Mr President, I must say that I am slightly disturbed by the lack of response on one or two of the issues there, but I will come to those in one moment. My report deals with this regulation and, as has been said, it concerns a key mechanism in the implementation of the European Union's goal of free movement of people in that it coordinates social security systems. It certainly does not seek to harmonise them. There are three aspects to today's debate. We have heard already about third-country nationals and the legal base which should be applied to include them in the scope of the regulation; the comparative lack of progress in including accession countries in the coordination process; and the update of the regulation in my report to bring it into line with the changes made in the social security systems of certain Member States. I will say more on that, but touch on the other two issues as well. As has been stressed, a crucial factor underlining all these elements is the need to make rapid and positive progress on the Commission's proposal for a simplification and modernisation of the whole of Regulation 1408/71. It is essential for the Council to understand that in Parliament we have consensus and are determined on that point, whatever the differences that might appear elsewhere about the right strategy. We have been looking to the Council for a positive response about the speed of that overall reform. Paragraph 4 of the resolution tabled by four political groups makes it clear that Parliament is no longer prepared to continue with the piecemeal amendments and technical updates – of which my report is the latest and, we believe the last example. We must now have overall integrated changes necessary to resolve the bulk of the problems currently arising from this regulation as soon as possible. That is why the amendments proposed and supported by the committee are technical ones. We prefer generally not to accept amendments concerning the scope of the regulation, the benefits covered, the changes in the competent authority and so on. Our aim is to deal with this report most speedily so as not to give the Council any excuse for not moving rapidly to the conclusion of its initial debate on overall simplification – again a point raised in the joint resolution. That is also the primary reason for my not accepting the amendments tabled in the name of the PPE, although I also have difficulties with the content of one or two of them. Amendment No 8, for example, deals with occupational pensions which are not state-provided benefits and therefore currently outside the scope of the regulation. I also consider that Amendment No 10 might be regressive in some Member States, as it proposes a general condition governing entitlement to unemployment benefit. I accept that certain of the proposed amendments touch on some important issues and Parliament recognised them in its vote on the report on frontier workers last month – again, as recalled in the joint resolution. Such workers are of course an issue for accession countries. We are aware that free movement both to and from those countries depends to some extent on successful coordination of the social security systems. Much of the debate about free movement tends to neglect the fact that people from current Member States wish to work and establish themselves within the accession countries, and hence our interest in the state of those negotiations. Personally, I strongly support the Commission's proposals to include third-country nationals in the regulation and to do so on the legal base it has proposed. Parliament should be involved in codecision on this issue, as it now is on matters relating to coordination of social security in general. The inclusion of third-country nationals seems to me to be recognition of the principle of equal treatment of those who contribute to the economic and social life of the Union. The joint resolution recalls the Tampere Summit when Member State governments stated that the legal status of third-country nationals should be approximated to that of Member State nationals. I was at a European Union migrants' forum conference representing the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs soon after that statement was made. It was welcomed as a strong indication of the Union's desire to be anti-discriminatory in its actions. I regret that the Council cannot yet uphold the proposed legal base and live up to the hopes it has raised in the EU's so-called '16th Member State' of third-country nationals and among those of us who wish to see them treated fairly and equally. To sum up, I would urge Parliament to move to a rapid conclusion on my report so that we can turn our full attention to the much-needed simplification and modernisation of the whole of Regulation 1408/71 to make it more inclusive and effective for all of those covered by a social security scheme.

Political group: Verts-ALE