Mr President, Commissioner, Mr Schmid, thank you for the report and thank you for looking into the situation. I should like to make a few critical observations. Firstly, as has been mentioned a number of times today, we are now on the brink of a slow but steady economic downturn. Member States where, until recently, an economic miracle was unfolding – the Netherlands being one example of this – are now faced with rapid decline in employment, while the same measures are still being applied. It is actually regrettable that we talk about creating 10 million jobs – in the knowledge that this largely depends on the economic climate – but cannot gauge accurately whether, and if so, how, this is related to policy. However, we still believe that measures to assist reintegration into work, for example, can definitely have a sustainable effect. If these were not in place, we would be in trouble. But as I said before, we are not certain. Meanwhile, the Luxembourg process has, in fact, been overtaken by the Lisbon process to a certain extent, and there are a number of other processes running parallel to it as well. We believe it is useful to maintain the four-pillar structure as it is now, not least because a number of underlying guidelines have not yet been elaborated. I will mention two. The first one, which falls within the pillar of adaptability, is quality of labour and quality of the organisation of work. I find it distressing that we have been talking about creating more jobs for years, yet far too little attention is being paid to the whole aspect of better-quality jobs. We have wonderful documents on the subject, but this is as far as it goes. We have no further details worked out, no plans to put them into practice, certainly no programme, and we have no money put aside for this. This is distressing at a time when one takes part in a fifty-plus fair and is surrounded by hundreds of people, and one talks about the need for increasing participation of the elderly in the labour market. Statements you hear at a time like this are: ‘So what are the jobs involved? Will I be required do the same job as I did before? No, never, give me voluntary work any day’. Or you may be facing cross-border workers in a room of 600 people who say: ‘Yes, very nice, this free movement between Belgium and the Netherlands, but how about adapting the social security systems?’ This is an underdeveloped area. I could quite easily go on like this for a while and fill my 3 minutes very quickly. I think we should persist with the open coordination method, but should at the same time consider very critically whether it should be applied to other areas, and many more, without any further consideration. Finally, on the issue of policy coordination, it would be good to work on this very hard in the near future. There are debates coming up in the short term about how we will be coordinating this. I will monitor very closely whether the subordination of the employment guidelines compared to the overall guidelines for economic policy, as enshrined in the Treaty, is not overshooting its target too much and whether the right balance is maintained. I think this is urgently required. This could mean that we will need to bring elements of current economic policy into line with a number of elements of these other objectives. This means balancing things out, in my view. Finally, it is patently clear that parliaments must be interviewed and called on more extensively in order – how shall I put it – to lower the level of this sort of work across the European organisation.

Political group: Verts-ALE