Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-05-21-Speech-1-048-000"
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"en.20120521.14.1-048-000"2
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"Madam President, I am very pleased to be here – rather later than I expected, and thank you very much for including me in the speakers’ list. I was sorry to miss Simon Busuttil’s presentation of his report and your response, Commissioner, but I would just say that, as Chair of the committee, I am pleased that so many colleagues are here to support you. We do not all agree on everything, as Ms Rapti indicated, but nevertheless, I think the detailed analysis of the issues in this report is an indication of the depth of knowledge and engagement that my committee has for single market issues. I know you will take it seriously, as I am sure you have already said at the beginning.
Unfortunately, because I was not here to hear everybody else’s speeches, I do not know whether I will be duplicating what people have already said. But in my remarks, I just want to concentrate on two particular aspects.
I will come back in a moment to refer to the question of infringements which Ms Rapti raised, but first I want to highlight how our monitoring of the effectiveness and impact of the single market can evolve, namely, by understanding the level of lost opportunities that still exist.
I am reminded of a phrase that was used by one of your distinguished predecessors, Mr Bolkestein, in one of his reports on the single market, which we received annually – and I have been around long enough in the single market to have done a report on that – where he described the single market as a Ferrari motoring along in second gear. At the time, I said that it was not necessarily a Ferrari that we wanted, because what we want is not top speed but solidity, reliability and accessibility to everybody; but I think the point was, nevertheless, well made. The problem that we have, colleagues, is that we do not know how many lost opportunities are still out there in the single market, where businesses have tried to sell goods or services in a country (which they are legally entitled to do) and are still frustrated by existing barriers – many of which should have been cast away by the Services Directive and the goods package – so they go off and go to another market, or they take another product.
We can never calculate those lost opportunities, but I think the question about attitudes of business to the single market, knowledge of instruments like SOLVIT and the point of single contact, are clear indicators of loss of potential. In this report, there is just a short paragraph (but a significant one) where we ask the Commission to include the findings of the Eurobarometer surveys in the annual governance check-up. What I particularly want to ask the Commissioner is whether, in the annual Eurobarometer surveys that are linked into the governance framework for the internal market, we should be including awareness measures about the extent to which companies and individuals know about their rights, SOLVIT and the points of single contact – because if we do not do that, we will have no indication about how the Member States and the Commission are promoting [the single market] together. Similarly, my colleagues have called for the Your Europe platform to be incorporated too so we can have a single powerful brand name and citizens and businesses will know where to go to get information. That is my first point.
On the second point, about infringements, I think the core idea that was in the report about fast-track procedures stands. It may well be that ideas about an independent infringement assessment are at too much of an early stage but, to be fair to Mr Busuttil’s amendment, it only says ‘potentially considered’. However, it seems to me that, if people cannot sell a product or a service because of a government not implementing legislation, we have to deal with that quickly. Justice delayed is justice denied."@en1
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