Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen. Although we are not dealing with any legislative proposals on this occasion, the importance of this debate should not be underestimated. The Green Paper on Consumer Protection – and I will confine myself to that during my first five minutes and move on to Mr Whitehead’s question in the remaining two minutes – is not only of legal and economic importance, it is also politically significant. It can help us to refute the myth that the internal market is something that is only for business and that the consumer has nothing to gain from it. Good consumer law is an outstanding instrument to bring the European Union closer to its citizens and it is up to all of us to work toward that. Another misunderstanding that I would like to help to rid the world of is the alleged opposition being whipped up between realising the internal market and achieving a high level of consumer protection. Both are objectives of the Treaty and each can support the other. It is our job to apply ourselves to this, but unfortunately I have to say that the division of responsibilities between the Parliamentary committees does not always help us with this. I think this is a matter that we should re-examine in the next legislature. Then, thirdly, there is another deep-rooted idea that I would like to get away from, that is the widely held conviction that consumer law and regulations on fair trading practices are areas that are totally isolated from each other from a competition perspective. Well, ladies and gentlemen, in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market we believe that these are often two sides of the same coin and this is why we are asking for a thorough impact study of both business-to-business relations and business-to-consumer relations. That will bring us more justice, certainly as far as SMEs are concerned, more legal certainty and more stability in the legislation, all things we are all striving for. Commissioner, we in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market agree with your analysis of the state of affairs in consumer law and we also think that the time is ripe for an evaluation and possibly for a new approach. Let us not be over-confident, however. After all, not everything that the consumer keeps on his own home market constitutes a barrier to the internal market that needs to be eliminated. There are still natural limits to market integration – they are summed up in my report – and we must accept them. What it comes down to is identifying genuine barriers and concentrating on them, then we will not miss our target. The new approach, if it comes, must, in the opinion of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, be geared towards a high level of consumer protection – an objective of the Treaty – sufficient flexibility, simplicity and transparency of legislation and also legislation of a high legal quality. That is why we support the suggestion in the Green Paper to ensure that an efficient and affordable procedure for settling disputes is included for consumers, because that is how it should be. Nor do we reject the idea of a framework directive, Commissioner, but as responsible legislators we want to satisfy ourselves beforehand that such a framework directive with all that involves really would lead to greater simplicity, more legal certainty and, also, a more effective consumer policy. That is why we are asking you to give us the full picture beforehand, that is to say both the framework directive and the proposals for directives that go with it. For the sake of legal certainty we would prefer a general clause based on a prohibition on unfair trading practices. Of course that prohibition must be well defined. We recognise the usefulness of the instrument of maximum harmonisation, but, like Mr Whitehead in his report of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy, we ask for caution and that we proceed on a case-by-case basis, otherwise we run the risk of leaping far too far ahead. In any case, we in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market are also convinced that maximum harmonisation is not possible as long as a high level of consumer protection has not been reached, unless harmonisation is geared towards that. A high level of consumer protection is, in our view, also a condition for fully implementing the principles of mutual recognition and for implementing the country of origin principle. Commissioner, we say ‘yes’ to a statutory basis for a European code of conduct provided the conditions in section 17 of my report are met, but, because no-one has anything to gain from a false impression of legal certainty, we are against any kind of bureaucratic approval mechanism that can only provide a questionable assumption of legality. To the members of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market it is simple logic that obligations entered into in codes must be enforceable. Ladies and gentlemen, you will see that the Patrie Report of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy differs on many of these points from what we in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market have said. We in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market have done our best to concentrate on the legal aspects of this matter. We have made choices based on considered legal grounds. I would therefore like to ask the members of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy and other members of Parliament to have another good look at this before deciding how to vote and I would ask them to support these points of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market. Finally, Mr President, it only remains for me to thank colleagues for their very constructive cooperation and I can say to Mr Whitehead that I will answer his specific question in the two minutes I will be given soon.

Political group: PPE-DE