Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, except that the ladies and gentlemen have all gone home, which is unfortunate as this is an important topic. I should in any case like to thank the fellow MEPs of the other groups who have seen this issue through over the past two years: Mrs Oomen-Ruijten on behalf of the Christian-Democrats, Mr Maaten on behalf of the Liberals and Mrs Scheele on behalf of the Socialists. I should also like to thank Mr Provan who chaired the delegation in the conciliation committee. In addition, I should like to express thanks to the Commission for its fruitful cooperation, at first reading and second reading and during most of the conciliation phase. Finally, also a word of thanks to the Spanish Presidency. They were very constructive and have finished where the Belgian Presidency left off. During the conciliation phase, there were, in fact, three important points on the agenda, which I will outline below. Parliament has also asked for slightly lower noise levels, to be measured. This is important, for experience has taught my country that if only the high, and highest levels, are measured, lower noise levels spread over much larger areas. Parliament has achieved more or less half of what we set out to achieve: straightforward success. My second point concerns the objective, which has been tightened up considerably. The Council of Ministers only talks about controlling the adverse effects. In plain terms, this translates into noise barriers along motorways. However, experience, has taught us that this must be approached in a much more structured way. Noise itself has to be tackled by means of low-noise tyres or road surfaces, for example. Far greater progress can be made with these. I am pleased that the Council has finally agreed that the objective should be to reduce noise and not only to control and reduce the negative effects. I should like to finish off with the most important, and at the same time most controversial, point, namely the obligation to lay down directives concerning the most important sources of noise. This particularly concerns road traffic, which is the most significant source of noise anyway, aircraft noise and noise generated by trains, but also noise from outdoor machinery and noise from machinery in factories that penetrates into the outside world. Parliament – and it really was the whole of Parliament – has asked for directives to tackle these sources, and not only to measure them. This was by no means an absurd request. As early as in 1992, the Fifth Environmental Action Programme, written by Laurens Jan Brinkhorst as the highest environmental official at the time, stated that the Commission would present a proposal for measuring noise in 1994 – the proposal did not actually appear until 2000 – and that the Commission would present the directives in 1995. Maybe the Commission could explain why, for some reason, these proposals never saw the light of day. The only pledge Parliament has now made, and the Council has fortunately seconded this, is that the Commission will be proposing this daughter directive by no later than 2006, in other words eleven years later than it had announced itself. In view of the importance of the topic of noise, which affects one third of European citizens in a very negative way, I will not make an issue of this, but I hope that the Commission, as we have agreed, will in fact be presenting a kind of Green Paper in eighteen months' time about the direction to take regarding these daughter directives. I hope at any rate that in a number of areas, for example with regard to tyres, we will not need to wait for four years before the Commission presents new proposals. This is where I shall leave my contribution, as time is getting on.

Political group: Verts-ALE