Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, first of all I would of course like to thank Mr Savary for his excellent report. He has done such a good job that we can adopt it without further ado and we have not even needed the excitement of the conciliation procedure, which I was so looking forward to. However, I am very pleased, as has already been said, that we were recently able to approve the railways package which Mr Jarzembowski and I put so much work into, and that we have achieved a well-rounded package to which Mrs de Palacio also made such an important contribution. This is not just a half-hearted compromise, but a really good package. My second point is this: can we rest on our laurels now? Have we done everything that needs to be done as regards railways? Mr Savary has already indicated that there are still some problems to resolve. The Commissioner has already announced that work is to be done in some areas on market opening in freight and passenger transport, and has already started the relevant work, and I regard this as being very important as regards working conditions and the regulation of working hours. The big problem is competition between road and rail. The work we have now done and will be voting on tomorrow means that we will be making rail transport more competitive. I would remind all those people who are always talking about competition that competition means, or ought to mean, that the initial opportunities, the competition conditions, should be reasonably equal, and that certainly cannot be said when it comes to road and rail. During the Swedish Presidency we have been discussing sustainable development and giving greater priority to environmental matters, and in the specific context of a motion on the energy dependence of the European Union, we are have been talking about reducing that level of dependence. That ought to mean that when it comes to transport policy we should be taking greater account of the potential of railways. I am deliberately not talking about giving priority to rail, but it would already be a great step forward if we could create a level playing field between road and rail. I have already touched on the issue of regulating working hours, and I will not go into the incredible cost-cutting tactics adopted – even on the roads – by means of artificial self-employed status in the road haulage industry, nor into the 'Willi Betz syndrome' and associated regulations, which have also been mentioned several times, nor into issues relating to tariff classification, also including, of course, the issue of external costs. However, all these issues are very important in the context of enlargement. When we consider how widely the situation of railways in the various candidate countries varies, and how poor and even appalling their infrastructure is in some cases, then we must do everything we can to solve these problems not just at EU level, but also at candidate country level. I say that because it is no use having the best, the most modern and integrated railway system in the western part of Europe if we cannot, at the same time, achieve better conditions on the railways in eastern and southern Europe, and this is an area where the European Union needs to make a major contribution.

Political group: PSE