Mr President, I largely support the reports before us on better regulation and the interinstitutional agreement, and indeed their objectives: to secure a reliable, up-to-date and user-friendly body of law to benefit all our citizens, workers and businesses. This will involve removing the 'dead wood' – the obsolete or outdated texts – which should result in decreasing the volume of the acquis communautaire without affecting legal status. There is a need to improve presentation and ensure user-friendly access to a Community body of law, the modernisation and simplification of existing legislation and policies have to be phased in. However, the task should not be underestimated. The Single Market is one of our great success stories, but the sheer volume of legislation spawned by the Single Market to ensure harmonisation of Member State procedures is daunting. Amendments, originating in any of the official languages and then translated into all of the others, often leave the finished product – when it is translated back into all of the official languages – turgid, pedantic and generally cumbersome and uncomfortable to the native eye. Yes, the legal status is intact, but the text is not user-friendly. Our addiction to acronyms has spawned a new language: Eurospeak. After six months in any of the Institutions, we are all using it, further isolating ourselves and our work from 'Joe and Mary Citizen'. Cocobu, CFSP – or is it PESC? – Coreper, and the latest is GARC, which I think stands for the General Affairs and External Relations Council. In short, our texts need urgent detoxification from this addiction. Impact assessment is a particular area of current interest for my country, Ireland. Our specific interest is in developing a means of competitiveness-proofing for EU legislative measures, to ensure that the EU strategy is one that stimulates economic growth in order to meet the Lisbon 2010 objectives. We would like to achieve real progress in the development and use of impact assessment to underpin competitiveness. The text of paragraph 30 of the interinstitutional agreement is inspired by the proposal in Mr Medina Ortega's report to have the possibility of impact assessments on codecision legislation, prior to the adoption of any substantive amendment, either at first reading or at the conciliation stage on the basis of jointly-defined criteria and procedures. I will not hold my breath, Mr President. For the record, the Commission's own integrated impact assessment procedure is in its infancy. For 2003, the Commission identified 44 proposals for so-called extended impact assessment. It seems however, that only four were completed. I should like the Commission to comment on this, please. The expected legislative proposals on chemicals not included in the 44 originally identified, but assessed now in response to political and other pressure, will be the first real, extensive impact assessment carried out on a draft proposal. Only then perhaps will its usefulness become apparent. In conclusion, to use the Commissioner's own words, there is a solid basis here, but perhaps it is a wish-list. Let us hope it is the former. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE