Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-23-Speech-4-496"
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"en.20090423.70.4-496"2
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".
Mr President, honourable Members, I would like to thank the rapporteur, Mrs Neris, for her efforts in working on such a comprehensive and technically complicated proposal. This is a law-making process that has created great challenges for us all, but we must be clear that what we are talking about here is the future of an extraordinarily important sector.
For understandable reasons I have not gone into every amendment. We will inform Parliament’s staff in writing of the Commission’s position in relation to the rest of Parliament’s amendments.
The proposal for a regulation on construction products is a very important proposal, in my view. I consider today’s debate important and I share the view of the rapporteur that, with a little more time, we still have a good chance of achieving a result together and reaching a sound compromise.
Construction products alone already make up 3% of internal European products, and if we include construction activity, the construction sector amounts to 10% of the total economic output of the European Union. It is absolutely clear, therefore, that efforts to improve the competitiveness of this sector – especially in the current crisis – are particularly important.
With this proposal, we are aiming to create a solid basis for the consolidation of the internal market for construction products. Only in that way can we secure the necessary growth and jobs beyond the recovery phase. In order to achieve this goal, the current Construction Products Directive must be brought into line with the principles of better law-making.
I will now set out what we were trying to achieve. We wanted to clarify the basic concepts and the use of the CE mark, simplify the procedures in order to reduce costs for businesses, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises, and to raise the credibility of the entire system.
For me, it was about avoiding any unnecessary additional burdens for businesses, especially for the smallest companies. I therefore think it is important that no new administrative or assessment procedures are introduced, something that is of vital importance, above all, for the smallest local companies.
In accordance with the principles of the Small Business Act, which was, I would point out, given an extraordinarily warm welcome by this House not long ago, the Commission proposal puts forward simplified procedures for micro-businesses when it comes to products that do not give rise to any serious safety concerns. I do not want to see this approach changed – it is one of the key points of the proposal. This is because, in practice, it is the case for a number of families of construction products – such as windows, internal doors and floorings – that the existence of very small manufacturers is extremely important for the functioning of the market and is in the interests of consumers. The potential of these small manufacturers must be exploited efficiently for the benefit of the European construction industry.
I do not share the opinion that it is necessary to prescribe the declaration of hazardous substances going beyond the rules that we have already put in place under the REACH regulation. I assure you in all earnest that the rules laid down under the REACH regulations cover everything – there is nothing more that we would need to do for the construction sector – all the concerns that I have heard are comprehensively covered by the REACH regulation. I really do wonder what point there would be in having comprehensive, integrated legislation on chemicals if we were then to go and introduce new and deviating regulations for individual products. There is no way that the Commission would support such an idea.
Finally, I will deal with CE-marking and the abolition of national labelling. Let me be quite clear on this: where prescribed, national labelling adds additional testing requirements for construction products over and above the provisions of harmonised European standards, but it does not give any added value at all in terms of content. All it adds is more red tape and more work for the businesses in question. That is directly opposed to the main goal of the proposal.
The construction sector’s situation is different from that of the traditional areas of what has been called our ‘new approach law-making’, which was recently the subject of the internal market package. We cannot simply copy the solutions implemented in the other sectors of ‘new approach law-making’ in the construction industry as it has a completely different structure and works with completely different materials."@en1
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