Mr President, despite its brevity – it only has ten paragraphs of provisions and many recitals – my third report on simplifying and improving the regulatory environment is the result of reading many texts of at least ten years old. The Commission believes that this third report goes further than what was achieved in the interinstitutional agreement. My report is not aimed against the interinstitutional agreement, but rather it intends to strengthen it. However, by means of the long discussion between Parliament, the Commission and the Council on the issue of improving the negotiation of Community legislation, myself and the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, which approved the report unanimously, wish to express our concern at a tendency which I would describe as technocratic in the legislative field. The legislative process is a political one, it is a process of political decision-making. It is true that as far as possible we must prevent the drafting of legislation that is irrational, complicated and which can be improved on. But the emphasis on exclusively technical considerations or on the economic weight of a certain legislative measure may not correspond to the need to adopt a piece of legislation. In other words, one of this European Union's faults is ‘over-technification’. The European institutions have been criticised for being bureaucratic. I do not like the word ‘bureaucratic’. I would say that what we have in the European institutions is a tendency to technify everything. And as a result of this technification we distance ourselves from the citizens thereby leading to their rejecting our form of adopting decisions. On approving the interinstitutional agreement, I and the members of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market stress the danger of creating a decision-making process which is entirely out of line with the will of the citizens. And the only means – however imperfect – the citizens currently have to express their point of view on the Community's contribution is the European Parliament elections. If, for example, the European Parliament cannot oppose the technocratic procedures for adopting decisions by means of small groups in the form of self-regulation or co-regulation, I do not know what role it can play. Mr President, I would like to reassure the Commission by guaranteeing that I, and this Parliament as well I believe, which I imagine will adopt my report without too many difficulties, do not intend to undermine the progress which has been made in terms of simplifying Community legislation, but rather propose strengthening the political elements of the process of adopting legislation, pointing out that legislative delegations must always be subject to the popular will, by means of an institution with full legislative competence. As we know, the great difficulty is that the current Community legislation is the result of the accumulation of a series of international treaties which have continued to evolve and there will be no solution until a European Constitution clearly defining legislative powers is adopted. Once clearly defined legislative powers exist, the legislative power will be able to delegate, will be able to transfer duties to technical bodies; but these technical bodies must never replace the popular will expressed by means of direct elections to a legislative institution – the European Parliament, Parliament and the Council, whatever you want to call it – which wishes to adopt those decisions. I will therefore end by assuring the Commission that our intention is not to undermine the interinstitutional agreement but rather to strengthen it, introducing the necessary political elements into it so that our citizens believe in the European construction we are carrying out.

Political group: PSE