Mr President, I am very pleased that I have been entrusted with being rapporteur for the second reading of the SEA Directive which I believe is an important step towards a new form of behaviour in environmental policy. I want to thank all my fellow MEPs in the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy, together with the Commission and, in particular, the Portuguese Presidency for the excellent way in which they have cooperated. This draft directive concerns strategic environmental assessments which, in brief, involve a systematic process for identifying, analysing and assessing the influence and likely effects of plans and programmes upon the environment. The assessments are to be carried out at as early a stage as possible in the planning process, partly so that alternative solutions might be found before the decision-making process is taken any further. Environmental reports are to be written and made available to the environmental authorities, the public and environmental organisations, which are also to be given sufficient time within which to respond to the reports. This is a very important directive for the whole of the Community’s environmental policy if a tool is to be obtained which makes it easier to comply with the commitments to sustainable development and compliance with the precautionary principle which have been made in the Treaty and in other agreements. A modern environmental policy worthy of the name must do everything to ensure that damage to the environment does not occur and that effects upon the environment are minimised. What often happens nowadays is that attempts are made to identify and repair damage once it has occurred. As early as at the planning stage, we must learn to use policy areas, plans and programmes to avoid and reduce the negative effects and influence upon the environment. The SEA Directive constitutes a very important step towards an approach of this kind. Unfortunately, this draft directive makes no mention of policy areas, in spite of the fact that they figure in the Commission’s original draft from 1991 and in spite of the fact that all researchers in this area actually take it for granted that policy areas too must be included in a strategic environmental assessment. It was not possible to achieve this in the Council, but the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy considered that policy areas too must be included in the review to be carried out in five years’ time. This has been discussed in Amendments 2 and 21. A crucial argument when the Commission finally tabled this proposal in 1996 was that the assessment at project level enters the decision-making process much too late. In actual fact, this is one of the main points in the directive – that an environmental assessment should be made early on in the decision-making process. At first reading, the European Parliament had quite a lot of points of view. The proposal was thought to be heading in the right direction but in many areas, it did not go far enough. Parliament tabled 29 amendments, of which 15 are more or less to be found in the common position. If the SEA is to be a genuinely useful tool, the directive must be sufficiently broad in scope and the environmental report and the assessments must naturally be of very high quality. In the common position, the Council has now made the text worse in a number of areas, specifically when it comes, for example, to the scope of the directive and the definition of what it is to cover. The Commission too was very, very critical of the common position because it was far too limited in relation to the original text. The Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Consumer Policy has tried to restore something of the balance, for example by means of Amendments 6 and 7 which broaden the scope of the directive by not limiting it only to plans and programmes linked to EIA projects. We do not permit whole categories of plans and programmes to be exempt. Nor can we accept that financial plans and the whole of the defence sector are exempt from strategic environmental assessments. This is discussed in Amendment 10, which also proposes that structural funds must also of course be covered by strategic environmental assessments next time around. Other amendments which improve the directive concern greater transparency and openness to inspection and the need also to cooperate and consult with countries outside the Community. I personally am very surprised at Amendment 26 from Mr Nassauer and 29 other MEPs who want to reject the common position. This possibility was not mentioned at all in the Committee’s discussion. Clearly, they are fully entitled to make this proposal, but do they really think that the EU’s environmental policy is something extraneous which is not in any way binding? Should the European Parliament just not bother about the text of the Treaty, the Cardiff Agreement, the Fifth Environmental Programme and so on? I really do not think that the proposal is a genuinely serious one. Amendments 11 and 31 also worry me a little. Amendment 11, in particular, says that the Member States should define at what level SEAs are to be carried out if plans and programmes are part of a hierarchical system. In this way, the whole idea of arranging an SEA is called into question, so I hope these amendments do not go through.

Political group: Verts-ALE