Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-12-13-Speech-2-410"
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"en.20051213.63.2-410"2
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".
Madam President, I shall try to be as brief as possible. Usually I am the last on the list in these late debates, so I know exactly what we are talking about!
I will stop there. I apologise if I have spoken for too long. I will now listen with great interest to the debate.
I would like to begin by thanking and congratulating Mr Kristensen and Parliament for this initiative. It is very important to identify the special situation regarding new Member States and consumer protection. Even though a lot has been done already, and I will talk about that later, a lot still needs to be done. We have come a long way, but extra effort is still needed. I know that some of you have already heard me speaking to the Intergroup, but I shall echo what I said here with one word: how? How are we going to do all the things you are suggesting? Most of them I agree with, and we are going to try and see how we can adopt in practical terms, but the problem is that to do all those things we will need adequate funds, and that is a problem.
It is true we have reached a very high level of legislation. This is a fact. But there will always be room for improvement. As you know, we have the review of the
very soon, but at the same time we have reached the point where we need to enforce, to implement. This is usually done through training, education, capacity-building – largely through consumer organisations. This is even truer for new Member States. The question is how this is to be done without sufficient funds.
We have a more demanding situation now. We now have 25 Member States, soon to be 27, and not 15 Member States. Yet at the same time, in practice, we will have fewer funds than we had for the EU-15. Based on last week’s latest proposal on the budget, if we fund the European Food Safety Authority and the European Centre for Disease Control, as envisaged in the programme, there will be no money left for anything else. New Member States or old Member States, new initiatives or old initiatives, we will not have any funds left. Therefore, we will have to re-evaluate our priorities and limit the areas in which we are going to work to make sure that we make an impact with the limited funds we will have.
It is true that we have a lot to do in the new Member States, but we have gone a long way. There are very interesting suggestions in the report. We will try to find the best ways to apply them. However, I can tell you that we have already achieved a lot: we offer training courses especially for consumer organisation staff in new Member States. More than 60% of the trainees come from new Member States. We give priority to calls for specific projects. EU co-financing is higher and the criteria are more favourable for the new Member States. We have already had information campaigns in Poland this year and will have them in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia next year.
With regard to European consumer centres, which are very important institutions – you have supported the idea many times – we already have them in seven out of the ten new Member States and next year will be establishing them in Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia. We will continue in the meantime to work on finding the means to make operational some of the calls in Mr Kristensen’s report. To do our job properly, we will need to have the right data and information. We will need to have objective criteria to be able to evaluate and assess the situation in each Member State and, in particular, in the new Member States.
Finally, I have to say that we have limits: not just financial limits, but also competence limits. What we do complements but does not substitute for national responsibility and national initiatives. Many aspects, such as the financing of the day-to-day operations of national consumer organisations, are the responsibility of national governments. That is the main reason why I always emphasise in my meetings with the ministers responsible for consumer protection that consumer policy has to become a priority. I believe that Members of the European Parliament can also play a very important role in this respect.
I shall conclude by making two points. Firstly, I can assure you that in the consumer strategy we will bring forward in 2006 there will be a more detailed, elaborate proposal that we will develop and present to Parliament. It will give a greater focus on new Member States, taking into account as many of the suggestions in the report as possible.
I should like to announce to the House something that you may find interesting. We have circulated a questionnaire. We are building a country profile for all Member States in the consumer protection area, containing all the data on the situation, and this will be published on the website. This will make it more transparent, so that both consumer organisations, Members of Parliament and anybody interested will be able to see. If there is anything incorrect, I would be very happy to know, because most of the information will be given to us by the Member States. But at least it will be the first step towards being able to compare the situation between the various Member States."@en1
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