Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-06-14-Speech-1-091"
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"en.20100614.20.1-091"2
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"− Madam President, I would like to thank first the rapporteur, because Mr Marinescu and his shadow rapporteurs have done very positive and important work. Now we are at the end of the second reading, and the Commission would like to reaffirm once again – and in the strongest possible terms – the political and industrial importance of the subject on which Parliament has to decide.
Notwithstanding the adverse economic cycle we are in, there are some clear lessons to be learned: how to revitalise the rail freight sector, because rail freight transport is primarily international, and an indisputable factor in its success is the availability of good-quality rail infrastructure at the European level. That is what the customers ask for. Good-quality rail infrastructure across borders is an essential condition for the competitiveness of many rail freight market segments, and it is primordial if rail wants to compete with other modes of transport.
This also explains why the Commission proposed, at the end of 2008, the development of a European rail network for competitive freight based on freight corridors. These corridors link the main industrial regions of Europe, where the most substantive flow of goods originates and terminates along the main international axes. The legislative proposal to which your attention is drawn today contains decisive elements which favour this development of high-quality rail infrastructure at international level. These include cooperation between rail infrastructure managers, reliability of infrastructure capacities allocated to the corridors, good coordination between rail infrastructure management and goods terminal management, and non-discriminatory access to these corridors for all operators.
The Council’s position at first reading maintains the basic principle put forward in the Commission’s original proposal but waters down some of the elements. The TRAN Committee has reintroduced, at second reading, important amendments which strengthen the regulation, and they bring back the original Commission proposal. The Commission considers that the compromise obtained during the negotiation is balanced and that the general objectives of the Commission’s proposals are duly taken into account. We are very grateful to Parliament in that it has succeeded in reinforcing the role of the one-stop shop, which had been reduced to a mere mail box in the common position of the Council.
I know, rapporteur, that some people want to go back to the common position. I invite you and Parliament to resist these attempts, because they would weaken the compromise that you have been able to reach.
For the railway undertakings and for other applicants which wish to have access to the corridor infrastructure, the one-stop shop is a considerable simplification of the present, very burdensome procedure, because the one-stop shop will be able to take decisions itself instead of referring matters to the individual infrastructure managers, which cover only national sections of each corridor. But, of course, the one-stop shop is limited to catalogue or reserve capacity: that is, the capacity which the infrastructure managers themselves have already decided to set aside for freight trains. Corridor managers have also several options as to the way in which the one-stop shop should be established.
Let me emphasise that the one-stop shop is a joint body set up or designated by the management board of each corridor: its function is that of a coordination tool. It may be a technical body within the corridor management structure, or one of the infrastructure managers concerned, or the bodies already established by Rail Net Europe. So it is not a supranational body, but it is a tool which speeds up and simplifies, in a very transparent and non-discriminatory manner, the path allocation process.
The infrastructure managers have the responsibility to predefine capacity. The one-stop shop just sells paths to applicants on the basis of decisions already taken by infrastructure managers on the predefined infrastructure capacity. Some have gone as far as saying that, with this regulation, the Commission wants to give priority to freight trains over passenger trains, thus threatening the efficient provision of rail passenger services, in particular at regional and local level. Now let me be very frank: this is improper, it is not the right reading of the proposal, and it does not correspond at all to the texts that everybody can read in Article 14, in Article 15. Priority rules for trains are not something the Commission will ever want to decide from Brussels. Freight traffic is systemically discriminated against today because passenger traffic always has priority, even in cases of disturbance.
What the text says is that the infrastructure managers themselves must take the responsibility to define transparent, consistent, non-discriminatory rules for both types of traffic so that freight trains which are on time do not have to be systematically delayed in case of disturbance. This is, I believe, a very good compromise, and if you parliamentarians adopt it and if it is also then correctly implemented, the Commission is convinced that it will contribute to the revitalisation of rail freight and will help the European economy to start again after the present crisis."@en1
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