Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-06-02-Speech-1-096"
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"en.20030602.7.1-096"2
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"Mr President, I must say first of all that I find it an absolute disgrace that the services were not able to present a package of compromise amendments with which to communicate with the public and the press. I hope and expect, therefore, Mr President, that you will instruct the services to ensure that we have the right package tomorrow. It is really disheartening for something like this to happen.
The importance of the issues we are discussing was expressed eloquently by the Commissioner, and I shall not repeat it. I should like to give sincere thanks to my fellow Members, the rapporteurs, the shadow rapporteurs, and the Commissioners, too, of course – everyone who contributed – for this result. Above all, however, I also wish to commend the Greek Presidency – as it has not yet been mentioned for its tremendous commitment, because it has done sterling work.
We in the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy have fought hard with the Council. In all fairness, I must say that Parliament has invested a great deal of effort, and I was not expecting the result that we have now achieved. I believe we owe this to the flexibility, commitment and constructive approach on everyone’s part.
Let us focus on a couple of points. Parliament has invested a great deal of effort in strengthening the position of the supervisory body. We want the supervisory body to be independent not only of the industry, but also, as far as possible, of the national authorities, because we want to avoid the PET problem, as it was then known. In any case, we have increased the gap between supervisory body and government. We have tightened up the competences of the supervisory body, and we have obliged it to contribute to the development of the internal market and the creation of a level playing field, in order to avoid the prospect in many people’s imaginations of there being 25 partial markets instead of a single internal market. My colleague Mr Mombaur also pointed this out earlier.
The second point for which we have fought hard is of course unbundling: functional unbundling, obligatory as from July 2004, and legal unbundling, obligatory by 2007 at the latest. It has been made clear that not one Member State may deviate from this, because there is a requirement for the Commission to produce an amended directive, which then has to pass through the whole parliamentary and Council process once more. This is the way it should be, too. I am also very grateful that we have strengthened the independence of the subsidiaries, that is to say, the transportation undertakings, from the parent company, so that the parent companies, that is to say the production or distribution companies, cannot just dip into the coffers at the expense of the maintenance of the networks, thus de facto frustrating a level playing field in Europe.
The third point is that a great deal more attention has been paid to the level playing field. We have fought with the Council, and the Council has been well-advised enough to take over specifically those compromises that we have reached in the electronic communications sector. That will be the crux of the matter. The question – the key question – will also be whether the Commission is able to look into whether that level playing field has been achieved on an annual basis, by means of concrete analyses. There is an enormous amount of anxiety that we will end up having perhaps five, six, seven, eight oligopolistic undertakings – large undertakings – in Europe. On that point I throw down the gauntlet to the Commission to take hard action in cases where there is a lack of ‘fair play’, in cases of market distortion. Only then will we be able to convince our citizens that liberalisation is a good thing.
I also think that the compromise on the decommissioning funds was a very significant achievement. I still do not understand why Member States do not dare to simply put down on paper, in legislation, that a decommissioning fund must be transparent, that it must be used for the intended purpose and that the normal competition rules are to be applied. Mr President, why do Member States not dare to put that down on paper? I still do not find convincing the legal drivel – forgive me – to the effect that all this belongs in the Euratom Treaty. I can endorse the interinstitutional agreement, I welcome the new declaration by the Commission, but the Member States that prevented that from becoming law, from being incorporated into the directive, have got a lot of explaining to do to their citizens.
We also welcome the fact that, as regards the public service obligations, there is not just an incredibly long list to be seen, but also a provision preventing public service obligations constituting a barrier to newcomers. This seems to me to be another important point for the Commission to note.
In summary, I think that we have achieved an excellent result. Of course, as a parliamentarian, one wants more, but, given the point of departure, we have achieved an enormous amount. We can be proud of this, and if we do have any explaining to do to our citizens, it is that there are going to be improvements in quality and in service provision."@en1
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