Mr President, may I too offer my congratulations to you on your election as first Vice-President. I should like to provide a different perspective on the debate this afternoon. In this debate we have not heard from the people who are now supplying public authorities across the European Union as a result of the tremendous progress that has been made in opening up public contracting all over the European Union. So far we have heard nothing this afternoon about the people who are driving the economy forward because they are getting open access to tenders, cheaply and readily available by electronic means. That applies to businesses, organisations, service providers, manufacturers, contractors all over the European Union. A few weeks ago I went to see one of those companies in my constituency. It employs 80 people. Every morning it logs on to the Official Journal. Five or six tenders are listed there, all for the United Kingdom. This company does not at the moment have export ambitions but the Official Journal gives it cheap, ready access to customers in public authorities to a standard format. It fulfils and puts in tenders for them every week. In this perspective I want to look at the balance between economic, environmental and social issues. That company in the Black Country in the United Kingdom employs 80 people, that is 80 much-needed jobs, and it complies with every single social requirement in United Kingdom law. It complies with all the environmental rules in United Kingdom law. It is perfectly entitled to apply for a contract. Why should that be otherwise? Why should it have to do anything else? This is primarily an economic instrument. That is what it was designed to be to begin with. We may want to add to its social burdens – and plenty of colleagues over there would like to do that. We will have many more debates with Mrs Thorning-Schmidt and other colleagues about adding to the requirements to improve the safety and health of their workers. That is fine. If companies comply with that, they should be entitled to apply for contracts. I want to pick up on Mr MacCormick's points, because methinks he protests too much. On the question of the Helsinki bus contract, surely it was up to the Helsinki authorities to decide, before they put the contract out to tender, what was the optimum and most environmentally friendly bus that they wanted? It is not part of public contract to require the bus manufacturers to do an environmental appraisal for Helsinki before they then submit the contract. If the Helsinki authorities had said that they wanted 100 buses powered by natural gas and that is the contract, then fine, if that is what they want to do. But it should be done on an open and consistent basis. Finally, I want to turn to this question of thresholds. This seems to be the most extraordinary debate. I particularly refer to one of the opinions from EMAC, in which our colleague, who unfortunately is not here, said he wanted to simplify matters by raising thresholds but at the same time he wanted to allocate 15% of contracts to SMEs. Does he think that by removing a substantial number of contracts from the public procurement regime, by raising thresholds, he is going to improve the situation for SMEs? What sort of world are we living in? This is an area where we want SMEs to compete. We want local authorities to put in contracts on a consistent open basis that will give our citizens value for money. We want to oblige them to do that. Just because they find it difficult, because they think it costs them money – probably because they do not want to comply with all the requirements – they want more discretion to give contracts not on an open basis. That is what raising this public threshold is all about. We should not do it. It will undermine the value of a system that is working well already. That is what we should be looking at: improvement, not destruction.

Political group: PPE-DE