Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-03-12-Speech-1-099"
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"en.20070312.18.1-099"2
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"Mr President, far and away most of the EU’s businesses have committed themselves to social responsibility, to socially and environmentally responsible action, to the protection of people and their environment, and to security of production. They support cultural and religious facilities, sports and clubs. As both Commissioners have just said, though, it is and remains a prerequisite that these things should be done on a voluntary basis, something laid down in the European Parliament report back in 2003, and, a year later, on the occasion of the founding of the Multi-Stakeholder Forum. If you want to maintain the voluntary character of this commitment, you have to reject binding regulations and suffocating bureaucracy.
A comprehensive reporting system ought, if at all, to be expected only of large companies; SMEs, which make up over 90% of all companies, cannot cope with it, for they quite simply lack the human and financial resources required to give an all-round picture of their CSR. My group’s shadow rapporteur, Mr Bushill-Matthews, has succeeded in reaching some compromises that have the effect of defusing the Howitt report, which my group in the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs was right to reject.
I count it a victory that the demand for the award of public contracts to be made dependent on compliance with social and environmental clauses has been largely struck out. Firms must be able to win a public contract even if they do not have an ecologically-correct pot of flowers in front of the factory gate and even if the menu of their works canteen does not include alternative meals.
Paragraph 11, which calls for the setting-up of a central point of coordination for CSR, is problematic, as are paragraphs 39 and 55, which advocate the appointment of an ombudsman for CSR. I am opposed to any extension of enterprises’ liability and obligations to account for their corporate social responsibility, and regard such
manipulations as unacceptable.
Finally, we are talking today about an own-initiative report, one that many do not take seriously on the grounds that it is thought to be no more than a declamation. What I say is:
resist that which is only just beginning! If this House calls for some of all this to be made mandatory, then legislative measures from the Commission are no longer far away."@en1
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"principiis obsta"1
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