Mr President, I wish to congratulate the rapporteur on his report and say that the proposals on the simplification of legislation in the internal market that were launched in 1996 are very welcome. An attempt was made there to improve the quality of legislation, to try to cut down on superfluous legislation and to limit the costs associated with implementing legislation. Now that we have finished the third and fourth phases, with teams of Member State officials and users identifying concrete suggestions to simplify legislation, it is right that we have a review. We need to have clearer definitions of what is going on. Improved selection at the moment seems to be fairly random and we need some clear guidelines for the operation of the management teams and, of course, the implementation of recommendations which, at the moment, are too little and too late. Many of the recommendations are not implemented at all and many have to wait considerable periods of time. So we are in favour, but there are two things we want to add. Firstly, we have to ensure that political control remains with the Commission and Parliament. Recent press reports on the new approach to legislation dating from the 1980s and '90s – not so new now – which allowed the detail of legislation to be worked out by industry-led standardisation organisations, seem to indicate that this is not always the best way forward. The European Committee for Standardisation, for example, recently did work on the packaging of waste directive, which the press has described as 'fundamentally flawed, undermines democratic accountability and fails to meet the demands of the directive or, for that matter, environmental protection'. So we need to ensure that there is political control there, unless of course there are strong political or consumer pressures to ensure that industry makes progress. However, we would also wish to go further in a different direction. SLIM seems to have become fundamentally about simplification, even though in the original proposals we talked about limiting costs. What we would like to see are proposals for dealing with economy of legislation as well as simplicity. We therefore welcome the proposals from Lisbon for better regulation, which will look at the costs of legislation; we welcome the informal meeting of ministers of public administration held in Strasbourg on 7 November; we welcome the establishment of the high-level group to look at recommendations on making legislation more cost-effective; but we are disappointed that the promised European Parliament representative on that high-level group has not been appointed by Parliament nor, as far as I understand, have we been approached to appoint such a representative. We welcome the fact that Commissioners Bolkestein and Liikanen are looking at various pilot projects in this area. However, the Commission and Parliament will have to begin to act on their own rules in looking at the financial implications of legislative proposals in order for them to be taken into account. It can only devalue our work in the European Parliament if claims can be made, for example, that the end-of-vehicle-life directive will cost us £400m a year in terms of the cost to the producers and the consumers but will only deliver £100m a year of benefit to the environment. While such claims can be made, obviously we in this Parliament will look rather ludicrous.

Political group: PSE