Mr President, it has been, as always, a pleasure to work with my friend Bill Miller on these technical directives and I believe that we will have made a significant improvement to this directive if it is approved. So I will not go through the amendments. He has done a good job on that. I just want to address the question of why we on this side have chosen to propose a motion of rejection. It relates to the whole issue of whether Parliament should be handling technical directives. I recall that in a speech not long ago in this Parliament Commissioner Liikanen talked about some of the problems he is facing on potential pedestrian protection legislation for cars. He presented us with at least 60 pages of complex technical mathematical calculations and he challenged us: is this the sort of thing this Parliament should be considering? This directive is 150 pages long and it has it own share of technical calculations, graphs, charts and other detailed technical provisions. The same arguments apply. I want to pick up on a point made by Bill Miller. He is right to challenge us on the question about disabled access, but he said and I quote him, 'It will make public transport accessible to all users'. Regrettably that is not the case. If it were, we would support it. This piece of paper includes provision to make buses more accessible for disabled users, but it does not address the whole question of operating regulations for public transport systems across the European Union. The issues which our colleague Mr Howitt quite rightly says we should be putting in here: changing the infrastructure to make buses more accessible for disabled users. What have we actually achieved after nine years? Do we really have mutual recognition of technical standards between countries? Have we really achieved the sort of significant advances in safety that we want? I had a look through these 150 pages. I may be wrong – Commissioner, you may be able to tell me this – but I could not find in here any provision for mandatory fitting of seat belts. Why is that not in here if we are serious about the Council saying to us in this document that it has come up with a practicable solution with a high level of safety and user-friendliness. If we really had achieved that, then we should be proud of it. There are provisions, certainly, for things like strength of superstructure but the worrying thing here – and I ask the Commissioner to address this – is that this is not all. At the end there is a list of things that the Commission and Council want to bring back to us. It does not address school buses. It does not address the latest developing technology of buses. There are going to be new provisions for superstructures. When is all this going to end? When are we going have realistic and sensible measures and the sort of technical committee structure that this Parliament asked you to introduce at first reading in 1997 and which is simply dismissed here? I quote in conclusion: 'The Commission was unable to support the approach and in consequence did not amend its original proposal.' Not a single word of explanation. That is why my group will be recommending that this is rejected tomorrow.

Political group: PPE-DE