Mr President, Parliament's Committee on the Environment is increasingly concerned that we are adopting European environmental legislation and then neglecting to implement it properly. Putting it bluntly, we believe that the Council of Ministers, the Commission and the European Parliament are complicit in a deception of the public. Opinion polls show that the majority of people support the idea that environmental issues are important and should be dealt with at European level. We are adopting legislation that appears to fill this need. In fact, in all too many cases, environmental laws are ignored, targets are not met, reports are not sent in to the Commission on time and those countries which break the law go unpunished. The purpose of this debate is to highlight what is going wrong and to try and do something about it. The Committee on the Environment has put together three reports, we call them ‘insight reports’, basing ourselves on the model of the US Congress. We have found that the habitats directive is locked in controversy and law suits. The PCBs directive is characterised by the failure of Member States to supply the all-important inventories of the stocks they hold. The nitrates directive was probably flawed from the beginning and all but two countries, Denmark and Sweden of course, are now before the European Court of Justice because of their failure to implement it. It is highly likely that these shortcomings are repeated throughout the canon of EU environmental law. What can be done about this? We hope firstly that in the environmental action programme, which the world is eagerly awaiting, the Commission will key in adequate resources for following up what has happened to legislation. It would be interesting to hear from the Commissioner roughly how many people in her Directorate are responsible for this as compared to those overseeing the introduction of new legislation. There needs to be a much more honest debate secondly – nationally and at the European level – about the real possibility of achieving the environmental objectives set out in draft legislation. Too often, we suspect, Member States sign up to green laws because it looks good to do so, and opposing or moderating them is seen as politically insensitive. If, in fact, they cannot comply with what they have agreed to, such countries are doing Green causes harm. If the Germans and others, for example, now have trouble with the habitats directive, why did we not hear more about it when that directive was going through this Parliament? And did the German Government, in fact, vote against that directive originally? Certainly the cost of clean-up laws must be taken into account when a law is adopted. A good example of the failure to do this is the urban waste water directive which the government of Brussels cannot afford to comply with. We suspect that the same thing will happen with the national emissions ceiling directive. Thirdly, we want Member States to develop the infrastructures which will allow them, all of them, to carry out the monitoring work that must accompany the proper implementation of many of the EU directives we adopt here. My colleagues and I were desperately disappointed that the Council felt it could not agree to our proposal to transform the environmental inspections recommendation into a directive. We were not demanding an EU inspectorate but simply that Member States should agree to bring their national inspectorates up to a common high standard. We will continue to pursue this idea in two years time when the issue should return to us. Fourthly, we want much quicker action by the Commission to take Member States to court when they break EU law. Last week the Greek Government, which can ill afford to do so, paid the second instalment of a fine, now totalling over EUR 2 million for failure to comply with a judgment of the Court of Justice over the dumping of waste in Crete. This was thirteen years after the Commission received the first complaint about the dumping of that waste and no less than nineteen years after the directive concerned came into force. It is absurd that a poor country should get itself into a situation of paying back money to Brussels, but equally absurd that the case should have taken so long. Finally, let me say that we in Parliament are not daunted or diverted by the idea that the European Parliament should only be concerned with the adoption of legislation and not with its follow-up. Apparently the Environment Council was somewhat surprised and even disapproving that we had intruded into their territory and that our intention was to take the environmental inspections recommendation very seriously. MEPs, as we will all know, are on the receiving end of public criticism of poor implementation. The public tends to complain to us, not to the Environment Council. In the interests of the people of Europe and their environment, we will pursue this issue and we will not let go.

Political group: PPE-DE