Madam President, I also wish to thank the rapporteur Mr Ferber and the members of the committee for their hard work on this particular dossier. It has not been an easy dossier to follow and it has not been rushed or done wrongly. It is excellent. The previous directive of 1997 called for: 'a gradual and controlled liberalisation'. What the Commission came up with during this year was neither gradual nor controlled. What it came up with was, in the words of Neil Armstrong, the famous American astronaut: 'one giant leap for mankind' in that they moved from 350 grammes to 50 grammes in one fell swoop. Therefore, whilst that may be welcomed in certain parts of this House, it would have had a devastating effect on postal services throughout the European Union. This morning we need to examine what those proposals would have meant. We also need to make the point made by Mr Jarzembowski: so many studies have been conducted by this Commission, yet we have never seen them. A commissioner came before the committee and said that they would be put on the Internet – we never saw them! Yet we are expected to go along the lines that the Commission wanted without ever seeing those so-called studies. The reason why we never saw those studies was because the social effects mentioned in them – the effects on postal services – were simply not to the liking of the Commission. A reduction of the universal service – the very core of the postal service sector – to 50 grammes would seriously put at risk the ability of the national postal operators to deliver a universal service at an affordable tariff to people, irrespective of where they live. That is a crucial point. I am not saying that people who live in cities should get a better service than people in rural areas. I am not going to give the old Florus Wijsenbeek argument: well, why should we be delivering letters up there – people should get on the Internet. That is why he is no longer with us. In other words, what the Commission is proposing, supported by some in this House, will in my own country lead to a reduction in service levels, in particular in rural areas. You can forget the daily guaranteed delivery and collection service. You can forget a single tariff: zonal pricing will be introduced. In other words, people in rural areas will pay more. There will be job losses. I am sorry, Mr Ferber, I am concerned about job losses and the effect they will have. It will also lead to the closure of rural sub-post offices, because they rely on postal services for their very survival. I also want to stress the human element. Some people have said that we have liberalised telecoms and it was not a great problem. But telecoms are about machines, this is about people meeting the service face to face, not meeting the service the other side of a telephone or computer screen. We often pontificate here about being the representatives of the citizens of Europe. Well, if my mail bag is anything to go by, the citizens of Europe do not want to see their postal services decimated. I remind my Conservative MEP colleagues of the mess they got into in the UK when they tried to privatise the British post office. I fought against that and, having won that battle, I am not going to give that up to see the battle reopened via the back door of Europe. Today we have a report before us that is an excellent response to the Commission's proposals. It is a response that is not only measured, but also guaranteed to improve our services for consumers, irrespective of where they live. Again, I stress that what we are talking about today is people and public service and not ideologies. It is about getting that public service delivered to them, irrespective of what is on the balance sheet. I would recommend our compromises because I believe we have ensured that postal services will be developed in the European Union and that those postal services will deliver to the people of Europe. If you go down the road of the Commission or some in this House, then you will decimate those postal services and we will be slated by the people for that action, and rightly so. (Applause)

Political group: PSE