This is Parliament's second report on the growth and employment initiative which is a multiannual programme. But it is also, perhaps unusually, the second one this calendar year and the reason for this is that the 1999 report was delayed until January of this year in essence because the Commission had been somewhat sluggish – a point I recollect I observed in my speech in January. This year, I am delighted to say that the Commission has produced a very thorough and generally much better report and I would like to thank them for the cooperation they have shown. Ironically, the timing has been more of a problem this time around with Parliament and that is partly because the Industry Committee decided that it wanted to produce an opinion and wrote to the Employment and Social Affairs Committee and asked if the vote in committee could be deferred. The vote was deferred and then the Committee on Industry decided it did not want to produce an opinion after all. But these things happen. Anyway, I would like to thank colleagues in the Employment and Social Affairs Committee for their amendments which have generally improved the report substantially. I would like to thank the Economic Committee for their opinion which the committee fully supported and which is utterly embraced within the body of the report, and I would also like to thank the Employment and Social Affairs Committee for adopting this report unanimously a few weeks ago. Parliament clearly hopes that its views as expressed in this report when voted on tomorrow will be of genuine help to the Commission and the EIF in determining any programme changes for the coming year, in which case the report each year needs to be presented annually in good time well ahead of the year to come so that it can influence what happens in the year to come. The challenge for everybody in the year 2002 is therefore to present the report in the November plenary rather than in the December plenary. The Commission can help, as I hope they will, by speeding up the inter-service consultation which still seems to be a rather dozy process. I have it on good authority that the Commission's own report rested in certain DGs in-trays for several weeks before being lifted out so progress can be made there. It can also help by sharing with Parliament the quarterly information from the EIF and I thank the Commission for agreeing publicly in the Employment Committee to do this. This will be very helpful, but Parliament can certainly help in sharpening up its own act in terms of getting the timetable much sprucer next time around. Meanwhile, I would just like to highlight three points from the report: paragraph 13 where we would like to see in next year the Commission report much more concrete evidence of the employment gains that this multiannual programme has produced, not because we doubt what those employment gains might be, but we would like to see some hard data next time around. On paragraph 14, there are a number of references to other stages in the development of SMEs in their business cycle. We would like attention to be paid to this too. Finally, to go back to the earlier part of the report, in Recital F, where a deliberate comparison is made with the United States, because there, less regulation allows for a much more entrepreneurial spirit. In the EU we believe that we have to get a much more similar mindset to America in the way in which we approach SMEs. I note with great interest the Minutes of the Industry Council meeting on 4 and 5 December, which proudly proclaimed real progress under the Belgian presidency towards 'better practices geared towards elimination of red tape'. If this is true it is most welcome. I want to believe it. I would love to see the evidence. Certainly we all have to do our best to make it true. SMEs currently account for two-thirds of all workers – the majority of all workers employed in the European Union. But European employment laws are substantially shaped by the social partners who represent the big employers and the big trade unions but the minority of the workers. We all need to recognise that SMEs are the biggest employers overall, that SMEs are the biggest engine of growth for the European economies. It is not enough just to say that we have looked after SMEs, that we have the employment and growth initiative. It is a great help but we have to do much more.

Political group: PPE-DE