ‘and passengers’ and ‘or inland waterway’ to recital C, so that the definition of short sea shipping is the same throughout the report."@en1
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