Mr President, I remember that at a very early stage, even before the Action Programme was before us, we had a talk with the Commissioner, during which we made it clear that the sixth environment action programme should be a brief document, taking the form of a pamphlet, with clear priorities and objectives. I remember that the Commissioner shared our view. Unfortunately, on behalf of the , I have to say that we are disappointed with the ultimate outcome. It is a document which may provide an excellent analysis, but which is far too long and which does not contain any clear priorities and, in actual fact, which does not set out a clear policy, except for wanting to make the environment cleaner. Other than that, however, the document offers little in the way of transparency. That is, by the way, not a personal criticism of the Commissioner: we are very satisfied with her work in other areas. Despite this, the Commission saw an opportunity to produce something which we did not actually want. Allow me to move on to the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy. We have a great deal of appreciation for the work which the rapporteur has done. In many ways, she re-wrote the document. Ultimately, however, the result of the work of the Environmental Committee is not really what we had hoped for either. It is increasingly resembling a hotchpotch: everyone has a say and makes proposals, which leaves us ultimately with a kind of wish list. I cannot shake off the impression that if someone had at some stage proposed to clean up the moon while we were at it, the Commission would have adopted that too. That is not the right way to go about things, of course. We may produce whole reams of fine words and give the impression that we are doing something worthwhile, but that is not strictly speaking the case. It is also perhaps questionable whether a ten-year programme is really what we need in this day and age. Too much chat, which, in fact, fits into the Dutch political culture perfectly: we too talk endlessly about all kinds of things – the infamous Dutch culture of consultation and deliberation, referred to as the ‘poldermodel’ being a case in point – but it subsequently takes an incredibly long time before something actually gets done. Perhaps we need an entirely different approach, for example by establishing very clear issue programmes in the short term, alongside regular legislative programmes, in respect of which the Commission is doing a sterling job. Allow me also to make a constructive comment and indicate which, in our view, should be the minimum priorities: climate change, energy, waste and bio-diversity. We should have placed the emphasis on these aspects, instead of producing a document which indicates how beautiful the world should become on all scores. We do not welcome many amendments because we then cannot see the wood for the trees. Strictly speaking, we are not against the proposed details in the legislation, but we are of the opinion that it is unnecessary to include those in the Action Programme now and to regulate those matters from Brussels and Strasbourg. It would be far preferable to implement this at national and perhaps even at regional or local level. Mr President, transparency and details are two different things in our view. We will therefore vote against a good number of amendments, not necessarily because we are opposed to them, but because we believe that those points should not be laid down by the European Parliament at this stage. We therefore offer our hesitant support to this process. Finally, I should like to propose the following: next time a document of this kind is drafted, we must ask the Commission officials to go back to using typewriters instead of word-processors. In that way, it might be easier to keep to the point, because then there would not be the constant temptation to copy sections from existing documents into the new document.

Political group: ELDR