Mr President, today we are debating a proposal on general product safety. The Parliamentary Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy considers it to be a generally good proposal. Therefore, there are few amendments. Perhaps the quality of the proposal is due in part to the fact that the Commission consulted over 14 consumer organisations and these pointed out the difficulties there had been in implementing the 1992 directive. I think some of the observations made by the consumer organisations are included in the Commission’s proposal. I shall give one example, one that I know the Council has some difficulties with, but which for Parliament is highly important and we wholly support it: the ban on exporting products deemed unsafe to third countries. And the same has happened with other proposals in the document, which to us seem acceptable. Therefore we have not made too many changes, but there are some which we believe will better safeguard consumer rights. This report was approved by a large majority in the Parliamentary Committee on the Environment, and I shall therefore stand by the result of the Committee’s vote. The proposals approved in the Committee on the Environment deal with enhancing transparency and consumer information; ensuring the recall of products even when they are already in the hands of consumers; limiting professional confidentiality to the bare essentials; clarifying the definition of a safe product and a dangerous product; including the monitoring of the safety of product installation and maintenance (because sometimes this installation and maintenance may present a risk to consumer safety); including the precautionary principle, a useful principle little used in the European Union (if it were, we would not have problems such as mad cow disease, to be examined this afternoon, the dioxin issue, or other matters relating to genetically modified products); ensuring a certain harmonisation of surveillance and follow-up programmes (it is important that Member States should maintain some equality in these surveillance and follow-up programmes); and in general arranging for consumers to be given information in the language of the country in which they buy the products. Mr President, unfortunately we cannot accept some amendments first tabled in the Committee on the Environment and now tabled here, which go against these principles. I shall mention two examples. The first concerns Amendment No 4. It proposes removing a paragraph which simply asks producers and distributors to inform the authorities in the Member States immediately if they learn of a dangerous product. We must not allow this paragraph to be removed. Another paragraph that some wish to remove concerns professional secrecy and says that professional secrecy must be subordinated to the efficiency of dangerous product surveillance and follow-up services. We must not allow this paragraph to be removed either. Some amendments, such as Nos 1 and 18, deal with questions that basically concern the United Kingdom, and it must be said that all the groups from the United Kingdom, whether , popular or green, have supported them vehemently and they have been approved in the Committee on the Environment. They relate to a matter that is very specific to the United Kingdom, that is, charity shops and sales more or less between private individuals. Some of us from other countries do not understand so well this concern of our United Kingdom colleagues, but the amendments were approved in the Committee on the Environment and so I have to explain the fact. Mr President, I thank the Commission and the Council for their collaboration in the preparation of this report. I believe the Committee on the Environment has drawn up a report that tries to go more deeply into consumer rights and safety. In view of what has happened in recent years, especially in the food sector, I believe this to be a very important directive and I hope it will be approved by a large proportion of this Parliament, even though, as I said before, certain amendments presented go against the spirit adopted in the Committee on the Environment.

Political group: GUE-NGL