Mr President, I would first like to thank all fellow MEPs and rapporteurs. The aim of all reforms must be to create a sustainable transport policy in Europe. Liberalisation can sometimes be a means to achieving this, but never an end in itself. The extremely poor situation in respect of maritime transport must indeed be a warning to us. Freight traffic in Europe has become a problem due to the enormous increase in the number of lorries on our roads. I myself regard early liberalisation of goods transport by rail as a sure fire way of quickly reducing the number of lorries on the road, provided that it is given sufficient support. Indeed, we do not view liberalisation as an end in itself, and we are therefore not in favour of liberalising passenger transport. Passenger transport by rail is a public service and must remain so. Transport must also remain affordable for everyone, so it should not only be the profitable lines that are allowed to be leased or sold. The negative consequences of liberalisation are already being felt by travellers. International lines outside of the high-speed network are being cut back. One example is the fast overnight connection between Brussels and Milan which, as my Italian colleagues know, has been scrapped as a result of competition from air travel, a mode of transport in which the environmental costs are not calculated into the ticket price. That there is a problem is, however, demonstrated by the poor rail connection between Brussels and Strasbourg I got a taste of yesterday. The European Commission has done too little research into the consequences of liberalisation for rail transport. We think that an assessment is urgently needed before we go any further down the road towards liberalisation. We cannot make decisions on accelerating the pace of liberalisation of rail transport until such time as we have a clear picture of the impact this liberalisation will have on working conditions, safety, the environment, the effective improvement of consumer choice and the growth of the sector. With this in mind, we have therefore submitted an amendment to Mr Jarzembowski’s report. The three other reports closely reflect the problems and issues of the sector. Firstly that of safety in the Sterckx report. Then coming up with practical ways of cooperating effectively in the Ainardi report. Finally, a Railways Agency to support the entire harmonisation process and to get it on track in the Savary report. The era of containers being transported from the North Sea port to Northern Italy on trains crawling along at 18 km per hour must be consigned to history as soon as possible. The Sterckx, Savary and Ainardi reports place the emphasis on cooperation and consultation between different companies. These companies could naturally have done this themselves, but they seem to only spring into action when competition is imminent. Europe should naturally have organised this internal rail market much earlier. This Railways Agency should have been in place thirteen years ago. The free movement of goods was not organised in a sustainable way in the twentieth century. The twenty-first century must bring the changes we so urgently need. (Applause)

Political group: Verts-ALE