Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-05-21-Speech-1-055-000"
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"Madam President, I am grateful to each and every one of you for your speeches and your proposals. I would like to thank Andreas Schwab in particular, as Ms Girling did just a moment ago, for highlighting at the beginning of his speech that when we talk about the single market, we are talking about this source of growth.
Many of you, like Mr Busuttil, but also Ms Weiler and Ms Rapti, mentioned this new idea – Mr Busuttil – of a prosecutor.
The Commission has certain reservations about this idea quite simply – I believe that Mr Busuttil will understand this – because we believe institutionally, within the framework of the Treaties, that we are the Guardian of the Treaties and that duplications or reduplications in terms of function or responsibility should be avoided. However, you have a right, as it is your role as legislator, to ask the Commission to do its work. That is the aim of this report, the aim of other tools we have.
I think that Parliament has a role of political oversight within all these tasks, and I believe that it is through dialogue between our institution and yours, with the support of the Council, that we can improve the implementation of these tools. Now I think, Mr Busuttil, that we must strengthen the role of the Commission and its work with a view to the proper transposition of all these texts. I will propose working on certain ideas such as determining the legislation or sectors that are a priority in terms of the internal market, where we could, after identifying the most efficient priority sectors for growth and competitiveness, have a strengthened partnership with the Member States and, in some cases, achieve zero tolerance. This is, moreover, the objective that you undoubtedly had in mind with your amendment, Mr Busuttil.
I would like to remind you that we could suggest that this exercise regarding the proper implementation of the market falls within the framework of a binding and more comprehensive exercise, that is the European Semester, so as not to content ourselves in this semester with assessing performances or budgetary recommendations, but also competitiveness and growth. I have already discussed this with my colleague, Olli Rehn.
We must do our work, but we must also make an effort to open dialogue with citizens and with small and medium-sized enterprises. I would like to tell Ms Mazej Kukovič that that is indeed the idea behind this internal market week, which comes after the success of the internal market forum, which your colleague, Róża Thun, set up and in which many of you participated.
We will try to use all the new means of communication, particularly online and social networks, to get as close to people as possible. I will, as Mr Harbour and Mr Schwab have advised me, along with my colleague, Mr Tajani, specifically bear small and medium-sized enterprises in mind in the dialogue, using the Internet to directly bring them the content of everything we have been doing with you for several years, and at this very moment, to facilitate their work. Reconciling citizens and small and medium-sized enterprises with the internal market is precisely what we want to do, and it is also one of the points that Mr Baldassarre mentioned while urging us not to forget about national parliaments. I completely agree.
When we talk about freedom and the circulation of goods – I am responding to Mr Paška here – we are actually talking about the security of goods as well, Mr Paška, of those that enter the internal market and which must respect standards, particularly in terms of security, and of those circulating within the market. It is a subject which my colleague, John Dalli, is, of course, responsible for and which he is following closely.
Within this large single market, there is – as Ms Gáll-Pelcz rightly mentioned – a part of the economy which depends on public procurement: 15 to 17%. I think that respect for these texts in terms of public procurement and also the progress we can make, particularly with electronic public procurement, can lead to extremely significant, beneficial savings.
The other day, several of you were there at the workshop we held in Parliament in Brussels with Mr Tarabella and Mr Arias Echeverría on
procurement. We had demonstrations which showed that if we manage, together, through our texts, to systematise, to generally develop public
procurement, we could make savings with all the local authorities of close to EUR 100 billion per year, thanks to this digitisation and this generalisation.
That is the concrete progress that has been made in the Single Market Act. I share the opinion of Mr Schwab because we must be objective with the single market and the interest that it represents for small and medium-sized enterprises. The work that we want to do in all our texts, as I have just said, is to speed things up where accounting standards, very small enterprises, public procurement are concerned through simplification, activity and investment in small and medium-sized enterprises.
I said – and I am also responding to Mr Cofferati here, who was talking about the crisis as the main threat to the single market – at the beginning of my own speech earlier something that is in line with the speeches you made yourselves. I will say it again: in this crisis – with the rise of protectionism and the return to nationalism – we are seeing that the market could be its first victim. For if we split up European economic activity again under the impetus of national or indeed nationalist reflexes and protectionism, it is clear that the single market will not be able to withstand it.
I would like to tell Mr Gustafsson and Ms Zuber that the single market does not mean all European policies. What is the single market? It is the foundation. It is the base on which we build public or private policies. However, of course, if the foundation is not broken, if the foundation is solid, anything that we build upon it, in terms of public or private initiatives, will be more efficient. This is precisely how we are working with policies for green growth, such as those mentioned by Mr Gustafsson in the framework of the Europe 2020 strategy. This is how we have worked with the 12 levers that form the Single Market Act and that demonstrate the balance we are hoping for. These levers embrace the foundations of the competitive social market economy – I personally wanted this and many of you encouraged me – in three, or rather, four words: economy, social, market, competitive. You will find this balance in the 12 levers which we will retain within the framework of the Single Market Act II that we are preparing for the end of the summer.
I would like to say, along with Ms Gáll-Pelcz, that I do find Mr Busuttil’s report effective, to use her words. I think that we must – as Mr Schwab always wanted, so that we can be even more effective, because we can be, and I am undertaking this screening work with that in mind – look at whether we should use the regulation rather than the directive, as I wanted to do. I am also undertaking similar work in the field of financial markets, and in the field of the Single Market Act and the internal market.
It is in this spirit that we are preparing the Single Market Act with Ms Schaldemose and the Council, which has a very important role to play as colegislator. That is also why I want us, in Parliament, the Council and the Commission, to be able to find a way to deliver, to act on the 40 texts which are in this brochure and which have now been on your table for several months.
It is time to take action by going further, as we are going to do, by removing the obstacles that Mr Harbour mentioned. These obstacles to the internal market amount to missed opportunities for growth and employment. Frankly, I believe that we do not have the right, in times of crisis such as we are currently experiencing, to waste opportunities.
That is why we must have the right tool, as Mr Busuttil recommended, to implement, with the Member States, all the internal market texts as they have already been proposed and adopted, and also to go further, sector by sector, company by company, as we proposed in the Single Market Act, to make this single market work better.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am convinced that that is where the first, the closest source of growth, competitiveness and employment lies, and we must go looking for it where it is.
Yet, at the same time, in order to get out of this crisis, I agree that this large internal market, with more freedom and less separation, is our best chance. It is our best chance for restoring growth.
That said, in order to act effectively, in order to make the single market work properly, we must recognise where there are weaknesses, bad transpositions, sometimes mistakes, shortcomings in terms of contact or information with citizens or companies, and I agree with Malcolm Harbour, who called for such recognition – that is where the interest lies in Mr Busuttil’s report and the work that we are doing.
That is the reason for this scoreboard, for this desire for transparency that Mr Schwab recommended. I would like to tell Mr Schwab that beyond this global scoreboard, which mentions all the single market texts, we must indeed go further and examine how it functions, text by text. That is what I am going to do, for example, with one of the main documents on the single market, which is not working well, and it has only been in place for three years. I am talking about the Services Directive, which covers 40% of the European economy, as all the other services sectors are covered by other European texts. We must examine text by text, brick by brick, how each of the directives is evaluated within the overall framework of the scoreboard.
With this scoreboard we have, as Ms Schaldemose and Ms Băsescu said, an opportunity to send out regular early warnings, to point the finger, to separate good or bad points from time to time, but also to help Member States, to practise what Róża Thun mentioned as an exchange of good practices.
I would also like to say to Mr Stolojan and Mr Schwab that it is important to me, as it is to them, that we have correlation tables, that Member States provide these correlation tables for all the texts, all the directives and that we are able publish them, where appropriate.
Mr Repo mentioned infringement proceedings. I have decided to use these infringement proceedings – as I have already done – to force Member States to do what they must, but I want, above all else, to rule out any possible contracts or incentives. We have already improved things, Mr Repo. I want to say this to be objective. For example, thanks to EU Pilot proceedings, we have substantially reduced the number of infringement proceedings.
I would now also like to reduce the length of infringement proceedings. Among the tools that we need to bring the single market together, to bring Brussels closer to citizens and companies, we have SOLVIT, this tool that I firmly believe in. I have worked a great deal for two years in each Member State so that SOLVIT could have – as Mr Correia de Campos and Mr Obermayr wanted – the legal and technical resources it needed as well as the necessary staff, and I am continuing in this work with a great deal of vigilance."@en1
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