Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen. My first request is addressed to you, Mr President. I should first of all like to say that this report comes at least one month, maybe many months, too late. This report should have been ready to take to the Barcelona Summit, where pensions were on the agenda. Parliament has, as it is, such a modest role in the open method of co-ordination that we must urgently find ways in this Presidency of improving our response time as Parliament. If not, we will lose any credibility in this debate. I hope, Mr President, that you will be able to inform the Presidency of this and that you will also find a solution to the problem. I should now like to thank the rapporteur, Mr Fatuzzo, for the fact that, in this report, he has consistently adopted Parliament's line and the views we expressed in the report by Mr Cercas Alonso, for that is very important for my group. After years, the silence has at long last been broken in an important debate such as that on pensions. Silence is a very relative concept. For, since forever and a day, the ECOFIN Council has been working on pensions, but viewed from the angle of the Stability Pact and the broad economic guidelines and, thus, only from the point of view of the fundability of pensions. It is therefore a huge achievement on the part of the Commission, the Social Protection Committee and my own Minister, Mr Frank Vandenbroucke, under the Belgian Presidency, to have placed this issue on the agenda whilst adding the social dimension. For let us be quite honest: if we want to safeguard our European social model, if we want to preserve the solidarity between, and within, the generations in pensions, if we want pensions also to form part of a strategy against poverty and in favour of guaranteed income, then this debate should clearly be placed on a social footing. Although this issue mainly falls within the remit of the Member States, that does not mean that we cannot reach agreement at European level about the social objectives of the pension system. And this is why this report is so important, in my view. My group is also of the view that the objectives are currently still vague and general, but this is exactly why we need reports of this kind in order to ensure that this open method of co-ordination becomes more concrete in years to come. And I am therefore particularly anxious about, and particularly surprised at, the attitude of the Group on the one hand, and that of the on the other which now – at this of all times – wants to back-track and scale down a number of our positions, not only on the open method of co-ordination, but also on the social objectives of the pension system. This is really the limit. If we champion rights in the second pension pillar, then I fail to grasp why we should not do so for the statutory pension systems. This is, in fact, another cause of my concern. I have the impression that some reticence has crept in recently in the Council too. Following the panache that was displayed under the Swedish and Belgian Presidencies, I have the feeling that the Council under Spanish Presidency is taking a bit of a back seat. And that, indeed, respite is being given to countries that do not have their pension plans ready and that no more work is being done on indicators which can make this open method of co-ordination more concrete. And that moreover, Barcelona was merely a summit where some of the preparatory work was done. Finally, let there be no mistake: my group too is convinced of the fact that more people will need to enter employment in order to make future pension schemes affordable. But let us also be quite clear about these social objectives; let us spell out clearly that this is not about raising the statutory retirement age but about introducing incentives which encourage people to stay in the labour market and about a resolute fight against any form of age discrimination within the labour market. I hope that we will be able to demonstrate in our vote that this is what this is all about for us. And I also hope that the will not play any games with this open method of co-ordination and will join us in voting in favour of Mr Fatuzzo's report.

Political group: PSE