Mr President, this is a moment of some importance for consumer protection in the European Union. The institutions of the Union have come together to set out the principles of food law in the shape of a new authority which can safeguard the food we eat and the way it is produced. You cannot have the one without the other. To those who say we have gone too fast and that the Commission or the Council are urging us to move too quickly during this presidency, I would say simply that we are repairing the neglect of decades in which the very variety and self-sufficiency of our foodstuffs hid great disasters, from BSE, to dioxins, to some of the scourges of the present day. It is the particular task of this Parliament to refine and specify the proposal from the Commission, that is, to remind citizens and stakeholders alike exactly what we are intending to do to safeguard all parts of the food chain, at whatever point we happen to be in it, from primary producers through to ultimate consumers. We all have a stake in the kind of food that is circulated in Europe, how it is produced, how it is prepared and ultimately how it is checked. This authority is primarily concerned with food safety. That is why our committee strongly supported the change of title. We believe it is necessary because there must be clear but also limited and targeted ambitions for this authority. They must relate to what it is able to do in terms of its remit and also in terms of its budget, and not in terms of all of the other ambitions that might be piled upon it by those who wish it to do a variety of different things. Everything has to be seen through this focus. I would say to some of my colleagues in the committee who moved a variety of amendments aimed at the further restyling of the title of this authority: the priorities are set out in the report as amended. If you want a proper reference to hygiene or to nutrition or to quality or to our affection for traditional foods, as some of the amendments have proposed, my answer would be: look in the report. They are all there in due measure. But they are not there in the title. They are not in themselves the primary function of this new authority. I owe a great debt to my colleagues of all parties in the committee. The report was passed in the Committee on the Environment by 40 votes to 0 with 2 abstentions. The large number of amendments which we shall put forward today in blocked groups reflects the degree of consensus that we ourselves reached. Here I also owe a debt to the Commission for its help, to the Swedish Presidency, which has taken this through with a commendable sense of urgency, and most of all to my own parliamentary assistant, Michele Smyth who has laboured tirelessly on all of this. I should like to raise some of the salient points about which there will still be argument and upon which a number of the amendments have been based. Should the new authority be appointed on the basis of ability and merit, through a full process of scrutiny, or should it be by the old road of quiet nomination? We go for merit every time. We go for openness. We go for transparency. The Member States will play a full role through the continuum of the advisory forum. They do not need to be in a position where, proportionally, they plant their flags around every seat at the new authority's table. We do not think that the authority should be responsible for the rapid alert system. We think ultimate responsibility must rest with the Commission. The authority should be financed entirely from the budget, on which this Parliament can share the decisions. The EUR 44 million envisaged is a fairly small sum, compared to other European agencies. It is only one third of the budget which the British Food Standards Agency had at its inception. There are amendments, including some from the Committee on Budgets, which I would support, suggesting that we take in hand the precise financing of this agency ourselves. My final point is about the site of the new authority. There are those who would like it to be determined by codecision involving this Parliament. There are those who think it should be decided ultimately by the Council on a proposal by the Commission with the assent of this Parliament. My own view is that we should have a free vote on this, because it seems to me that those in the House who wish to take the codecision route have a right to vote for it. My own scepticism remains. I think we should take the traditional route, on this issue at least. I commend this report to the House. This is an idea which has not so much found its time as found us at precisely the right moment. I hope the House will support it in the vote.

Political group: PSE