Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-07-02-Speech-1-044-000"
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"en.20120702.17.1-044-000"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to start by offering my very sincere thanks to the rapporteur and the shadow rapporteurs. It was a difficult and protracted process but, in the end, a compromise was reached. The single European railway area was adopted back in 2001, yet we are still far away from it becoming a reality. There are countries with a strict separation of network and operator, but no other companies on the railway network, and there are integrated concepts with a great deal of competition. This needs to be cleared up, which is another reason why we favour this recasting. Clearly, this should have been undertaken much earlier, since the Commission sat idly on its hands for nine years. It then launched the court proceedings and we actually need to wait for the court’s decision before we can deal with unbundling and some other issues.
We need a strong regulatory body that takes decisions quickly and is well appointed. I say this because we have a situation where a few Member States have no regulatory body at all, where decisions are taken in a fortnight in some Member States, while in others it takes two months, once all the forms have been filled in – and it can take two years if they have not – and there are Member States where you will not even have received an answer after two years. We have therefore pushed through the regulatory body.
Clearly, we would like to have had the transitional regulation in place more quickly. Given that nothing has happened for nine or 10 years, to have to wait now for another six years – as has been proposed – is slower progress than we would have liked to have seen. We have, however, managed to achieve the following: transparency, information about money flows, a start on tackling the training issue, ERTMS, a European train safety system that makes cross-border rail traffic simpler, and we have eliminated unfair competition, especially in electricity prices. Fair prices are a necessity for everyone. No one should receive preferential treatment.
We have just heard that the separation of networks and operators and the liberalisation of passenger transport will be included in the fourth railway package. The Commission has committed to this, but we also await the decision by the court. We therefore want to see the final realisation of the single European railway area, as it is to the benefit of both the environment and – of course – the European market."@en1
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