Mr President, I am happy to announce in this plenary sitting that this Parliament’s Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research and Energy has reached full agreement at second reading on the common position on the directive on the energy efficiency of buildings. Mr President, this important piece of legislation is a direct consequence of the Green Paper on security of supply, which the Commission originally presented, and which gave rise to a lively debate at European level on this issue which is essential to our competitiveness and well-being. This directive, which is now happily to see the light, represents a significant qualitative change in relation to previous attempts to achieve the same objectives based exclusively on coordination and voluntary application. This time the Commission is bravely establishing a binding framework which will undoubtedly lead to an homogenisation of best practices in the fifteen Member States. Mr President, I must also express my particular satisfaction, which is shared by the whole of the Industry Committee, with the Council’s receptiveness to all of Parliament’s contributions: the principle of individual charging, differentiated treatment between existing buildings and new buildings, the clear definition of exemptions, special attention to social housing, the growing importance of passive cooling in southern countries, where air conditioning systems are increasingly contributing to our energy consumption, and, of course, the emphasis on incentive mechanisms rather than penalties. In order to assess the importance of this piece of legislation we must bear in mind that 40% of the Union’s energy expenditure is consumed in buildings, which in quantitative terms means EUR 100 000 million per year; 2.5 % of our total imports and 0.5 % of our Gross Domestic Product. There can therefore be no doubt that this directive, which will be followed by others that the Commission has already launched, will represent an extremely important advance, on the one hand in terms of compliance with the Union’s environmental objectives and, on the other, with regard to guaranteeing the security of supply. There has been one point on which the Council, on the one hand, and Parliament and the Commission, on the other, have had to iron out certain differences. I am talking about the period for the implementation of this essential directive. It was the Council’s view – perhaps with arguments which we cannot agree with, but which may be understandable – that once the 36 months for transposition into national legislations had elapsed, there should be four additional years for this directive to become fully operational; this took us beyond 2008; and 2008 is a symbolic year since it is then that the period for verification of the Kyoto commitments begins. This was not therefore acceptable to Parliament: either in terms of energy saving or in symbolic terms. And therefore, in the end, as we usually do in the European institutions, we reached a compromise agreement and this additional period was set at three years. I therefore believe, Mr President, that we can be very satisfied and we can congratulate the Commissioner and her team on this great contribution to the Union’s energy policy, all my colleagues in the Industry Committee for the great support I have received, the secretariat of the committee for their excellent technical work and, as I said before, we must thank the Council for their receptiveness.

Political group: PPE-DE