Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, bathing water is making waves. Every year, at the onset of summer, the Commission draws up, on the basis of the 1976 directive, the survey of bathing waters. Not only does the European public take note of this information, but over two million visits are also made to the relevant websites. It is an established fact that bathing waters have become substantially cleaner right across Europe. In 2002, despite positively diluvian rainfall and flooding, as much as 98.5% of Europe’s coastal waters complied with the directive’s specifications. There are several reasons why it makes sense to revise the directive after over a quarter of a century. Scientific and technical knowledge have expanded at breakneck speed, any revision is to draw on the experience of up to twenty-six years of applying the directive in practice – dependent on the length of time the country has been a Member State of the European Union, the water framework directive is to be harmonised with the bathing water directive, protection of the health of bathers is to be further improved, and, last of all, the simplification of the existing laws is worth striving towards. My group shares the Commission’s intention to improve the quality of bathing water. Bathing should be promoted as a sensible leisure activity, as should the use of bathing waters for tourism in all our Member States. It is evident from what is now many years of experience that the greatest dangers to human health when bathing are presented by faecal matter finding its way into bathing waters as a result of inadequate treatment of waste water or from stock rearing. The new rules are intended to reduce from 19 to 2 the number of parameters to be measured and to treat intestinal enterococci and Escherichia coli as leading indicators; these two standards are to be made substantially more rigorous, but, by way of contrast, chemical parameters are disregarded and are no longer to be measured, as they are governed by other directives. Samples are to be taken less frequently if a constantly high level of water quality is found over a period of three years. The quality of bathing water is to be ascertained on the basis of changes over the past three years and no longer on the basis of one single year, so one-off eventualities – such as poor weather conditions – will be less markedly apparent. These factors would also reduce the costs involved in implementing the directive in the Member States. Our group also sees it as important that the provision of information on water quality should be improved, and that it should be more extensively disseminated via the media and the Internet. With that in mind, we endorse the Commission’s objective and also the amendments tabled to that end. Our amendments, however, are intended to bring about objectivity and simplicity and, above all, to avoid further increases in costs; hence, we do not want leisure activities to be included, and the management policies required strike us as every bit as over-the-top as the newly-introduced bathing water profiles. These measures will help make matters simpler in so far as they dovetail with the water framework directive; otherwise, our group takes the view that the principle of subsidiarity requires that local and regional circumstances be taken into account and dealt with in a flexible way. Some of the Commission’s proposals already run counter to these considerations, but a number of amendments from the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy even more so, and so we want to vote against these items. I see it as important that all the Member States have gathered a great deal of experience, and I take the view that we should stop trying to reinvent the wheel. (Applause)

Political group: PPE-DE