Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-12-10-Speech-1-118"
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"en.20071210.18.1-118"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, Mrs Madeira, who was to have spoken on behalf of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, is unable to be with us because of transport problems. I shall therefore be presenting her views on the importance of this report and her concerns, which I share, and which I expressed previously in this plenary session regarding development policies.
The approval of the Treaty of Lisbon, which is to be signed this week by the Heads of State or Government, makes it absolutely vital to have reliable European Union population data. The new voting method included in that Treaty, which will henceforth take account not only of the Member States’ vote, but also of the population figures, means that we must be aware that population censuses are crucial for the effective operation of the European Union. However, this regulation is important for other reasons apart from the voting method – it is important also for all indicators concerning employment, regional, structural or social matters that take account of the data provided by each of the Member States and that, often, in view of the discrepancies in the data collection methods used or in the reference periods, produce inadequate analyses and results of questionable validity. The last time this exercise was carried out, in 2000, the data were available only in 2005 and thus were of questionable validity.
The regulation under consideration today, purged of certain incongruities that shocked even the most inattentive reader, takes account of a series of factors that are essential in order to obtain good results from population and housing censuses and will enable us to have pre-defined reference years common to the Member States and listed questions that will allow reliable comparisons.
Finally, I repeat that I am in favour of including the non-obligatory topics in the regulation. Using questions not covered in the obligatory topics will not only give Member States a consistent and coherent list to serve as a basis for collecting further data rather than leaving it to them which might produce interesting but totally redundant results. The argument that censuses should be removed from the text because they cost money does not make sense. It is precisely because high costs are involved that we should clearly place topics to be analysed within a legal framework so that the results do not prove to be worthless for future use for various purposes."@en1
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