Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, first of all I should like to thank you for still being here to take part in this debate this Thursday afternoon. I should also like to thank my colleagues in the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market very much for the constructive and in-depth discussion we had on this subject. I am also most grateful for the supporting opinions of the other committees, and should like to express my thanks to Mr van den Berg of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs and Mr Candal of the Committee on Petitions. Indeed, we had a very earnest and also very self-critical debate about the quality of European lawmaking and the application of the principle of subsidiarity. What conclusions did we draw? We established that the quality of lawmaking leaves much to be desired, particularly in the eyes of the public. There, frustration with, but also alienation from, European law becomes apparent from time to time, and we should like to urge Parliament, but also the other Community institutions, not to shy away from paying painstaking attention to detail here, to work with precision, and also to make the necessary time and staff available to do this. But it is not only the quality of lawmaking which is crucial; we also need to be shrewd about the quantity of lawmaking, because not every problem in Europe is automatically a problem for the European Union. We expressly declare our support for the points made by the Commission in its strategic objectives for 2000 to 2005. It says that we need to concentrate on our core tasks. It can, nonetheless, be a painful process to give up dossiers on which one has been working. Unfortunately, examples from the very recent past show that the Commission, and also the European Parliament, do not always succeed. You will remember the provisions recently presented to us on climbing ladders. I remember standards for ship survey organisations – I hope that I am not causing the interpreters problems – and I remember a proposal for a Directive on ambient noise which actually intends to produce noise cards for the whole of the European Union. The Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market explicitly calls on the Commission to resist the legislative pressure to which it has itself objected. This is no excuse for doing things which are actually superfluous. But of course, this request is also directed at ourselves to be sparing with European regulation. We are helped here by the principle of subsidiarity which, in the view of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market, should also be applied when deciding whether to make a particular matter the subject of internal market legislation. This principle should also be observed in full for green and white papers and for action programmes. The European Union cannot claim to have a monopoly on competence here. Here, too, specific authorisation is required, together with thorough verification of compliance with subsidiarity. On this occasion, we have also discussed a tendency which we find worrying, which is for more and more decisions to be taken away from the institutions which actually have the democratic legitimacy to do this. The introductory comments in the Commission's White Paper on good governance set us thinking. If then a comprehensive set of networks is to be formed, if more soft law is enacted, if interpretative guidelines are adopted by the Commission and if many issues are resolved by agreement between the parties concerned, then this may well all be justified, but it cannot impinge on the responsibility of the legislator. We ask the Commission here quite specifically to observe the clear demarcation of responsibilities both between the EU and the Member States and within the institutions. With this report we want to send out a signal to the public that we are taking their complaints about the deficient quality of lawmaking and the complaints about over-regionalisation and centralism seriously. I would ask you to help us to send out this signal, and to vote in favour of this report of the Committee on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market.

Political group: PPE-DE