Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-10-25-Speech-3-408"
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"en.20061025.29.3-408"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, public procurement is of crucial importance in terms of budget and competition policy – on that we all agree.
Competitive tendering is a fit and proper way of determining the most economic way of providing public services, and, over and above that, mandatory Europe-wide tendering does something essential in terms of opening up the internal market to competition.
As rapporteur, Mrs Weiler has done a fine job of steering us, together, through the public procurement dossier – which is a difficult one – in an exemplary way. It is thanks to her that we in the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection have already managed to come up with plenty of workable compromises, so it is only right that we should take this opportunity to express our gratitude and particular appreciation to her, and both I and the other Members involved are certainly willing to do that.
I have advised my group to hold fast to what has emerged from this vote, and wish only to say something about the few contentious points. In so doing, let me start with institutionalised public/private partnerships, which are a relatively recent phenomenon, the development of which should not be unduly restricted by legal regulation, and it became clear from the public consultation that people do not want it to be.
I therefore recommend that we go no further than an interpretative communication and guidelines that are comprehensible not only by lawyers but also by those who take decisions at the municipal level, which will not only afford greater flexibility than does legislation, but also – and above all – hold out the prospect of a rapid resolution to the legal uncertainties that are very definitely still there. This is where the Commission needs to act as promptly as possible.
Moving on to inter-municipal cooperation, the second contentious point, I believe it to be self-evident that the municipalities should not in any way be hampered in their management of their own affairs, but equally self-evident, too, that this cannot mean that public/private partnerships should be generally exempted from the obligation to put work out to tender.
Although public authorities are not obliged to hand over to third parties the performance of functions for which a market exists, should they decide to entrust third parties with the performance of a service, they must be bound by a public tendering process, as is indeed clear from Article 295 of the European Communities Treaty, which requires neutrality in the application of internal market rules to public and private undertakings. That, by the same token, makes cooperation between municipalities possible in principle, albeit subject to the restrictions that are so well stated in what is now paragraph 45 of the Weiler report, namely when cooperation between municipalities is for the purpose of administrative restructuring or where real in-house monitoring is provided for.
Perhaps I might be permitted to add something as I close, namely that people in Europe have had very varying experiences of public/private partnerships, and so I am certainly very glad to see that a start is to be made on an exchange of good practice, which will bring in its train more good examples of working PPPs.
I might also add that I believe we should be conducting this debate in Brussels rather than in Strasbourg."@en1
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