Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, in the White Paper on European transport policy, we set ourselves ambitious goals, especially as regards the improvement of road safety. Far from requiring us to approach this in a spirit of unthinking activism, these goals oblige us to take sensible courses of action in various sectors in order to have an effect. The measures in question certainly do not always involve high investment costs; one good example is the introduction by law of the mandatory wearing of seatbelts in all seats of a motor vehicle fitted with them. This strikes me as sensible, effective and much to be welcomed. Since we already have the requirement to wear a seat belt, it makes sense also for the law to require them to be fitted with few exceptions and this is something to be advocated. I am grateful to the Commission for doing this. Even in buses, which are in any case among the safest means of transport in the European Union, safety belts will, in the event of an accident, help to reduce injuries and save human lives. With this in mind, the Commission is now proposing that side-facing seats, for which there are as yet no effective restraint systems, should be permitted only in buses used in urban and interurban regular traffic, there being, in the Commission’s view, no particular danger to the persons using such seats. This covers seats in thousands of buses, used to transport millions of adults and schoolchildren every day. The fact is that there are no analyses of accidents to which we can refer. On the contrary, it strikes me as utterly illogical that the Commission, in its proposal for a directive, seeks simply to ban side-facing seats of this kind only from comfortable coaches, in which only a few of these are to be found, as individual seats forming part of comfortable groups of seats of a type with which few of us will be familiar. These the Commission does see as potentially hazardous for users, but it makes no attempt to motivate or oblige industry to develop restraint systems suited to such seats. Having no prejudices in this matter, I initially asked myself whether this was an example of carelessness or of an oversight. The answer, though, was provided by the discussion in the Committee, in the aftermath of which two – admittedly populist – questions forced themselves into my mind: firstly, is the Commission prepared to expose people in the ‘cheap’ side-facing seats in buses in urban and interurban traffic – which it wants to permit – to a greater safety risk than the people who use similar seats in luxury coaches, or, secondly and contrariwise, is its call for a ban on cosy corner seats in luxury coaches founded on envy and ill-will towards those who can afford to travel on what are regarded as luxury vehicles. I think we can be clear in our own consciences when declining to answer both questions in the affirmative. I therefore propose that the tourist industry be allowed the cosy corner seats in its luxury buses, which we made possible only a few years ago by enacting the directive on the use of 15-metre buses. We should, however, call upon the industry to develop appropriate restraint systems for side-facing seats of this kind as well. We must aim to provide an equal degree of protection for people wherever they are seated in a vehicle, that is, whether in side-facing seats or in those facing the direction of travel. European policy should be not so much to prohibit as to promote and to support. That would enhance us as an economic base in terms of the Lisbon targets, whereas the prevention of development would not.

Political group: PPE-DE