Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-05-10-Speech-4-015"
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"en.20070510.5.4-015"2
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".
Madam President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I should first of all like to leave no one in any doubt about the fact that my group will, as a matter of course, strongly support the Andria and Janowski reports.
Commissioner, I was quite clear to start with that you had taken full account of our fellow Member’s, Mr Janowski’s, requests concerning innovation. I did not have the same feeling when listening to you. Allow me to speak my mind, given that we enjoy close relations and tell each other what we think. You replied on the subject of cities, but you did not really talk about housing.
Housing – and our fellow Member, Mr Hutchinson, has just been talking in these terms – is, in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the second most important need of any human being. The need for food is immediately followed by the need for shelter. Housing is fundamental to the protection of every human being. Housing is therefore an issue in every country whenever there are local or national elections although, admittedly, it presents itself in very different forms. We have seen this in France with its homeless people, and we see it in every other country in which the many and varied factors include problems involving building, urban sprawl, financing and so on.
Among the various factors to be taken into account, there is one that I should like to take a few seconds to highlight. It appears in the Andria report but has not, in my opinion, been sufficiently underlined, and that is the issue of financing. We see how the price of land has risen throughout the world, leading city dwellers to seek ever further afield for somewhere to live. In other words, they waste time every day travelling between home and work and devote a larger portion of their budget to travel costs. This means that, every day, they cause more atmospheric pollution and that, every day, the number of social problems is increased. What I am trying to say is that this issue of housing costs is of relevance to us.
In view of this situation, Mr Andria’s report contains a request for a study to be carried out. Most members of our intergroup and of the Committee on Regional Development are not asking the European Commission or European Union to accept responsibilities for housing that are not properly theirs. What we are asking right away, Commissioner, is that, with the help of your services, we might have a clearer view of the responsibilities involved. What are the responsibilities of, respectively, regions, districts and Europe as a whole? Where do the housing organisations’ responsibilities lie? What are the responsibilities of the financial bodies and of all the other players involved? The study referred to is absolutely fundamental to our knowing who is to do what. Thanks to the studies you are carrying out and the work you are doing, we await some clarification in the course of the next few months, bearing in mind too that a variety of Commission services – environment, transport etc – have a parallel interest in these housing issues.
Finally, and by way of drawing things to a close, you can be sure that, proud as we are today of having obtained the Andria report, I and my fellow Members of the intergroup and of the Committee on Regional Development have no intention of stopping there but, rather, are determined, with yourselves, to make much further progress with this issue of housing at European level."@en1
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