Mr President, quite often a parliamentary colleague is given a report and you envy him or her. By the time the report is presented you envy them no more. That is not the case with Mr Bowis. He has carried this whole debate through with considerable elegance, charm and willingness to compromise, which is why the committee was able to adopt 12 compromise amendments, supported by almost all the political groups. We have a stark reminder this week of why we are all here and why this legislation is going through in the report in my own country – the Phillips Committee of Inquiry into the disaster, indeed scandal, of BSE. That came about in our national herd because of negligence and the indictment against those responsible, civil servants as well as ministers, will be set out for the world to see tomorrow. It will not be a day when we look with any particular pride at the procedures we then had. Those procedures have now been amended and changed and we have our own Food Standards Agency. To have such a body introduced in the European Parliament as part of a raft of similar measures, which will increase our concern and care for food safety in the European Union, is a good outcome to what has been a sad tale. I will mention briefly the key amendments which I commend to the House and the Commissioner and which I hope we can see voted through today. Obviously the title is important and Mr Bowis has accepted that. This has to be called an 'authority' because in English and most other languages, that conveys a body which has the power and ability from time to time in the process of risk assessment to use its best judgment and not merely to be the agent of what others would wish it to do. One of the amendments that was passed allowed it to issue own-initiative reports. On the still vexed question of how far we should go in allowing it to look at nutrition, and indeed to offer advice and to be consulted by those whose primary concern is risk management, we have also said that where the issue of safety is involved, these issues also should at least be within the remit of the opinion and the advice of this food standards authority. We have also said that the national food safety agencies and the consumer bodies in the Member States of the European Union should be fully consulted in the processes we are now embarked upon. That is because we need to carry right across the European Union the full support and weight of the public, the stakeholders and indeed, of course, the Member States for this authority. That means that they have to accept that the rapid alert system must be improved immediately and extended to animal feed. Yet again this week we have had another example, with infected beef in France finding its way on to the shelves of Carrefour, of how hard it is to catch those who have scant regard for food safety issues. We want the EFSA to have a board which has a balanced representation of people in consumer affairs, public health and all possible areas of scientific and agricultural knowledge. We want them to be people whom we can respect and who can declare their interest. Of course many of them will have had links with the food industry, links with science elsewhere. That is understandable and natural, but we need to know how and who and where and we should be able to do so. We want an annual report to this House and we want the director, when he or she is appointed, to be available to the Committee on the Environment and indeed the Agriculture Committee and to this House in general to report back. When that has happened I would say there is one last thing we must do. We must wait patiently for the Commission to come forward with legislation on other matters in the food safety area – PCB standards, food labelling, allergy labelling, action on nutrition policy and the amending legislation we need for processed baby foods and infant formulae. These things are inextricably linked with what the food authority will be doing. Finally, we will also be supporting a number of the new amendments, certainly Amendments Nos 11-13, 7-9 and we wish to have a free vote on Amendment No 14. We consider some of the others superfluous, but generally speaking the broad consensus there has been throughout in this House on this report should be carried through into the vote.

Political group: PSE