Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, over and over again we hear of the underhand machinations of rapacious businessmen, in whose nets members of the public have been caught, but from which it is often possible to extricate them. All the Member States have precautions in place to protect consumers, whether this is done using public authorities such as the UK’s Office of Fair Trading or France’s Direction générale de la Concurrence, de la Consommation et de la Répression des Fraudes, or by such bodies as the Dutch Consumentenbond or the Zentrale zur Bekämpfung unlauteren Wettbewerbs in Germany. All of them help if, for example, a letter lands on your doormat telling you that you have won a prize in a lottery, and that all you have to do to get it is to sign and post the form, so you do and off it goes. A week later, you get goods you have not ordered, which you are told you have to pay for. Alternatively, you fall for one of the slimming courses that are on offer – particularly frequently in young people’s magazines in recent times – the effectiveness of which is much exaggerated and whose side-effects are glossed over. Perhaps you have been enticed by an offer that has turned out to involve ‘modem jacking’, in which a website offers you the chance to download music free of charge, you accept the offer, and, in the course of the process, you, the customer, without being aware of it, are cut off from your usual Internet Service Provider and attached to another one that is much more expensive. Only later do you get the bill. In most cases of fraud, the national authorities can provide help. It is something like 20% of cases that matters become problematic, when the only known address is often a PO Box in a foreign country. In such situations, good advice soon becomes invaluable. This draft piece of legislation is of great importance in terms of dealing with cases such as these. Legislation is also urgently needed, for problems are piling up, and we should not leave the public to their own devices. That is why, as your rapporteur, I acceded to the wish of the Irish Presidency of the Council that the legislation should be adopted, if at all possible, in only one reading. What is on the table is what has emerged from negotiations. I also want to put on the record my thanks to the Commission for its active help in achieving this result. This legislation is primarily concerned with mutual assistance in enforcing consumers’ rights, for which every Member State is to set up a public office to function as the point of contact for the authorities in other Member States, although I wish to stress that no Member State will be obliged to set up a new authority. It is for the Member States to decide how to allocate the functions described in this Regulation to existing authorities. This is not about creating bureaucracy, but about successfully putting a stop to the fraudulent schemes of a few rogue traders, who use cross-border businesses as a front. To this end, public agencies can, by mutual agreement, delegate the handling of cases to non-governmental organisations, and this is the traditional practice in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. I am working on the assumption that, in these states the norm will be for tasks to be handed over to time-tested bodies such as consumers’ associations or business self-regulators. On that, I believe, depends my recommendation, as rapporteur, to my fellow-Members that they should vote to accept this compromise text. The only exceptions I can envisage are where statutory bodies have to exchange particularly sensitive data, but we have made definite arrangements for that in this document. By agreeing to this draft legislation, we can redeem a pledge given by all of us as MEPs, our pledge that we would commit ourselves to dealing with the public’s concerns. I hope that, tomorrow, we will do so with a resounding yes. (Applause)

Political group: PSE