Mr President, I really can only echo what my friend and colleague, Mr Miller, has said. He and I alternate from one side to the other as rapporteur and shadow rapporteur of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market on these technical files. I can also reveal to him that not only have I been nominated for this task in the Legal Affairs Committee, but I currently have on my file six other technical regulations – wearing my other hat – for the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy. Perhaps it is because I was an engineer in my previous life. But seriously, we must consider first of all the whole way in which this work is to be carried out. This is an important directive. We should not underestimate the importance of it. I thank Mr Miller for the work he has done on basically sorting out the finer details of it although, as he said, it is not really a job we should be doing. Commissioner Liikanen's services need to make sure that they are sorting out the fine detail. The fine elements of this – the technical detail that the car or component manufacturers are advising us about – really ought to be handled by him before it comes to us. Indeed, now that the Commission has acceded to the protocols of the Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva, which has been where the bulk of motor vehicle legislation in Europe is handled, we are faced with another set of issues – most of which are being handled in the Industry Committee at the moment – where Parliament does not have the right of amendment as we have with this sort of directive. That is probably right but there are still the political elements that we need to consider. In fact, Mr Miller should be receiving an invitation from me, so I am pleased to say that I had already anticipated what he was going to invite me to do tonight. He will be receiving an invitation from me to a meeting next week where I have been asked by the Industry Committee to convene a group of interested parliamentarians. I know that Commissioner Liikanen's motor vehicle colleagues will be well represented and are keen to come and exchange views with us, as are the motor industry trade associations and the European and Japanese component manufacturers, to have a look at how we handle this growing and important issue and how we relate to it politically. Essentially, we are looking for some shape of strategy and for key issues requiring a political input, so that we can then leave the technical side to the Commission. There may be then, in the case of EC regulations, simply a right of veto at the end or, if we feel that the work has not been done properly, we will simply not accept it until it comes back in its finally completed form. Then we should not have to be dealing with this sort of technical work. Hopefully, by the time we come around to another cycle of these procedures, Mr Miller and I will not be here late on a Tuesday evening, talking about the technical details of heaters, tyres or whatever it is, but we will have had a chance to make an overall political input into the scope of motor vehicle regulation. I know that Commissioner Liikanen is interested in seeing this process streamlined, not only in the fine technical detail, but also by looking at the ways in which the industry itself can be encouraged to develop its own technical regulations within an overall public policy framework and indeed, on crucial issues like safety, to be able to move beyond those and to use its own technical resources to help make better, safer and more environmentally-friendly vehicles for us to use.

Political group: PPE-DE