Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I can tell you that we have achieved a great innovation. The first reading was at 23.33 on Tuesday evening, and it is now 21.02 on Wednesday evening, so I must say that we have made tremendous progress. As far as I know, this is the first time that we have had a second reading on Wednesday evening and then the voting on Thursday. In that sense, then, we have taken a step backwards. The use of public sector information is naturally a very important issue. We talk so often about the re-use of public sector information, saying ‘it was agreed in Lisbon that the European Union should become “the most competitive ... knowledge-based” society in the world’. Premiers go home afterwards with tears in their eyes because they have just said that. As soon as we get back to reality, however, we feel fierce anger, because what then lies ahead of us is an endless struggle. At the second reading, we had to deal with a Council common position containing a large number of comments which, it has to be said, did not have a great deal to do with the ambitious objectives agreed in Lisbon. To illustrate: one could say that auctions of third-generation frequencies, for example UMTS, have now fetched so much money for the Member States that they would say ‘we are now prepared to make as much information as possible available free of charge’. The reverse is true. Public sector bodies simply want more money for the use of public sector information. My colleagues and I have had to fight extremely hard with the Council in order to take a step forwards on that point. I am very happy, therefore, that we have indeed been able to take that step. Nevertheless, we have to accept the fact that reality is far more difficult than we should like. Then, of course, there remains the point to which I am always referring. Imagine that you are an entrepreneur in a small SME in Italy. You are not, but imagine that you are. Imagine also that you want public sector information that you intend to re-use. You must imagine that scenario in a Union that is soon to have 25 Member States all having their own, unpublished, assets lists. You then have to contend with a situation in which you have to use a pink form in one case and a green one in the other; in language X in one case and language Y in the other – and you have to keep on top of all of this as an entrepreneur in a small SME. That is simply not possible. For this reason, I am also very pleased that we have finally been able to convince the Council, too, that there must be an assets list stating explicitly which public sector information is available for re-use and – if this can be done at all in these days of the Lisbon objectives – that it is also available on the Internet. We have managed to achieve this at the second reading, and I am extremely happy about that. We have also managed to tighten up the cost principles raised by the Council considerably and to make it clear that it is by no means always necessary to demand reimbursement of costs from citizens or enterprises that want to use public sector information. In some cases, however, for example where bodies are concerned which the government has privatised, and which themselves have financial commitments, there is no other way. However, express limits then have to be imposed on this. That point proved a very difficult one – including internally. We discussed it at great length, but, in my opinion, obtained a good result. The Council did not want to use the word ‘information’ – it only wanted to speak of ‘document’. I asked the Council, therefore, whether it is a European document society that we have or a European information society. Of course, everyone saw the humour in that, and ultimately we did reach the compromise that we could keep the word ‘information’; even though ‘document’ is used throughout the Directive. I should like to tell one final anecdote. We wanted a situation in which information follows promptly after submission of a request. In our enthusiasm, we said that this had to be within three weeks. We then spent approximately one hour squabbling with the Council as to whether that deadline should be three weeks or 20 working days. I was then convinced by the fact that working weeks are shorter than five days in some Member States. Some Member States have a lot more days’ holiday than others. We finally changed it to 20 working days: this could mean three or four weeks in one Member State, and approximately five weeks in another, but there you have the multiformity of the European Union. Finally, I should like to thank my colleagues, in particular, for the confidence they have shown in me. I have been able to count on a great deal of support from Mrs Read and Mrs Plooij-van Gorsel in my negotiations in the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy. Thanks to them, and to the excellent cooperation with the European Commission, we have come through, and we can in any case present a result that I believe satisfies our minimum expectations. We are going to carry out an evaluation in three years’ time, and I hope that the Council will then have progressed slightly, and that we are really going to take the Lisbon objectives very seriously. I should like to thank everyone for their confidence and for the help they have given me.

Political group: PPE-DE