Mr President, your reminder a moment ago to us to keep strictly to our speaking time leads me to make my fundamental observation and ask all of you in the Bureau to give consideration to how Parliament works. The law we are drafting will completely overhaul the market in energy, which is one of the key markets in Europe, one that is worth billions, and we allow each rapporteur to speak for just five minutes – five minutes in which we really cannot make any sensible points. That, then, we even have to divide up again between the two rapporteurs, because, strictly speaking, we have only one directive, but its two dossiers mean that there are two rapporteurs. The Commissioner, who is just entering the Chamber, will then have the opportunity to say something, provided it is something amusing! There is no doubt about it, I do not begrudge her that, but our having to limit ourselves in political debate in such a way strikes me as positively catastrophic. I have just said that we are going to change the structures of the market. What we actually have in the European Union is not an internal market; rather, we have 15 submarkets which, in themselves, are more or less open, but which vary widely as to their degree of openness. That is still much more the case in the market for gas than in the market for electricity. If, though, we want to exploit the efficiency gains of an internal market, then what we need is not the addition of 15 submarkets, but an integrated, common, internal market. Efficiency gains to enable business – especially small and medium-sized enterprises – to improve its competitiveness, efficiency gains for consumers in terms of favourable prices, and efficiency gains for the environment, gained through the careful use of resources. The open market that we want is not a matter of ‘laissez-faire’ or of everyone doing as they please. We need rules for all the participants in this integrated market, rules that they can make sense of, rules that they can apply in a similar manner. We need, then, the access of all market participants to the networks and other system installations to be utterly transparent and free of discrimination, as otherwise distortions of competition will come into being. We therefore need a unitary regulatory framework, such as we do not as yet possess, the consequence of that being that we have a divided market and a system that in practice works virtually nowhere, with the possible exception of in one Member State in an island situation; it is not yet working anywhere else. We need a regulatory framework that sets objectives, lays down binding standards, and creates machinery and applicability across the board. Our problem is now that we have, of course, 15 different Member States, and the structures of these 15 Member States differ widely. The overall conditions of a country with 700 or more network operators are quite different from those of a Member State with only one network. What matters, though, is that the regulatory framework should have binding effect, with its application being monitored and with sanctions being imposed in the event of non-compliance. That is what is at stake, and, that being so, we must correct some of what the Commission originally proposed in its amending directive in order, on the one hand, that the objectives of the different systems in the Member States should be standardised, and, on the other, that their home-grown structures should remain compatible to some small degree. How the institutions and authorities in a Member State then guarantee that this happens is a matter for the Member State itself. All that is needed is for it to be clear and reliable for all participants in the market. So much for what we, as legislators, can actually regulate. I want to use the seconds remaining to me just to ask the Commission for something. It so happens that we currently have different conditions applying to electricity and gas respectively. On the whole, we produce electricity ourselves in the internal market. For gas, we are increasingly dependent on imports from third countries. I believe that, from the competition and competitiveness angle, we will have the important task of introducing competition among producers. I know this is a problematic issue, as the suppliers are generally from outside the EU, but this would be a task on which, as a whole, we would have to work together, as, without supply-side competition of this kind, we will never have more than restricted competition in the European market.

Political group: PSE