Mr President, as Parliament's rapporteur for a single market strategy, it is important to emphasise that the operation of an effective, open and competitive public procurement process is an absolutely indispensable foundation of a working internal market. I am very grateful to the many colleagues who supported my report. We in this Parliament called for the speedy completion of the internal market and particularly recalled that an effective internal market is a major weapon in the European Union's competitiveness. I want us to return to that in looking at the context of what we are examining here. We want this new proposal – if it goes through in a final form as agreed by ourselves and the Commission – to be the most effective instrument we can devise to, firstly, encourage public authorities to obey and use it. Nobody here has pointed out that the problem with the regime at the moment is that a significant number of contracts that ought to be included in this public procurement regime are not. Why are they not included? It is because the procedures are complicated, because they are being evaded. Also. the counterpart to that is that we want the maximum number of small and large firms to participate in the process. That is what an open and competitive market has to be all about. Therefore, the aims included in the revision of these directives – to make the rules clearer, simpler to operate and unambiguous, and to allow the incorporation of new technologies such as electronic auctions – have to be commended. We are basically satisfied with the direction that those proposals go in because they seem to me to be crucially important. We must move forward in other areas as well. There has been a lot of discussion tonight about issues, particularly involving sustainability and ecological procurement. However, there is nothing whatsoever in these proposals that in any way outlaws sustainable or environmentally friendly procurement. Provided that public authorities clearly specify the environmental criteria that the product or service must meet in an unambiguous and non-discriminatory way, then there is nothing to stop them from doing that. This is an instrument of internal market and competitiveness policy. It is not a fresh instrument of social or employment policy, nor is it a fresh instrument of environmental policy. We may want to ensure that those criteria are applied in a non-discriminatory way, but companies that comply with all the European rules on environment and on employment criteria must be able to tender in a non-discriminatory way. This is not an instrument for adding new provisions. Therefore, we must be very clear in rejecting any amendments that try to do that. I understand that colleagues on this side of the House are about to subject us to a whole raft of fresh amendments tonight, so we shall probably have and look forward to looking at a hundred amendments tomorrow for a vote on Wednesday. That seems to me to be an entirely unrealistic thing to do. However, unfortunately, we are forced to do that by the constraints of the timetable. Finally, I just wish to draw the House's attention to the merit of Amendment No 68 concerning monitoring. We want the member governments to monitor the application of public procurement rules better and to encourage local authorities to comply with them, because compliance with these new rules will be the test by which this proposal is finally judged.

Political group: PPE-DE