Mr President, today’s debate comes under the sign of the snail, not because I ate such excellent snails here in Strasbourg yesterday but because the snail is a symbol of slow progress. One example of this slow progress is the way the Commission is proceeding. This study is taking far too long and we feel it is important to speed up the pace at last. I am most grateful to the Commissioner for his plain talking today and I would ask the Commission to force the pace now. Today’s debate makes it quite clear that Parliament wants more emphasis on speed, not speed at the expense of quality, but then slowness alone does not mean quality either. This brings me to my second point, namely the snail as symbol of our postal services. What has happened over the past 200 years is that the time it takes for a letter to go from Munich to Brussels has increased fivefold. Letters to Strasbourg arrive there a bit sooner, but it still takes far too long. That means that since the days of mail-coaches and taxis, we have seen a steady decline in the quality of services. It may be true, as was said here, that today we have new possibilities, e.g. electronic possibilities such as e-mail, but on the other hand we must realise that as ever the ordinary letter continues to play a very, very important role and that, in particular, young families, the elderly and many others continue to rely very heavily on conventional mail. So I believe that in relation to conventional mail we must do what Mr Radwan described in such excellent terms, namely encourage competition on the one hand and on the other, define the limits. But what we have often seen in recent years was the very opposite! By embarking on the kind of pseudo and partial privatisations we have also witnessed in Germany, we have combined the drawbacks of the state monopoly with the drawbacks of privatisation, which is really not the purpose of the whole exercise! Some speakers have referred to the social importance of the postman. Let me add to that, the importance of the post offices. They have referred to rural and sparsely populated areas. I come from Munich, a very densely populated urban conglomeration, but we have the same problem there. One urban district post office after another is being closed down. We have a disproportionately large number of old people in these large cities, who are becoming increasingly lonely with the decline in the number of retail shops. That is why we must define certain minimum standards here too and realise that it is important to provide the necessary services for the people. For if there is only one letter box left in the inner city of Munich where the mail is collected again in the evening, that reflects a rapid decline in quality, while at the same time prices are sometimes rising, which is something else we must note. So, yes to liberalisation, but let us also think about the limits to liberalisation, rapidly create reasonable conditions in Europe and submit the appropriate study to the Commission. I would hope that in future the symbol of European postal policy will no longer be the snail but that our post will finally be dispatched post-haste. That is a term that harks back to the time when the post was still the symbol of speed.

Political group: PPE-DE