Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-11-28-Speech-3-143"
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"en.20071128.18.3-143"2
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Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, after the adoption of the first two railway packages in 2001 and 2004 and before the adoption of the third railway package on 13 December 2006, the Commission proposed a new set of legislative measures on cross-acceptance of rolling stock, particularly locomotives. The aim of the measures is to revamp the rail sector by removing hindrances to the operation of trains on the European rail network.
Now I come to my final point on the proposal to amend the Regulation establishing a European Railway Agency. This concerns extending the powers of the European Railway Agency to allow it to compile the various national procedures and existing technical rules for authorisation of locomotives, and to draw up and subsequently extend the list of requirements to be verified once only, either because these are internationally recognised rules or because they may be considered as equivalent between the Member States. This task will be carried out in cooperation with national safety authorities under the guidance of the Agency. The Agency must issue technical opinions at the request of national safety authorities or the Commission.
While making these amendments, we also clarified a number of other points in the Regulation on the basis of past experience, particularly in relation to the introduction of the ERTMS (European Rail Traffic Management System) and registers of rolling stock.
Mr President, I apologise for this rather technical commentary, and wish to say that the first and second rail packages, and soon the third package also, form the legal and economic framework for sound operation of rail services within the single market. The operation will be completed by the opening up of national markets from the technical point of view. This is the objective of these proposals so eagerly awaited by the railway industry. I wish to thank Parliament for its splendid and rapid work on these texts.
The Commission launched this initiative for two main reasons: to facilitate free movement of trains within the EU by making the procedure for placing locomotives in service more transparent and efficient, and also to simplify regulations by consolidating and merging the three rail interoperability directives into a single directive.
The full package contains a communication, three legislative proposals and their impact assessment: a communication setting out the current difficulties and proposing a number of solutions to simplify certification of railway vehicles; a proposal to recast the existing rail interoperability directives; a proposal to amend the Regulation establishing a European Railway Agency, and a report on the impact assessment.
What is the central focus of these texts? One crucial aspect is facilitating free movement of trains, and this concerns the procedure for approval of locomotives. According to railway companies and manufacturers, the approval procedure is extremely long and costly, and there would appear to be very little justification for a number of the authorities’ demands from the purely technical standpoint.
The Commission shares this view and intends to solve the problem by amending the legislation and also by asking railway authorities in the Member States to modify their attitude, and hence the importance of the communication issued along with the legislative proposals, suggesting solutions that may be applied immediately with no need to wait for any amendments to laws. This communication has not been issued in vain. One cooperation agreement has already emerged, signed in May for the Rotterdam-Genoa corridor. This agreement follows the concepts proposed in our communication to the letter.
We could also mention the proposed recast of the directives on interoperability and safety. The Commission had two objectives in mind when it drew up these proposals. The first was to simplify the approval procedure for railway vehicles. To this end we have introduced the principle of mutual recognition of authorisations for placing in service already issued by a Member State. This principle is that rolling stock which has already been granted authorisation for placing in service in one Member State will not require any further certification in another Member State beyond that required by additional national regulations arising out of the characteristics of the local network, for instance.
Secondly, in a bid for clarity, we have used a single text to combine the 1996 Directive on interoperability of the trans-European high-speed rail system and the 2001 Directive on interoperability of the conventional rail system. In that regard, the new regulatory procedure with scrutiny has been introduced for certain powers delegated to the Commission by the Council and the European Parliament.
Amending the interoperability and safety directives prompted us to carry out two further operations. We have made a number of amendments to technical issues in the new interoperability directive in light of experience gained during ten years of work not only by the Commission but also by the Member States in relation to comitology, by industry and the sector and, as of 2005, by the European Railway Agency.
We also wanted to respond to other operators by clarifying, in the safety directive, relations between the railway company and the entity carrying out maintenance. The aim is, through this directive, to set out the new regulatory framework emerging from the Community directives on the opening up of the market and from the new contract on the use of wagons implemented on an international scale by the COTIF Convention."@en1
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