Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-12-10-Speech-1-115"
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"en.20071210.18.1-115"2
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"Mr President, population and housing censuses are the central building block for all statistical reporting on the people that live in the European Union. In almost every policy area in which the EU is active, be it economic, social or environmental, high-quality population data are required to help formulate operational objectives and to evaluate progress. International, European and national institutions need census data to make valid comparisons between EU Member States.
Accurate data on the population are required to comply with important legislation. Examples are the qualified majority voting within the Council, or the distribution of Structural Funds (on the basis of ‘GDP per head’ figures.)
The purpose of the present regulation is to provide a clear European framework to achieve comparability of the results of the censuses conducted in the EU Member States. It clarifies the responsibilities and roles of the statistical bodies on the national and the European levels and sets common requirements concerning the quality and transparency of results, methods and the technology used.
This will be a major step forward to the harmonisation of demographic and social statistics. Population censuses have a long tradition in the countries of today’s European Union, in some countries reaching back over centuries. For the first time there will be a European legislative framework for the censuses. The word ‘historic’ might well be appropriate to describe this development. The regulation will also be an important milestone for international cooperation in the area of population and housing censuses in which the European Commission, via Eurostat, has been active over many years.
There is a broad agreement across all the institutions involved – the Commission, the Council and Parliament – about the importance of the legislation. It is only natural and appreciated that the legislation about censuses raises debate. After all, you will decide upon the collection of data about all European citizens as well as upon the most cost- and burden-intensive statistical exercise.
The issue is politically sensitive and requires a considerable investment of taxpayers’ money and citizens’ goodwill in the Member States.
However, we should not forget that the absence of subjective and comparable census data would lead to negative consequences. The data are used for policy formulation and evaluation, administrative purposes and social research that increases the welfare of the people living in the European Union. The benefits of harmonised census data by far outweigh the efforts to collect it.
The Member States have been carrying out their national censuses for many decades. What we can achieve with this European legislation is to make their efforts pay off even better by ensuring census data that are of the highest possible quality and comparable between the regions of the European Union.
This is why the European Commission supports the debate that is still ongoing and sincerely hopes that a solution will be found that is acceptable to a broad majority within this House, as well as to the Member States represented in the Council. We appeal to all to support the rapporteur, Ms Juknevičienė, in her quest to find such a compromise."@en1
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