Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2014-04-15-Speech-2-918-000"
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"en.20140415.117.2-918-000"2
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"Madam President, as chairman of the committee and also since this will be the last speech that I will make in the Chamber this evening, I will perhaps keep a fairly dignified silence on some of the stories in the British paper, though I thank Mr Bennion and Ms Stihler for covering those issues.
I just want to make some broader points about the way that the Council has handled this whole affair, because this seems to me to be something that we should learn from. On 14 February, I wrote to Mr Papastravou, the Greek Ambassador, saying that the issues that the Council now wants an impact assessment on – which are issues about tax losses in countries which sustain very high registration taxes for vehicles – were there when we started looking at this proposal 18 months ago. My committee, characteristically, under the enlightened, energetic and sometimes slightly exotic leadership of my good friend Toine Manders, has done this very thoroughly. We have had public hearings and we have engaged the Commission, but the issues that the Council wants to tackle, with its impact assessment, were there 18 months ago. Frankly, the inability of the Council of the European Union to take any strategic view whatsoever on legislation before it comes to this House is absolutely incredible.
One thing we should learn from this – and I am sure the Commissioner will support me – is that we have to reform the Council of the European Union as a better and stronger partner for us in codecision. Otherwise we are not going to make any serious progress. That is the big lesson that I learned from this proposal and I share it with you from my perspective of having been chairman of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection for five years.
I just want to conclude by thanking the Commission for taking up the interests of citizens. We asked for the top 20 complaints of citizens in accessing their rights under the single market, and the bureaucratic inefficiencies in car transferring regulations were among those at the top of the list. The Commission has acted on it. Why should the Member States be deliberately frustrating this? Why should they be so inefficient about it? But actually – and I say this finally to my friend Toine Manders – a focused proposal, without some of his more exotic ideas about RFID and number plates, would actually have helped us. I do not blame him for that but, he has seen the consequences of it in the
newspaper.
Madam President, thank you very much for indulging me slightly, since it was my last opportunity, but I want to say to my colleagues here tonight that it has been a great pleasure working with them. I reflect that, when I first spoke late into the night in this Chamber, it was with your distinguished predecessor Erkki Liikanen, who always used to complain that on these single market matters the only people there were the Commissioners, the Members and the ushers and that we were normally outnumbered by the ushers."@en1
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