Mr President, Commissioner, I am pleased to present this own-initiative report, drawn up by the Parliamentary Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism with the aim of bringing about progress in an area which I hope our work will help you to understand better. As you know, it derived from a 1995 Commission Green Paper, which called for measures to internalise the external costs incurred by environmental, safety and congestion considerations, in order to bring about a fairer and more efficient system of charging users for access to transport infrastructure. Basically, the report calls upon the Commission to intervene by harmonising the definitions of internal and external costs, harmonising or identifying charge calculation methodologies, and then, of course, leaving the implementation of these measures to subsidiarity and the decisions to be taken by the Member States. In my opinion, in essence, the report ensures that the recommendation to apply the 'polluter pays' principle is included in the wider principle of 'user pays'. This is its contribution, and it has two consequences which I wish to emphasise now. The first is that if the methodology which we hope the Commission will decide upon and we will be able to endorse enables us to produce a clearer definition of the internal and external costs and a clearer system for charging users, we will create the conditions to be able to transfer the financing of infrastructure from purely public resources and general taxation to the users as such. We can therefore now picture the enormous effort before Europe – the Europe of today and the Europe of tomorrow – in the process of constructing new infrastructure, the effort of involving private capital in this operation as well, which would not be possible if we do not succeed in identifying this situation. The next step is to consider that, where the attribution of some of these costs is meaningless, as, for example, in the case of the Italian motorways, which have already fully achieved their payback – the revenue from these charges which exist today could constitute funds to be used in cross-subsidies, in order to ensure that certain costs charged to road users serve to improve infrastructure in other modes of transport which are certainly more environmentally friendly. I would stress that this whole system, which transfers the financial burden from the State to the user, must have a safeguard, and that is the last principle, according to which those who have the most difficult circumstances because they are disabled or because they live in rural or remote areas where access is difficult, can in some way be exempted, and a series of subsidies, including State subsidies, can therefore be developed to compensate for this. Our objective in producing this report is to draw together certain fundamental principles which I have already mentioned: the 'user pays' principle, the 'polluter pays' principle and the principle of cross-subsidisation etc. together. How can we do this? The methodological suggestion given here is that a series of good practices exist now in Europe, which we have attempted to explore and put together in a seminary whose papers we will make available to anyone one who wishes to study the issue in more depth and which we have financed with the help of the Commission. Well then, these practices can now, in my opinion, be generalised and made available to everyone. This would make it possible – and I feel that the time is now ripe – to obtain operative indications for advancing European policy in this direction in practical terms.

Political group: ELDR