Mr President, I should like to begin by congratulating the Commission and by saying that this initiative can be criticised only for its lateness and for the modesty of its ambition. Nevertheless, it has the merit of focusing on the groups of workers currently at greatest risk and also of including sectors that it would have been quite unjustifiable to exclude, such as the shipbuilding and aeronautical industries. The Commission rightly affirms the need to expand protection for workers who are subject to risks of asbestos and also the need to increase the effectiveness of monitoring and prevention, especially in the civil construction industry, for certain tasks, such as the repair and removal of materials containing various types of asbestos. I congratulate the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy and its rapporteur, Mr Meyer, on the proposals he has presented us with and which the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs made the effort to include, despite the limited prospect of their becoming law. We also feel that this is, in fact, a public health issue, which should be looked at on the basis of Article 174, in another context. I should like to draw your attention to the efforts made by the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs and to emphasise that my colleagues have helped to ensure that this report is today a more ambitious, more wide-ranging report, which also makes greater demands for the follow-up process. We hope that the Commission and the Council will take account of these efforts. Amongst the proposals are new limits, a new organisation to oversee risk prevention and a greater effort by all parties involved, specifically by employers, who are asked to provide more training, and who are asked not to shirk their responsibilities by hiring workers without proper contracts, or who are subcontracted. There must be guarantees that workplaces subject to risks of asbestos are properly protected and that every precaution is taken to prevent the diseases that can result, which are serious diseases and as a rule carcinogenic, with a high mortality rate, which must be eradicated. In order to eradicate these diseases, the Member States, the public authorities, must also be required to accept other responsibilities; specifically, when local authorities, civil protection services, and site inspectors are consulted, before demolition or maintenance work, hiring workers or opening a work-site begins, they must verify whether or not the legislation of the Member States and Community guidelines in this field is being complied with. This is the rigorous evaluation we needed in order to make a legislative proposal that can, once and for all, put an end to certain arguments, which have more to do with vested interests than with what should be guiding us, which must respect the primacy of people’s integrity at work and in society. This being the case, we would like the Commission to provide this Parliament with epidemiological studies that clearly show the consequences of each asbestos fibre for the health of workers, which groups are at risk, to supply statistics that will enable a reliable study to be conducted and also to prevent some countries in the Union, six to be specific, from maintaining higher limits than those now being proposed. Enlargement will, furthermore, lead to discrepancies between the preventive practices of the various countries in the Union. Compensation for accidents and diseases is another issue that we would like the Commission to look into. Compensation paid to victims, specifically to fatal victims, is lower than that paid out for road accidents, which we do not find acceptable. We also think that the Commission, regardless of the fact that the Member States clearly bear full responsibility in this area, must steer this debate in such a way that companies that cause their workers, by means of concealing the truth, to contract these diseases are punished and that the compensation paid out is, in light of all the criteria, acceptable and socially fair. The Commission must also take advantage of this range of packages – which it presented to Parliament in good time – to review the legal and conceptual criteria of hygiene and safety. There are striking differences between the organisation that is proposed for this directive and the directive on building sites and others and, we hope, therefore, that the Commission supports this revision in order to establish best legislative practice in this field.

Political group: PSE