Mr President, tomorrow will see a large majority within the Group vote in favour of the amendments put forward by the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, as well as the amended version. I propose to confine my comments to two areas. Firstly there is the question as to what this directive is actually designed to achieve, that is achieve in the real sense. There is the fact that we have to take the interests of the economy and also of the individual into account. My comments start from the premise that we are talking about an upright individual in gainful employment. Then there are the interests of the Member States, which, being on the receiving end, may have to start from the premise of a worst case scenario. If we are going to abide by the one extreme, that is the interests of the Member States, then we certainly have every reason to make the hurdles that have to be cleared in applying for this card relatively high. There is also an argument for introducing early notification obligations as well as having this card. If I were to go to the other extreme, as few hurdles as possible that is, then I would run the risk of failing to produce any legislation whatsoever in the course of this procedure because the Member States would not sign up to this directive. I would therefore end up with a situation where a directive on the service provision card might well be in place, but with the hurdles facing the business world being so high, in reality no one would apply for the card. Alternatively, I might have no directive at all. Neither outcome would be satisfactory. Perhaps this is also why, as is rumoured to be the case, the Council has become bogged down in its negotiations on this as well. We have been trying to reach a happy compromise between one interest – that of public order – and the other, that of finding the easiest possible solution. We want to arrive at a solution where certain hurdles are created vis-à-vis the business world, but once these have been overcome, implementation is as easy as it possibly could be. Therefore we want applications for the service provision card to be for one or more Member States. If a company in France says that it has an employee who has to work in Denmark on a permanent basis, and only in Denmark, then it certainly ought only to be possible to apply for this card for Denmark. Accordingly, the bureaucratic hurdles that have to be overcome would be lower in this instance. In return for this, however, we want early notification obligations to be discontinued, rather it should just be a matter of the employee taking the justification for the posting to the other Member State along with them, and this might take the form of the contract forming the basis for his/her posting. Consequently, I too have to say that I am in favour of the amendments put forward by the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market. Perhaps there was a certain amount of residual misunderstanding on the part of the Commission. We want to achieve a completely flexible solution. If a particular Member State was to declare that it had suddenly run into problems because the individual concerned had committed a theft and the card was for their country, then this particular Member State would be able to revoke this card, as it were, for the reasons cited in this directive, which is altogether a flexible and intelligent solution. Allow me just to go very briefly into a second matter. Most of those who have been working on the directive to date have been lawyers. We all know that there are still various parts of the Treaty, some of them very old, which are still referred to as EC. We are aware that this directive is founded on EC law and not on EU law. However, before the elections we – the Council, the Commission, Parliament, the press, unions and companies that is – worked towards making the Europe we have today more comprehensible to the citizens. We have expected the citizens to take on board the transition from EEC to EC to EU. They have now got to grips with “EU”. We would be doing neither ourselves nor the citizens any favours if we were to christen the product we are proposing to deliver “EC service provision card” and not “EU service provision card”. It is the world of the EU that the citizens are interested in, this is the one that counts in their eyes. I would urge the Council and the Commission to move in this direction.

Political group: PPE-DE