Madam President, I would like to thank the Council and Commission for a useful and thorough conciliation procedure and one that was good-tempered all round, which is not always the case. I am happy to say that I can regard the end result of conciliation as very satisfactory for Parliament as the joint text has incorporated all its amendments either in full or in a re-worded form. The financial amount finally allocated to the programme is also a considerable improvement on the Council’s proposal at second reading which we found completely unacceptable and we have made quite a lot of progress there. I therefore propose that this House agree to adopt the proposals on SAVE and the conclusion at the conciliation at third reading. I would like to remind the House that at second reading Parliament adopted this report containing eight amendments, including a re-instatement of the Commission’s original budget. The Commission accepted five of the proposed amendments including the budgetary allocation and I thank the Commission for their continued support on the budget during the conciliation procedure as what the Council had proposed was unacceptable. During the procedure, agreement was reached on the studies and actions to devise, implement, complement and assess the Community measures. Compromise wordings were agreed for five other amendments including legislative and non-legislative measures and the inclusion of local energy centres and, very importantly, the energy audit systems in the review of progress on energy efficiency. I hope that you will all agree that this is important progress. The issue of the financial envelope was staunchly defended by Parliament in the face of the Council’s very meagre opening offer. In the event we had to have several meetings before the Council finally increased this to a substantial amount. We got an increase of 2 million on their starting figure which was a decisive increase which I can recommend to you and which the Commission confirmed that it could implement the programmes under. This was an important consideration for us. I would like to say however that it is, and has always been, a very modest budget and therefore the funding for this programme is more symbolic than real. Funding for energy saving still comes primarily from the Member States. We have to bear that in mind when approving this programme. If there is more symbolism than reality in what we can achieve at Community level, this is a pity because there is a lot of enthusiasm at local level for action, including Community actions, on energy saving. Where the Community can step in is to put the local activators in touch with each other so that they can actually not re-invent the wheel in every region. We have an important part to play in the Community in the European Union in this regard. SAVE is the only Community-wide programme dedicated to promoting the rational use of energy. It focuses on non-technical elements, helping to build energy efficiency infrastructure, and the purpose of the programme is to create an environment in which investments and energy efficiency will be promoted. Here we need to realise that there is also a market opportunity in industry for energy savings. We have heard a lot about difficulties of competition in renewable energies but energy efficiency saves money for business, saves money all round in fact and therefore it should be non-problematical. It is something that we can all support. I have to say, like motherhood, although we all support it, sometimes we do very little substantially and concretely to help the mothers or the people engaged in energy-saving. We could do rather more, considering that we have made great commitments in reducing CO2 and greenhouse gases and to reduce dependence on energy imports. We are not taking the kind of action that the citizens want to see. We are not making the connection so that the citizens can actually do something concretely either at home or in their offices or in industry to support action against global climate change. If we could communicate this it would be a very interesting thing to do. I would like once again to thank all who helped in this conciliation process.

Political group: Verts-ALE