Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-04-04-Speech-1-089-000"
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"en.20110404.16.1-089-000"2
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"Mr President, I would first of all like to thank all the shadow rapporteurs for their efforts on what is actually quite a technical report. The Commission’s proposal on tourism statistics has given us a good opportunity to revise the existing legal framework on the collection of statistical data on tourism in Europe. This is especially relevant at this time, when all eyes are on developing a strategy for European tourism policy on the back of the new EU competences in this field. Updating our tourism statistics database can, in turn, play an important role in giving policy makers a good basis for implementing successful tourism policies.
For these reasons, the approach that I took, supported by our shadows, in formulating Parliament’s position, was to strongly support the aim of improving the completeness, relevance and comparability of the statistics on offer in this field, bringing the statistics more up to date with new trends in the tourism sector to reflect, for instance, the increase in Internet bookings and in short-stay trips. We are all agreed that improving the competitiveness of EU tourism is a way to keep visitors coming to Europe, so it is important that the statistics we collect keep pace with the changing nature of the sector, identifying current and potential trends in that sector and monitoring supply and demand. In this way, the statistics collected can be a useful tool for supporting the decision maker in the tourism industry.
On the one hand, it is also important to ensure that the updated statistics are as complete as possible, giving a good overview of tourism across Europe, whilst, on the other hand, bearing in mind the need to keep the burden down for respondents. It was for that reason that I was keen to see a final agreement on incoming data collection on same-day visits, which we now have in the final agreement, as same-day visits account for a large part of tourism activity.
Parliament also pushed for the regulation to cover areas of data collection which, until now, have not been thought of as relevant for tourism statistics but which we felt needed to be included as part of the recognition of tourism’s important social, economic and environmental impact. I thought that the collection of data on employment and economic expenditure – the so-called tourism satellite accounts – was particularly relevant in this regard and we pushed hard for this to be included as part of the regulation.
The final agreement with Council now includes a provision on drawing up pilot studies that will enable Member States to show the effects of tourism on the economy and on employment, which I hope will contribute to a better understanding of the true size and value of our tourism industry. The final agreement also sees the inclusion of pilot studies that show the effect of tourism on the environment – an interesting avenue to pursue, given the need for a sustainable tourism approach.
The inclusion of data on accessibility to tourist accommodation for persons with reduced mobility, which was the only real sticking point that we had with Council, is also now an important inclusion. Following Parliament’s insistence on this point, Council finally backed down and agreed to its inclusion as part of the basic information collected from tourist accommodation establishments.
Together with the agreements that we have reached on restricting the delegation of powers to the Commission – which I also had some concerns about – I am very pleased that first-reading agreement has been found with Council. I hope Parliament will lend its strong support to the agreement in Wednesday’s plenary vote."@en1
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