Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-11-14-Speech-3-422"
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"en.20071114.38.3-422"2
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".
Mr President, representatives of the Council and the Commission, ladies and gentlemen, I should like to begin by thanking my colleagues, who entrusted me with this report, and the shadow rapporteur for their respective contributions.
Obviously, in the society we live in, data collection has become an essential tool of analysis. Data about job vacancies are used not only to gauge the health of the economy but also to determine and shape certain policies. Nowadays, statistics about job vacancies have a direct impact on financial markets. Ratings agencies await these figures and use them to inform the advice that they give.
Statistics, Mr President, are, if I may say so, a demanding subject. It is worth quoting G.O. Ashley’s famous comment: ‘Like other occult techniques of divination, the statistical method has a private jargon, deliberately contrived to obscure its methods from non-practitioners.’ In working together on this text in the Employment and Social Affairs Committee, my colleagues and I sought to highlight three aspects.
Firstly, there is the political aspect of the regulation: reasserting once again, even in the context of a statistical tool like this, the concept of free movement for European citizens and unconditional, unlimited and unhindered access to employment. Then there is the social aspect: making it easier for all the people of Europe to find suitable employment and to access information about job vacancies throughout the European Union. Lastly – and we have the Commission and the Council to thank here – there is the technical aspect of data quality. We are talking about a system that has harmonised procedures and has effectively updated arrangements for statistical information gathering, in other words an improved approach to obtaining precise data.
As you know, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we previously had no more than a gentleman's agreement – that is to say a voluntary basis for statistical information gathering. Accurate analysis depends, however, on the collection of these data being compulsory and consistent. That is why a regulation is a better legal basis than a directive because the provisions of a regulation, unlike those of a directive, are identical throughout the Union: the Member States have no power to apply them incompletely or selectively and no choice as to the methods of pursuing the stipulated aims.
One of the aims of the Lisbon Strategy is to bring more people onto the labour market, and at the same time more jobs need to be created, hence the need for the best possible system of information on labour supply and demand. Quality of information can be the key to success, and we all know today that information is power. That applies in economics as elsewhere, and that is why it was deemed necessary to develop and publish a structural indicator for job vacancies, capable of measuring just how narrow the job market is and where the skills shortages lie.
The Commission and the European Central Bank also need quarterly data on job vacancies in order to monitor fluctuation in the number of vacancies in particular sectors of the economy. Job vacancy figures are part of a series of major European economic indicators and they are needed for evaluation of prevailing conditions on the EU labour market and within the euro area under the EMU Action Plan.
Mr President, I will conclude by quoting Abbé Pierre, who said that many politicians are familiar with poverty only through statistics, and no one has yet shed tears over statistics. We ought to need no convincing of the necessity for a technically more effective mechanism for gathering all the statistics that are required. As politicians we can do our job by making it easier for people to find suitable employment. These statistics will enable us to facilitate their efforts."@en1
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