Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I myself come from a blacksmith's forge; I grew up there. I am familiar with the problems experienced by a small business. That is why I should like to congratulate Mr Liikanen, because, today, something has been achieved which is particularly important for small businesses and for our many sole traders. Unbundling of the local loop will open up new opportunities for competition and will therefore offer new businesses the possibility of making favourable acquisitions and give them good opportunities to prove themselves in this field. You will see that the programme has been allocated around EUR 230 million; if you divide that by the 16 million small and medium-sized businesses in the European Union the result is EUR 3 per company per year. The programme is so important precisely because it generates momentum, the right kind of momentum, which is also very important for us as Members. Take the example of the Euro Info Centres. My contact there is Magister Leitner, and if I come across a problem related to support programmes or a problem with the European institutions, then I can tell my employers that there is someone there who is competent and in the know, someone who can give information in the shortest possible time about public calls for tender, support programmes or research on infrastructure. This is excellent for Europe because help can be given quickly and competently in the form of technically correct information. It is extremely important, particularly for small companies, for help to be given quickly. For small companies, the three or six months which they have to wait for a piece of information to be forthcoming or for a programme to start is an endlessly long time. This means that the smaller the company, the more rapidly everything happens, and with new technologies everything is of course happening even more quickly. We all know that the pace at which we live our lives has become faster because we use mobile telephones, e-mail and the Internet, and this opens up entirely new possibilities. That is why it is important where financing is concerned for us also to ensure that companies have access to the capital market, not only to the stock market. Above all, when a one-man company or a company with fewer than 250 employees has a project, it should not need to provide 120% loan guarantees in the form of land to receive financing; it should also be possible for it to be funded on the basis of a good idea. Unfortunately, we are still a long way from this way of thinking in Europe. What we still need are more experts to guide our companies through complex procedures at European level. I should like, by way of an example, simply to mention standards. In principle a small company does not know very much about how a standard comes into being and how a standard is established at European level. That is why associations such as NORMAPME are very important, because this is another place where a small business can seek know-how quickly and efficiently, because tenders relating to this may be on the Internet and because, quite simply, this is helpful for its everyday work. One of the most important points is of course tax rates. America has an average tax rate of 30% while we have one of 45%, which means quite simply that small businesses here have to be 15% more productive or work for 15% longer for the same reward. That is why we should make it our business to bring down tax rates as far as possible by introducing less hefty laws, slimmed-down benchmarking and best practices so as to create a simple and well-ordered environment for our businesses.

Political group: PPE-DE