Mr President, with great respect to Mr Alyssandrakis, I have to differ with him. In common with most other colleagues who have spoken in the debate, I think this directive is going in the right direction and that we should all be pushing it as well as we can towards a conclusion. There are points of difference between us and these are important points. The grand idea of simplification, of bringing 15 different sectoral directives together into one overall scheme, is really an extraordinarily important one, not just for the reasons which Mr Harbour and others have mentioned, because of the completion of the single market, but also because of our responsibility as a Union to supply our citizens with reasonably clear and intelligible laws. If we can bring together the whole body of law concerning recognition of professions into a single coherent package, that is in itself a good thing in terms of the quality of the laws that we produce in this Union. It is important not to lose the particular protections that apply to different professions. It would be a very bad thing if you over-simplified, as Mr Bowis pointed out, to the point that you get rid of essential protections. For example, in relation to the provision of services in the health professions by health professionals. All of us have to confess, taking the example that he gave, that we can have very good professional qualifications and professional disciplinary tribunals and still people such as Dr Shipman can get through the net. That just shows the point, and it is a point which Mr Zappalà was making, that the relationship of professionals to other members of the community is a curious one: someone who goes to a professional for advice gives herself or himself over to the power of that person because the professional necessarily knows more about the client or patient's problem than the client or patient does or can. You would not have professions otherwise. That power relationship between professionals and citizens is one which requires regulation of the kind we have been talking about. It requires proper structures for example, the kind of structures that would emerge under some of the proposals from the committees and subcommittees that will deal with particular professions within the grander overall framework. Mr Alyssandrakis said that we are engaged in an effort of levelling down. I beg to differ. As a lifelong provider of a kind of professional training, as a professor of law, I would be the last to disparage the importance of on-the-job, in-practice training as well as the importance of the kind of work that I have spent a lot of my time doing classroom teaching, tutorials and so on. What is important, and Mr Harbour mentioned this, is the maintenance of the five levels that we already have. There have been some proposals to refine these yet further. I would certainly deplore that. I think we have an 'understood' set of five levels and these should be retained. They should also be clarified. Having read Amendments Nos 192 to 196 in the name of Mrs Kauppi, Mr Harbour and others, I think that does a rather elegant job and, in any event, between now and the final vote, it is up to us to try and bring it together in such a way that we get a clear, intelligible and workable package at the end of the day. The engineering case has been mentioned. There is a point here which we all share. With great respect, it is too soon to go as far as Mr Zappalà is suggesting at this stage. It is important that we get the engineers to a better condition of mutual understanding in the different countries and that we achieve a better situation so that someone who is entitled to call themselves an engineer in Italy can feel that the same applies to a chartered engineer in the United Kingdom, and vice versa. We need to develop a common platform. Across the House there have been indications of movement towards agreement, and very important that is. It has been said that it is important in the single market to have free movement of labour to provide services. I agree with that. Since the beginning of my time in this Parliament, I have been involved in the case of the foreign language lecturers at Italian universities who had four judgments in their favour over 14 years and who are still not guaranteed or granted adequate rights of access to employment on the same terms as Italian nationals. That is just one example of why the work we are doing is of such vital importance if we are to have equal access to work and equal opportunity to provide services, with adequate protection for citizens and consumers across the Union. I strongly support the direction in which we are going and hope we manage to get home to port at the next plenary.

Political group: Verts-ALE