Mr President, Commissioner Bolkestein, ladies and gentlemen, the simpler legislation for the internal market initiative is one of the most important processes now underway in the Union. At least for my party in Finland, the National Coalition, the streamlining of legislation and an end to the needless churning out of directives became one of the main objectives in the last European Parliament elections. I believe that much value is attached to this approach in many other quarters too. The Commission communication on the present state of the SLIM project is very gratifying, but by no means fully adequate, as yet. It is vitally important that the Commission is able to make the proposals for the project’s third and fourth phases into clear legislative proposals as soon and as effectively as possible. Furthermore, the six-month deadline proposed by the rapporteur should be taken seriously. I warmly support our rapporteur’s proposals that the users of the legislation – the customers of our decision makers – should be heard more than they have been when concrete proposals are being drafted. Only this sort of coregulation can fully serve to speed up the development of the European internal market, and, ultimately, guarantee that consumers actually do benefit from legislation projects and the adoption of the euro. Proposals alone are obviously not enough: they must also be able to be processed swiftly both in Parliament and in the Council. We do have debates on speeding up the legislative process from time to time here in Parliament. We members of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs in particular await with interest the proposals by the Lamfalussy working party on new courses of action that are to be applied in the future, at least with regard to legislation on financial services. Although their interim report was still not very detailed, it nevertheless gives us to understand that the working party is pondering a procedure in which only the broadest policy issues would be solved through a full-scale codecision procedure, while for other amendments to directives of a more technical nature the fast-track procedure would apply. In principle, I take a positive view of such proposals, although it is notoriously difficult for us parliamentarians to relinquish power. I believe that the relinquishment of power in certain respects will be inevitable to remove the final barriers to the internal market as soon as possible. My final position, and that of my group, will surely depend on what form the fast-track procedure will take. In no case should it be an imitation of the present comitology procedure, where there is a very great need for reform, especially in the area of transparency. Our rapporteur also referred to this. As regards the general development of the legislative process, I also await with interest the Commission’s white paper on governance it is drafting for the Gothenburg Summit. Whatever the Commission proposes in its paper will determine how quickly new projects for legislation are dealt with, and, how effective the Union is as a whole for a long time ahead. Hopefully, the paper will contain good, concrete proposals, but I also hope that we can still put some effort into the SLIM project.

Political group: PPE-DE