Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-09-26-Speech-2-010"
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"en.20060926.3.2-010"2
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".
Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Mr President of the Commission, having the President of the Commission present for a debate on an own-initiative report is not an everyday occurrence, for an own-initiative report is not exactly an outstanding event when what we are actually meant to be doing is making laws – although I shall turn to that in a moment. What your presence here demonstrates is that the Commission is clear in its own mind about how important this issue is in the eyes of the public, and hence, too, in those of the citizens’ representatives here in this House.
It is for that reason that I would like to refer back to a previous President of the Commission, and not just any old President, but Jacques Delors, who, a few months ago, addressing a meeting of the Committee of the Regions, attempted to place services of general interest in the context of the project of European integration. He told the Committee of the Regions that the work of European integration took three principles as its frame of reference: solidarity, which brings people together and has social, economic and territorial cohesion as its objectives; cooperation, whereby it is intended that the transnational and European aspirations of the EU’s treaties and programmes be fulfilled, and competition, which is meant to make possible the completion of the internal market on the secure basis of the rules of the social market economy and governed by democratic competition law aimed primarily at limiting the misuse of economic power and guaranteeing consumers the protection of the law.
Although these three principles refer to services of general interest and to services of general economic interest, there are always tensions inherent in the relationships of the corners of this sort of triangle, and, where services of general interest and services of general economic interest are concerned, it is obvious where they lie.
Public services have an essential part to play in the quality of life enjoyed by individual citizens; they also have a key role in the European Union’s Lisbon Strategy. Good public services can help overcome economic stagnation, social exclusion and isolation, to reinforce social and territorial cohesion, to improve, both internally and externally, the European single market’s functioning, and to enable it to compete better. Even so, whenever I am in the region from which I come or visiting others, and sit down with local politicians and the providers of services of general interest to discuss these, I have to deal with their complaints to the effect that we are interfering in their remits, making their jobs more difficult, and failing to make clear under what conditions they can operate. Their claim is that they do not, where the law is concerned, actually know where they stand.
It is for that reason that appropriate legal initiatives to afford them that legal certainty would appear to be necessary. There will be those who, in the course of this debate, will ask what we are actually after – after all, they will say, do we not have the Commission to issue communications and enact guidelines, and the Court of Justice to lay down the law? – and to them I have to say that that is evidently not enough, and, moreover, it does indeed contribute to the prevailing legal uncertainty, for the Commission, with its communications and guidelines, does nothing to create legal certainty. It may well suggest that it does, but the fact is that a communication is not the sort of black-and-white law on which one can rely.
We really must take the initiative in matters of law, and we are also making proposals as to how we can do this, not all of which I want to discuss, but the point I would make to you, Mr President of the Commission, is that the right of initiative that you possess is also a duty of initiative, and I urge you to make use of it. The building blocks for such legal initiatives are to be found in the resolution on which we will be voting tomorrow, as well as in the resolutions we have already adopted, in, for example, the Langen and Herzog reports. We are not prescribing a specific instrument; that is for you to do. Our allotted task is to give our own assessment – each group for itself – of the Commission legislative thinking, and we will, after further debate, give our own assessment of the proposal for a framework directive that our group has put forward. Others must do the same with their own proposals; then we, working together in this House, must move the legislative process forward, and for that, the codecision procedure is an absolute requirement. It is within that procedure that we need legal initiatives, for it is not you and your fellow Commissioner, together with the highly qualified and well motivated staff of the Commission, nor indeed the national governments, but we, the Members of the European Parliament, who enjoy the legitimacy conferred by election. It is we who have to get down to the grass roots and discuss these things with the local politicians to whom we are accountable; it is we who bear responsibility for what is done. It is for that reason that the codecision procedure must apply, and for that reason that this House must exercise its prerogatives in full."@en1
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