Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, as Mrs McNally said earlier, her report was not a particularly sexy matter. I think reports grow less sexy the later it gets, but I do not want to offend Mr Ferri, whose turn it is next. This draft directive amends and supplements a total of 10 directives, some of which date back to 1977. The President has saved me some time by already enumerating the professions concerned. Why did this report require so much care, including a time- and energy-consuming Conciliation Procedure, even though many may perhaps say the honourable Members are acting as though the world is being turned upside down, when it is basically just a matter of detail? Why did the vast majority of us insist on this Conciliation Procedure? There are essentially three reasons. Firstly, apart from architects and, in some respects, veterinary surgeons, they are all health-care professions in the widest sense. In everyday life, you can seek restitution for loss or damage suffered, but a human being is not a Golf, a Skoda or a Citroën that you can take to a professional or even an amateur mechanic to tinker about with. In such cases you can make a claim to make good the loss. But when it comes to health, the damage cannot normally be made good. That is why we have compensation for pain and suffering. From my own practice as a lawyer, I know of no one who would not gladly have repaid such compensation if the damage to his health could in that way have been reversed. If I may digress slightly, I think the whole procedure is a good example of why the Council ought in future to meet in public. From Greece to Ireland and from Italy to Finland, our citizens would have been very interested in much of what was said there and would have thought, “What are our governments proposing here? We want better safeguards!” There is therefore a lot of interest in these matters. Secondly, and this brings me to my second concern, we have the internal market. Wherever a diploma has been obtained, we want it to be used in the context of the free movement of people and services. Of course, the Member State on the other side and the citizen is interested first of all in asking anyone who wants to pack his bags and go to another Member State straight after his exams about the training he has received. Likewise, if somebody decides to go to another Member State 10 or even 30 years after taking his exams, the citizens and the host Member States want to know what the person has been doing in the last years since his exams. Has he undertaken further training? Has he kept himself abreast of developments? This brings me to my third reason. Parliament is keen that we should produce readable texts. I have already mentioned that I am a lawyer. When I was reading up on this matter, I have to say it was like going from one disaster to another. What we produce here is basically rubbish so far as the interested public is concerned. We must produce consolidated texts more quickly in future. For these various reasons, Parliament accepted 11 amendments with a large majority, and my only regret on going to conciliation was that I did not ask for that majority to be checked, because that would have shown that well over 400 of us were in favour. I must therefore also thank Mrs Gebhardt, with whom I worked closely to achieve that large majority, and who had confidence even though the conciliation delegation had three EVP members, that being how things turned out by the rules of the House. I will not bore you with the details – deadlines for transposition, the matter of qualifications obtained in third countries, replacement of the word “similar” by the word “equivalent” and the conclusion of Italian pharmacist studies. Briefly, three more basic principles. Firstly, the Commission has said that it will produce consolidated texts in future. I can only urge all rapporteurs to call for this soon to be done in their own fields, too. Secondly, lifelong learning. We must not just keep on talking about it, we must make it a requirement. I believe we have reached a good compromise. For reasons of subsidiarity, we have not produced any legislation, but we had our way with the preamble. Thirdly and lastly, the specialised training course for general practitioners was extended to three years. France was persuaded to increase it from two and a half to three years, while we have conceded to Member States Belgium and Finland that this special type can also be accepted with a longer basic training. I can therefore say that conciliation produced a good outcome, and I would ask you to vote in favour. But I should also like to say that we very much regret that the Commission was unfortunately not on our side from the outset on the points we were calling for and on which the Council finally gave way.

Political group: PPE-DE