Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-01-15-Speech-2-060"
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"en.20080115.7.2-060"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner Kuneva, ladies and gentlemen, obtaining credit is a different matter from purchasing goods. The legal complexity of the transaction is far greater, and established national financing practices and legal traditions play a far greater part. Accordingly, public trust is often crucial in matters relating to consumer credit. Against this backdrop, harmonisation of the law on consumer credit has its limits and should be done cautiously and gradually.
As the weaker party to the contract, the consumer must undoubtedly receive legal protection, but at the same time the guiding principles in this field, as in the law of obligations in general, must be freedom of contract and the personal responsibility of grown-up people, not prescription and paternalism. National legislators must have enough discretion to guarantee consumer protection flexibly in their own countries and to deal quickly with awkward new developments in the sphere of consumer protection. A body of legal provisions alone does not ensure that consumers are actually protected. Impact assessments would have been essential, given that consumer credit affects hundreds of millions of people. Legislation should be based on typical case scenarios and not on exceptions.
In this respect, I must first of all thank the European Parliament as a whole for rejecting the Commission’s totally unacceptable initial proposal and for amending it substantially and decisively at first reading. Secondly, I welcome wholeheartedly the new approach adopted by the Commission in its amended proposal dating from 2005, whereby only specific fundamental elements would ultimately be harmonised.
I must, however, criticise the Council’s common position. Instead of focusing on a sound practicable European solution, the representatives of the Member States have been introducing their own specific rules, defending them and compiling a litany of them in the compromise. The result is a set of provisions that create far too much red tape. That is no good to consumers. Swamping consumers with information does not help them. It generates considerable additional costs, which have a disproportionately strong impact on small amounts of credit.
Accordingly, my aim from the outset was to try to streamline the rules and give national legislators more leeway. In this context I would like to thank my honourable colleagues, because all the votes in the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection went in that same direction, and all the decisions of this House seem set to do likewise.
Let me just cite two key examples, namely the substantial improvements and slimmed-down provisions regarding overdraft facilities and the emerging arrangement on Article 16 in respect of compensation for early repayment. In spite of these improvements, however, I believe that the emerging majority is only prepared to go halfway, no doubt partly influenced by the absence of consent in the Council and by the desire to bring the legislative project to a conclusion. I nevertheless consider it imperative that additional improvements be made if the proposal is to be judged favourably in its entirety.
I wish to mention two other points that are important to me and to seek your approval once more. Firstly, the threshold at which the directive starts to apply should be raised to EUR 500. I am well aware that the value of that amount varies throughout Europe. The point, however, is not that the directive should only apply once the EUR 500 threshold has been crossed but that national legislators should retain the option of applying their own provisions from the first euro rather than being bound to restrict their action to credit of 500 euros or more.
Secondly, consumers should have the option of waiving the prescribed explanations regarding pre-contractual information, one reason being that these explanations could hamper the internal market. I do believe it ought to be enough to provide the consumer with a copy of the terms of the contract in advance in order to satisfy the pre-contractual information requirement – which is, incidentally, what the Commission envisaged in its own proposal. That would limit the stacks of paperwork.
Unless these changes are made, I fear that the desirable aims underlying this directive, namely to open up the single market to consumers in Europe and give them a wider range of products and options, will not be achieved."@en1
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