Mr President, it is interesting that Mr Prodi has presented today a work programme; however, our agenda says that we are having a debate on a legislative programme. Looking at it from the point of view of social and employment policy we certainly do not have a legislative programme before us. In fact we have not had a legislative programme for several years now. What we have had instead is a process of consolidation and the development of certain convergence processes such as that developed and launched at Luxembourg. We welcome the Luxembourg procedure. We hope it will be deepened, strengthened and extended to other areas such as convergence in social protection. But does that mean that we have done the job in terms of legislation in the social area? I think not. There are a number of areas where we need to update and modernise the social legislation we have adopted in the past. With the deepening and strengthening of the internal market and globalisation we are seeing an increasing number of mergers, take-overs and transfers within the European Union. That, to me, says that we need to look back at the whole framework of legislation we developed largely in the 1970s in this area – on transfers, collective redundancies, insolvency, and latterly on works councils. We need to modernise and strengthen that legislation, not in order to stop globalisation or the deepening of the internal market – of course not – but in order to make sure that we manage the changes these things bring, through a spirit of partnership in all of our workplaces, large and small, within the European Union. That means that we need to pursue with vigour the general framework on information and consultation at work. In the health and safety field as well, there is a need to update and modernise the legislation we adopted in the past: the pregnant women at work directive, five years overdue for review; the noise directive of 1986, ten years overdue for review; a number of directives that need to be radically updated and modernised. But is it just about updating? No. We do not need any new great raft of social legislation, but there are areas that have not been addressed. We have outstanding promises for legislation on homeworking, on teleworking; we have the yawning gap of social security in atypical work that has been outstanding for almost a decade now; we have the promise of a specific directive on muscular-skeletal injuries outstanding from the last medium-term Social Action Programme. There are other areas. I had a woman come to see me recently, called Mrs Angela Elliot Mathis, working for Lucent Technologies. She was head-hunted into the company at a very high level to work as a senior manager and a board member. She had worked in a range of European countries for high technology companies. Thirteen months into the job she was dismissed without notice and without reason. She still has no reason for the dismissal. The remarkable thing is that she has no protection in either Belgian law – she was working in Belgium – or European law. Without that sort of protection people will not take the opportunity to live, move and work wherever they can within the European Union. These are the gaps we need to plug. Let us do it in the new medium-term Social Action Programme.

Political group: PSE